Snow White

         Ryan felt the faint tickle of fresh snowflakes on her porcelain face and melting away into her raven hair. She blinked her pale blue eyes open to find a collection of snowflakes iced into her eyelashes and falling into her eyes, creating a beautiful blur of white Christmas lights and tiny pinpoint stars poked into a navy blue velvet sky. A bittersweet smile cracked on her lips. She was lying in a blanket of purity. Supposedly it was cold, but she didn’t feel it. And it was ironic. She was a contrast on the snow white blanket. She was, in fact, innocent, but feeling guilty for what she was and had become. It was silent beside her, except for the sound of breathing. She decided to break the silence.
         “And you still don’t think I’m weird?” Ryan laughed a little, expecting rejection.
         “Not really” the breathing stopped and a voice spoke.
         “Good, Jason didn’t leave” Ryan thought with relief.
         “And lying out here in the snow at three in the morning per my request isn’t at all out of the ordinary?” she asked with a smile.
         “No. You’re just a kid at heart. I just wonder how you’re not cold” the voice spoke again.
         “I don’t get cold” she answered blankly.
         Ryan’s pants were drenched with the wet snow, but she didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything now. She hadn’t felt anything since life had changed. She laughed sadly to herself about Jason’s comment about being a kid at heart. In a way she was: she’d been twenty years old and stuck there. She knew she had died when she was twenty. It was a damp, chilly late October night when she heard the shots fired out that pierced her head and took her life. She could still taste the blood. She could still recall the hopeless and wasted ambulance ride. She could still feel the scars. Reaching up to left temple and smoothing the hair back: low and behold, the scar from the bullet hole was still there. She still knew the sensation of the metal bullet shattering her skull into a couple million little pieces. There was no exit wound to be found. She could imagine the pain well. She could recollect the accident very well, but not what made her what she was. She still wasn’t sure, but with the years, she was finding out what had happened to her that she was still living and not aging. She knew vaguely what was done… and she knew she could do it to someone else. And she could also do worse.
         “I correct myself, I do think you are eccentric, but I’m not freaked out by it” Ryan amended his original statement about not finding Ryan strange.
         Ryan rolled onto her side to look at Jason, hoping that he wouldn’t see her or leave. She was still astounded that he hadn’t left. But she was sure he would very soon, but not from the cold of the snow. He would leave from something else. But for right now he stayed, starring at the sky and bundled up in a black pea coat with his hands shoved in his pockets. His jeans were overcome with the damp, melting snow. His auburn hair drenched much the same and sticking to his light skin. He looked so cold and innocent to Ryan. And he probably was cold, but the innocence was a sort of oxymoron. He had confessed to enough activities he had partaken in over the past twenty-four years of his life. All normal things though: loveless sex and taking risks and existing outspoken and unconventional; things of that nature.
         “Maybe you should be scared. Shit, maybe you should be. Shit…” Ryan’s voice rasped as she rolled back onto her back. Warm tears fell from her piercing eyes and froze to her cheeks.   
         “It’s OK. Really, it’s no big deal. Nobody’s normal. And with some of the crazy shit I’ve done, you should be freaked out by me” Jason rolled over to face her, attempting to comfort her.
         “You? No, you’re normal. There’s nothing about you that scares me” Ryan laughed through her tears.
         “And just what makes you so incredibly unattractive and strange?” Jason asked, slightly annoyed.
         “You really want to know?” Ryan chuckled sarcastically, rolling over to speak to Jason face to face.
         “Yeah. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to” Jason answered.
         “You really want to know?” Ryan had an idea. She was going confess her secret to Jason through actions and not words. She was going to do a test and hope it would work. She knew the process very vaguely, but she felt that she knew enough to make it work.
         “Yes” Jason affirmed.
         “It’s going to hurt a little bit” Ryan drew closer to Jason, softly speaking into his pale, icy ear.
         “Truth hurts” Jason reaffirmed again.
         “And I’ll be here the entire time” she traced little circles into his chest around the buttons in his pea coat.
         “So will I” Jason swallowed.
         “With any luck…” Ryan whispered as she kissed his neck.
         And Jason closed his eyes. And Ryan closed hers. And she imagined the white snow bleeding into red.