Eve felt something soft, sharp, and icy cold touching against her cheek. When she tried to move and realized she couldn’t, she figured that she was either frozen solid or buried deep beneath a thick layer of heavy snow. Her body was so numb from the bitter cold that she couldn’t tell whether anything was pressing down on it.
She tried to remember how long she’d been out. Had she been knocked unconscious...No. No, then she remembered. She’d been sleeping, in the balloon. But how had she ended up on the ground?
But before she could come up with any sort of an answer, she heard someone cry her name, and in an instant she was scooped up from the snowy ground she had been laying upon. “Eva,” she heard a voice say. It was full of relief, and she recognized it instantly.
“M-Momma?” Not realizing they’d been shut this whole time, she opened her eyes. She was seated in her mother’s lap, between a handful of pine trees whose tops extended beyond their vision, into the blur of the endless blizzard that was raging around them. “What...”
“It’s alright,” her mother said. She was doing her best to console her, even though Eve could tell she was just as worried. “I’m sorry...It was only a little accident. Everything’s alright now.” She smiled down at her, putting as much into it as she could. “Are you alright?”
“I...I guess so.” Eve shivered. “I’m...cold, though...”
“I know. Come here.” Her mother took her in her arms and held her tight against her, so that Eve could hear her heart thumping rhythmically in her chest. But even there, in what was usually the warmest and safest place to her, she only felt more frightened and afraid.
“W-What’s gonna...What’s gonna happen to us?” She couldn’t keep herself from trembling. “I...
... middle of paper ...
...r. “Are there stars where you grew up?”
“Why, I believe there are,” her mother said. “More than you could ever count in one night. I used to watch them so many times, when I was young.”
“Can we...” Eve hesitated. “Can we...watch them, together, when we get there?”
“Of course. We’ll go up higher than ever before, and we’ll stay out and watch them all night long, if you like.”
Eve must have drifted off soon after that - she began to stir what must have been a long while later, the blanket of pine needles covering the ground pressing into her cheek. She remembered seeing someone push a branch aside and shout her name, and next thing she knew she was being carried through the blizzard on horseback, in the arms of a knight in shining armor. She figured she must have been dreaming, and she was too tired and disoriented to say anything during the encounter.
An example of the cycle followed by her father, his father, and his father before him is told when Blunt recalls a major blizzard in December 1964 that trapped the family and some neighbors in their small homestead. She unemotionally describes how her father simply proceeded to go through the motions of keeping the pipes from freezing, calmly accepting the fact that he could do nothing as the storm progressed and he could not prevent loss of a of their livestock. Or how when he first ventured out to check on the animals in their nearby barn and nearly lost his way back in whiteout conditions. Later, when the storm passed, she told of playing amongst the frozen corpses of the cattle, jumping from ribcage to ribcage, daring her older brother and sister to cut off pieces of the animals, all with the calm acceptance that this was so normal, nothing strange about it.
...ed to confront the deep pain that she has carried in her heart; she must give an account of her life as she comes closer to the shadow of death.
“Just weeping. I can still hear her weeping now sometimes. I know the exact sound of it, like a note you hear or a song that keeps spinning around in your head and you can’t forget it.”
The silence was okay, she could’ve lived with that. But it was the coldness that scared her; the coldness suspended in the air between them: her mommy washing dishes in the kitchen, head bent, hair swooped to the side, hiding her left cheek, and her daddy, sitting on the sofa reading the Sunday paper in silent indifference. She was caught in the middle, with her toys scattered around her, shivering at the coldness of it all. She knew.
She climbed up a tree, and fell out of it, realizing she can’t climb trees. She just stayed under the tree, and wondered when she was going to get out of this place. Of course, her home wasn’t perfect, and she wasn’t even staying there for any longer anyway. But, if she went back, she’d be faced with a bunch of questions, and be scolded by her mother, like she always was.
Everything that she had worked so hard for had lead up to that moment. She didn’t quite know how to convey the emotions that were dancing around in her conscious being at that exact point in time. Perhaps the same feeling that an Olympic runner would have right before the gun fired to signify the start of the most important 50 meter dash in their life. Well, no matter how hard she tried, there wasn’t a specific situation that could accurately mirror what she was feeling. This was now, and this was her. This was the final performance, and the final chance.
I heard Mom’s squeak before I saw her look of horror. Her eyes fell to Emily’s finger, and her own rose to touch the tip of her nose. “Not it,” she mumbled, frightened.
But I stared at her. I wonder what went through her mind, what thoughts were crashing against her skull. I wonder if she was scared, confused, or angry. Maybe all three. I had felt it all too, and there is still a part of my conscience that nudged me constantly, confused and lost in the chaos. There is only so much we could hold. I've seen other kids who've thrown themselves onto the ground screaming, only to be dragged away by guards.
could feel wind in the air. Time was moving and she felt the absence of comforts back at home.
Knocked down, face flat on the floor, she cried herself to sleep for the longest time. “This was an impossible chase. I can’t do this anymore,” she thought to herself.
Eliza blinked open her eyes and looked around. She was in a bed, it’s wooden posts carved to tight perfection. She looked up, strangely, the ceiling was made up of what seemed to be golden tree branches, laced together so thickly, it seemed that no light could get through, and none did besides the light that came in through the sides of the building, which didn’t have any walls. Then, reality hit her. Where the heck was she? All she remembered was suddenly disappearing from the lake and ending up in the forest from her dream, completely dry. Was she dead? That was the only logical answer for what was going on, but somehow it didn’t seem that way to her. Everything around her felt…well…mortal. She heard a slight gasp to her left and turned to look at where the noise had come from.
She talks about how it starts with a pain in her breast and a jolt in the heart. It quickly goes from there to a describing how her mouth becomes dry and how her tongue sticks. This further escalates to her feeling a fire beneath her skin. This fire causes her to lose sight and her ears begin to ache and "roar in their labyrinths" (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). From this fire, her body develops a cold sweat, and she starts shaking. Proceeding this, her body the becomes "greener than grass" (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). After this vivid description of anger and envy her body enters a state of numbness that she describes as "I am neither living nor dead and cry from the narrow between." (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). This masterful ordering of words has painted such a clear picture of her pain and reaction to
“Mamma?” I called, shielding my eyes to the wind and pushing forward. It would be so pleasing to just hear her response, to be sure that she heard me, to have the comfort of knowing where she was. To have the comfort of knowing where
It was almost as if her mother were really there, not dead five years. Perhaps out of fear that she would fade from her thoughts, Raya talked to her everyday. Kept her alive. She hadn’t anticipated a response, but more often than not, she knew what her mother would say, and so she would hear it in that soft, stern voice of hers.