Cold

Cold. All I can feel is this terrible cold. It’s snowing. He always loved this kind of snow: big, fat flakes that drift down from the sky onto your eyelashes and just sit there, not quite blurring your vision. It’s the kind of snow you can catch on your tongue with no effort at all. He always loved it, but now he won’t anymore. He’s gone away from me and he’s not ever coming back. He called me today to tell me. He did it over the fucking phone!

**************

He was late--not so late that I would worry, though. He'd come for me. I saw his name on the caller ID. Not his name to be precise; he’d gone into my contacts list and changed his name to “Lover.” I smiled when I saw the name on the screen, just as I had so many times before.
“Hello, Lover.” I was in a playful mood.
“I…I’m sorry.” Apparently he was not. A thousand things ran through my mind then, none of them nice.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Oh gods, I’m so sorry. I love you.” I was starting to panic. If I could have, I think I might have grabbed him by the shoulders and wrung it out of him, but as it was, I couldn’t do anything more than panic.
“You know I lo-”
“DON’T SAY IT! Don’t you dare say it.”
“Damn it, what’s happened!? What is going on!?”
“Nothing’s happened yet….It’s what I’m about it do.” Oh God.
“Please, tell me. What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”
His voice was little more than a whisper, “I’m so sorry.”
The sound that followed was hideous. The roar of a million mountain avalanches condensed into a single blast of a fraction of a second. The cell phone slipped from my hand, crashing on the cold ground only moments before I did.

I’ve been sitting here ever since, my mind blank but for that single, sickening bang resounding in my head once, twice, a thousand times. Just a moment ago though, something else burrowed its way into my numb consciousness: the cold. This is a cold that no heat could ever chase away. I’m tempted to light myself on fire, if only to end this cold. But…what’s that? It’s him! He’s walking towards me across the not quite frozen lake! He stops in front of me and offers a hand up.
“It’s time to go home, love.”
I take his hand.

**************

The radio crackled to life. “Anyone near the north side of the lake?”
Joe picked up the thing from the dashboard and pressed in the button. “I’m a few minutes away, what’s the problem?”
“A bunch of kids called in, said they saw a body. Sounded hysterical enough that it might be worth checking out.”
“I’m on it. Where is this thing then?”
“Up by that mansion of a beach house.”
“Got it.”
Joe got out of the car. The snowy lump on the ground was just that: a snowy lump. A bunch of kids thought this was a body? Joe bent down and brushed away the layer of snow away.
“Fuck.”
It was a body, one he knew. Even past the blue skin and bluer lips, even past the ice-shut eyes and frozen hair, Joe knew this body. He walked back to the car and picked up the radio. “Kids were right…we’ve got a body up here.”
“Is it identifiable?”
“You know that suicide from last night?”
“Your niece’s boyfriend, right? Is she okay?”
“I’ve just found her.”