I Found Something Frozen

I was only in that school for one year.

It was charming in a post-soviet, interrupted ancientry kind of way. The school itself was in the phase of its inevitable disrepair that obscured its age; neither old, nor new, neither collapsing nor sturdy, with an enveloping air of being forbidden, and on its way to being forgotten.

Inside and out, an invisible ash clothed the school. The windows were clean, but you could hardly see out of them no matter how hard you squinted, until your eyes hurt and then you could see nothing at all. The dry ash coated everything in sight, purging the stones and glass of any nostalgia that might have been carved out of its concrete shell, and making it out to be a place from which no good memories were taken.

On this day it was winter, my last one before I left, but not my last one. You knew that already.

It must have been in the morning. The ground was still suitably frozen, and the chain link fence brittle enough to be snapped off. We’d tried before without gloves, when the thin wires cut into our fingers as we pulled and pulled, and it didn’t give. This time it worked, which left one question:

Who would go out first?

The yard of an old church faced us every break time, separated from us by a feeble veil that stung our fingers, that we were still too small to climb over, and not patient enough to break link by link. Once we peeled one side away, a stretch of graves, which had been untouched longer than their inhabitants had been alive, faced us, challenging us one by one to venture out. The snow was thinner on the other side, but untrodden, and between the cold dead things green speckles of grass (either early or late) sprung up.

The grey blocks rose up like a scattered army, not begging but recruiting the bravest among us to step out and join them.

I didn’t offer, but was pushed. I still remember how the edge of the chain link snagged on my hat as my friend held it up not high enough. It was this hat, still on my head, the one my grandmother knitted for me. It’s not keeping me warm now, but it did back then. Soon I could see more green in the spaces my boots left clear, the snow clinging to my heels as if dragging me down, holding me away from a much colder venture.

But being among them wasn’t enough, I had to put on a show. Children love dead things, so I looked for dead things. Turning back to face the school, that imposing building with an aura so grey that in it, even the clear blue sky wilted, I saw that my friend had dropped the fence back down. Between us and them, now, lay the same bounds that we had fought all autumn to break through. I felt all at once more one with you, than them. More with the dead than alive.

But still I wandered, and I searched, scrounging for some toll to pay on my way back. A frozen spectacle and rite of passage into the land of warmth beyond not only the fence but the school, and the six streets I would cross before I got home. Five, if I stopped at my grandmother’s house, which was infinitely warmer.

My toes were numb in my boots when I found you, so it took tripping over you the second time for me to notice how the snow warped around your little body, four little limbs and a tail straight out. The first thing I imagined as I wiped the snow away, carving you out and into the living air, was that you were hunting as you fell. You were prowling, like me.

I held you up in one hand, white flecks falling off your black body, a fresh snowfall, years interrupted or maybe even decades. Who knew how long you’d been waiting to be found? How did it feel? I wondered this, too, as I waved your stiff carcass around like a flag. I must have been smiling, because our audience was, too.

I can’t feel my face to tell if I’m still smiling. They hammered the fence back as soon as they found me, and then went one step further, and built a wall around us. You could have jumped if you still had your life, but even if I didn’t freeze beside you, I could never conquer that height. I wish I could see the school again. Over the top of the wall I can make out how it darkens the sky around it, but nothing more.

This story is based off of a real memory of mine. My primary school in Romania was back to back with an abandoned churchyard, and loosely arranged old graves would watch us as we played year-round. The memory of the day one of us finally gathered the courage to go through the broken fence and walk around a bit stuck in my memory. I was seven years old, or maybe eight, and it was my final winter in that country. Of course, in this story, that alludes to the narrator dying, and telling the same story to the dead cat year after year.

However, I simply moved, and still tell this story to every new acquaintance, and now to you.