DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Jen touched the window. “It’s cold.”
“Of course, it’s cold,” Ivan said. “It’s snowing outside. That’s not the point, anyway. Don’t touch it. Just count.”
Jen’s reflection in the glass was a silhouette of black Longleaf pines, the lamp in the room behind her a–”Hey, what do they call those glowly halos behind angels?”
“A halo. Keep counting.”
“Nimbus,” Jen said. “That’s it.”
“That’s a cloud. The dark kind, full of rain.” Ivan pushed out a sigh. “Goddammit, Jen. You’re ruining it. Keep counting.”
“This is stupid. I’m not staring at a window counting to one thousand.”
Ivan looked over her shoulder. At her reflection, at the trees outside, at himself, she couldn’t tell. He touched her shoulder. “You’re almost there.” His fingers looked strange in the window. Crooked, almost broken.
Jen shrugged his hand off. “Fine. Eight hundred and eighty.” Ivan’s face in the window changed as much as his hand had. She closed her eyes.
“You have to keep your eyes open,” he said. “Or it won’t work.”
She laughed and shook her head. “You actually think this is going to work? I’m only doing this because you promised you’d paint the entryway if I did.”
Jen saw his eyes, then, in the window, hovering among the boughs of the pines, white as snow without irises or pupils. As if the trees themselves had eyes. As if two moons bore a hole through them.
“Count,” Ivan whispered. His breath was cold, his tone laced with static as if a recording.
“Eight hundred and eighty-one.” The lamp at the back of the room, her nimbus, dimmed. Ivan’s heartbeat thrummed on her shouldblade.
“Eight hundred and eighty–” She spun and pushed him away. “I’m done. You’re creeping me out. We can paint the stupid entryway together.”
Ivan’s face was slack. A glisten near his lower lids. His lips were almost blue, but it could have been from her staring at the icy tones of night. She rubbed her eyes.
“Please,” he said, trembling, trails of sweat running from his temples to his jaw. His hands were pressed together in prayer, then the fingers intertwined, and he squeezed, knuckles the color of bone.
Jen’s heart ached. She forgot the stupidity of this game, the frigid air by the window, the eyes in the wall of trees. She almost asked him if he was okay, but he hated that. Always hated that. Especially the last few weeks.
“Fine,” she said.
She faced the window and ran her tongue over her teeth to separate her lips from them, which had grown sticky and dry. The back of her throat felt like an ice cube had lodged there. Yet she could breathe. She swallowed. There was nothing there.
“Eight hundred and eighty two,” she said. “Eight hundred and eighty–”
“No,” Ivan said. “It’s fine. That’s good enough. You were right. This is stupid. Let’s go finish the movie.”
She caught his shoulder as he turned. “You said I had to count to a thousand? Hey, listen to me. Are you okay?”
Fuck.
Ivan narrowed, withered, and she reached out to touch him, to say she was sorry, to say she knew he hated it, knew what he was going through, knew that she wouldn’t understand and she should just stop asking.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
He did look okay. Filled out, taller even. Was that a smile?
Jen wanted to hug him, leap into his arms, buckshot his face with kisses despite the gross beard he’d grown since all of this started.
“Jenny,” he said. “I love you.” That static sound again.
“What?”
His eyes were white, like she had seen in the reflection. She desperately searched the reaches of his eyelids for a sign of iris, a twitch, a strain that he was forcing his eyes back into his head.
Then he burst out laughing, folding over, hyperventilating, then falling to the floor in a fetal position where he rotated slowly on his side, a spiral.
She kicked him, but he continued his strange ritual. Closer now, she saw he was crying, not laughing, as a ring of tears formed around his body, glinting in the lamp light that was so bright. He looked up at her, still sobbing, his neck not quite right, his eyes not quite right, as he focused on the space behind her, beyond her.
A gust of wind hit her back. The window was open, the stand of trees appearing closer, miniaturized, coming into the room in tangled strands. Spiraled strands.
Jen was yanked off her feet, Ivan pulling her across the room through the entryway where sealed paint buckets were kicked over. She burst out the front door onto the stairwell landing, but Ivan kept going, thrown down the stairs face-first, his head bursting on the eighth step, his fingers mangled, the bottoms of his feet as black as the trees.
Through the front door she saw their home, near and far at the same time, the window closed and dark and cold. She could feel it from here. Then she saw it.
She fell against the banister, catching herself, and bolted down the stairs, zig zagging down the five floors until she reached the bottom. Back against the wall, she paused to rest. The angularity of the stairwell had changed, rounded into a–
Jen pounded on the exit door, the knob somehow missing, then searched the frame with fingernails, three snapping off, flinging threads of blood across a white blur of a face who had opened the door, and she ran out into the night, out into the cold.
An owl screeched as the building’s floodlight ignited, and a scream sounded behind her muffled by wood and brick. She ran toward her long shadow, which grew longer with every stride, taller. Blacker.
Ankle-deep in the snow, then on her knees, she faced the trees, connected to her shadow, then on her stomach, where she felt a heartbeat against her back. It was warm. Then cold.
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