Hypothermia: Poetry and Short Fiction

Hypothermia

Based on:

Hypothermia

I stand at the base

Of a lighthouse in old Salem town.

Wandering turned to running, exploring to escaping.

The January wind off the water

Whips at my cheeks with sharp razor stings.

My rubber boots stumble uneasily

Over the slippery, worn, rocks

That form the jette.

The air is cold and clear, But the dark is cold and muddled.

Like goes to like.

The water roils around the rocks,

And the spray soaks my toes,

Like the tears that fall from my cheeks

Salt to salt,

Like goes to like.

I stare at the water,

And the air is ripped from my lungs, as I drown

In the urge to slip beneath the icy surface,

To find clarity in the frigid waters, to feel something, anything at last.

But I can already see the numbness in my red, blistered fingertips.

But I have been numb for a while now.

Like goes to like.

Virgil Joy had just pulled his Catamaran, the Henrietta, up to the dock at the shore by his home and got to work tying her off for the night. Wiping the cold salt water from his hands, Virgil set off towards home, a mere fifty yards from the dock. As he began his walk, he was surprised to find the lights off in his home. Usually, by this time, his wife of forty-five years, Henrietta, would be home by now, a fire blazing, spewing smoke from the chimney into the silent Salem sky, especially on a cold January night like this. Supper would be simmering on the stove, the table set for five, then three, and now two as just Virgil and Henrietta were left in the cottage now, their children whisked away by city lights. So he began his short journey into the dark, and he looked ahead to see Gallows Hill skirted by somber Salem Woods. He walked the familiar winding path over the hills of his land, sand turning to dirt and gravel, and then to long-dead grass. Rocks tumbled back down the slope in his wake, and when he got to the poplar tree where he had built Henrietta a swing to watch the Salem Sound in the summer months, he turned around to take one last look at the harbor. It looked as it always did: smooth, still water, like pane of polished black glass, here and there boats bobbed slightly, and pines swayed in the winter winds. But one thing was not as it should have been. The lighthouse was dark despite the ever-growing blackness of night.

Jake Crawford loosed a sigh and raised the viewfinder to his eye again. For some reason, the DSLR wasn’t capturing what he was seeing, even though they were looking at the same thing. He tried once more to make the camera see the way the setting sun was eclipsing the old Salem light house, just so, making it look like the stone tower was still lit. He scrolled through the files on his SD card, swallowing the frustration at not being able to translate phenomenon to film. He lowered the camera, and checked the small camcorder on a tripod at the tip of the little dinghy he was bobbing in. It was capturing the sunset on a time-lapse setting that would be the perfect transition for the film. Looking up, Jake realized the he was the only boat still on the water, and that daylight was fading fast. He had been all around the world, but in the last three days he had been in Salem, he had realized that light faded fastest in New England. It didn’t help that thick, dark clouds were rolling into the sky, like waves crashing on the shore, and as the wind picked up it was clear: a storm was coming. He tried once more to capture the shot, and not entirely disappointed with the result, he put the pieces of his cameras into the many tiny compartments of the camera bag, before starting the unwilling engine of the boat.

Out on the water, he didn’t get much cell service but Jake knew that he would have a stream of messages from the rest of the crew about footage they captured around town today, and even more ideas they could use to piece the film together. It was a documentary about Salem, mainly known for its witch hunts, but how far did the rouse really go? Was there more to Salem than phony magic spells and ghosts? What was Salem like in the other eleven months of the year besides October? Well that was what Jake was here to find. He had always been interested in stories, peoples’ stories, places’ stories, any and all stories. He had dedicated his life to sharing them, especially so since graduating from NYU last spring. As he pulled up to the docks that lined the jetty leading to the lighthouse, he took a deep breath of the cold air. New England had been his favorite visit in all of the travelling of the past year, and he wanted to stay much longer than just the two weeks they had. Jake had proposed a hiking trip detour in Maine that had been turned down in favor of returning to New York to start editing, so he was trying to absorb as much Massachusetts as possible. As he walked up the creaking staircase from the docks to actual land again, he paused and looked to the tip of the harbor where the lighthouse stood vigil. By now the sun had sunk below the nuclear power plant nearby, and the emptiness of the lighthouse was overwhelming. In the winter time there were hardly ever any people around the lighthouse, a fact Jake had already noticed in the past three days. But today, Jake was surprised to see someone standing at its base, looking out at the water.

Anna Noreck found herself wandering again. Something had pulled her from her friends, lounging in a hole in the wall pub nearby, and down the bare streets of Salem. She hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place, but the guilt of missing her best friend Emma’s twenty first birthday had been enough to get her out of bed this morning. Anything to keep the guilt at bay. Anna had never had any interest in visiting the little fishing town, history and hoax ridden, despite living in the Greater Boston Area her entire life. Granted, she had loved the history behind the town and the stories of the witch hunts, but hated the commercialization of it all. If one more random old lady, inevitably draped in a shawl and beads like some psychedelic Christmas tree, approached her asking to read her palm or draw her tarot cards, insisting there was darkness ahead, she was going to lose her shit. It was a bitterly cold night, and Anna pulled the collar of her parka around her neck a bit tighter to fight the chill. Even from Main Street, you could see Salem starting to slip into sleep. The sun was painting the sky a muddy burnt orange, almost red, color in broad brush strokes as it slipped closer and closer to the horizon. Anna was suddenly struck with the urge to paint again, even though it had been months since she’d picked up a brush. Shaking her head, she jammed her hands in the pockets of her coat and kept on down the quiet lanes.

Anna found herself wandering like this a lot, too much her mother said, but what else could she do when the thought of sitting within walls became unbearable? When the emptiness of her apartment combined with the overwhelming tendency of her thoughts became utterly too much. So, she started walking, letting her feet do the thinking for a bit, letting her mind wander untethered. Emma wouldn’t worry, she knew Anna’s wandering and knew she would come back, she always did. At least she always had. This instance was probably not her most wise decision, a young woman in the dark, alone, in an unfamiliar place, in the dead of winter. But she had found herself in worse situations, so she let herself go. The pavement turned to gravel and well-trodden footpaths, to sand. The coastline wasn’t immediately visible from the center of town, and Salem wasn’t known to be a particularly popular beach time. After a few steps, packed sand turned to large, rough rocks but Anna kept going. Grey wool socks peeked over the tops of her green galoshes, as Anna clambered over the boulders. Her arms spread wide for balance, didn’t do much as the icy spray from the waves in the harbor had soaked the rocks slick. She slipped and stumbled over the rocks, but something pulled her over the jetty. Perhaps it was the tower at the very tip, like guard keeping watch at the edge of a medieval castle.

She picked her way over the rocks as the wind picked up in speed and intensity, which only made the waves in the harbor roil anxiously. The waves hammered the rocks, like workers in a forger, but instead of sparks flew drops of glacial water that soaked through Anna’s jeans, making her teeth chatter and her body shiver even more. It was nearly a half hour before she reached the tower, which was not really a tower but an unlit lighthouse. Anna had gotten so caught up in climbing and shielding her face from the water that she was surprised when she looked up and found herself at the very edge of the jetty. A few inches of rock separated her from the icy water. The wind whipping around the harbor bit at her face with razor-sharp teeth and pulled tears from her eyes, and both ocean spray and the tears that dripped down her face soaked the toes of her rain boots. Like goes to like. All in a moment the wind died down, though the waves kept stirring and crashing themselves viciously, and the tears kept falling as she realized she was crying. Anna’s eyes flicked from the darkening clouds above her to the waves calling her from below.

An intrusive thought, her therapist had said. An urge or thought or image that’s dark and difficult, and overwhelming and upsetting. The breath was stripped from her lungs as she stood rooted on the slick rocks and stared at the waves, suddenly overcome with the desire to let herself slip from the jetty into the dark, frigid water below. Anna Noreck drowned in that dark, depthless desire. Maybe feeling the ice slip into her bones would shock her into finally feel something other than drowning in chronic depression. Maybe enough ice would slip to weigh her down, down, down to the bottom of Salem harbor. Away from everything that happened with Pat last summer, and Mom’s alcoholism, and back to Dad. Maybe in the water, the outside would match the inside: numb. Unable to feel anything anymore. Like goes to like.

“No,” she whispered. “This isn’t what I want.” But it felt like a lie to say those words, because she wanted nothing more than to not feel the urge to breathe, and she knew it. She went through the blessed exercises. She went to the “happy place”, she counted her breaths with the waves, like goes to like. She pinched the fleshy part of her skin, but she was numb, her hands an angry, blistered red. She went through the exercises that had been pushed down her throat, but her mind wandered as her feet couldn’t any longer, and all she could think of was the mere inches that kept the toes of her boots from the siren’s song of the waves. It was time. She took one last rattling breath and lifted her foot, already feeling her weight teeter to the edge. She closed her eyes and felt herself begin to fall. It was time.