By T. Fox Dunham
“Is it still winter?” she asked. “I don’t feel the cold anymore.” She closed her eyes, willow branches weighed by snow. Meltwaters poured white along her cheeks, her snowdrift flesh, her icicle bones. She covered her bald scalp with a silver bandanna. She’d penciled in black eyebrows in thin curves.
“No, my dear. Spring was born during winter’s heart, conceived on the pagan day of Yule, birthed on the second of February. On the equinox, she matured to womanhood. And now she sows her seeds and paints with nature in vibrant shades.”
He sat next to her in his usual seat. “Open your eyes to see me,” he said. “To know that I am real.”
So she did, and his wild, Hawaiian shirt distracted her sight. He didn’t wear a bandanna or hat to conceal his alopecia. She admired his shapely head, much like a doorknob—oval in shape like the colonial design that hands still grasped on old, New English doors.
Nurse Wolf poked her nose into the private waiting room. The staff of the radiation-oncology ward at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania brought patients to this windowless room before their scheduled treatment, separating them from their families. She called back Taffie Ross—a grandmother of three—for her radiation treatment, and Wolf led her to the stainless steel cave where the one-eyed arm, the linear accelerator, burned away cancer with invisible rays, eroding their faces.
“We spoke yesterday?” Lady Winter whispered. “That wasn’t my dream?”
“And the day before and before,” said Mister Spring. “You asked me if it was snowing. If the wind blew. If the Delaware River had frozen. I’ll tell you the same. Rejoice. Spring has come. Life renews.”
She covered her eyes with the back of her hand, shielding the light that pinches her eyes with bee stingers.
“I cannot tell if winter has passed Philly, Mister Spring, though you have promised such. I wrap myself in my coat and scarf to keep warm. I walk to the Penn Tower’s Hotel across the bridge from the hospital. I hail a cab from the parking lot, and it drives me into the garage of my building. I’ve not felt cool or warm since I started chemotherapy, but I shiver from a chill deep in my body. I have no way of knowing the weather. Calendars can not be trusted. We’ve known warm days in January and frost close to summer’s end.”
He extended his hand.
“Then come with me, Lady Winter. I will prove it is spring. I’ll take you among the magnolia orchards I knew as a child. The wood is buried in the city, encased in the center of a cemetery. People are afraid to walk so far into death, so the trees are forgotten. They blossom now, sung awake by the sun, daring magnolias like us. I fear for them.”
She feigned to speak, but a cough stole her words. Her body shook with spasm, and she reached for her portable oxygen tank. He found the tubing and helped her slip it over her ears. She fit the tubing beneath her nose. The attack assuaged.
“Breathe, Lady Winter,” he said. “Then speak.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “Red cardinals fly and steal my wind.”
“They herald the spring,” he said.
“Then cardinals are my death.”
“No,” he growled. He huffed. “Your passage. They come not to murder you, but to teach you to fly.”
He held out his palm, holding over her chest. He led her heartbeat like an orchestra conductor. Her weak heart tapped moth wings against his fingers.
“My season will end with tepid life to burn hot. I am young, only twenty-three, but I’ve found peace.”
“I will not have this,” he said. “I am of the same age, and my life is a spark on dry grass. You will pass into my season. I will show you. I will carry you. We will meet the summer as one.”
Nurse Wolf called his name to come back for his treatment.
“I will wait for you downstairs at lobby door,” he said. “Come with me, Lady Winter.”
She sighed and blew a williwaw from her puckered lips.
“I promise to meet you. Winter will always meet the spring and share one day.”
* * *
She sat in the front seat of Mister Spring’s rusty Volkswagen. The breaks squealed when he pulled up to the edge of Time Memorial Park. He opened her door, held his hand to lift her from the sagging car. She took his hand and allowed herself to be lifted. She wrapped her coat and scarf around her body like mummy dressings, timeless and preserved.
“Why aren’t your teeth chattering and knees knocking? Wearing just those clam digger shorts and silly shirt? You’ll catch your death of cold.”
He turned his head to the Earth’s star, his face catching shadow like a sundial’s visage. She stood as the gnomon between his light. He never surrendered her hand after helping her out of the car.
“This way, Lady Winter. Walk through this garden and listen to the whispers.”
He beckoned, and she they strolled together. They waltzed through marble stones, the grave markers shaded by the colors of a sky-wandering cloud herd—silver rain, white snow, dark storms. As they danced deeper into the graveyard, the memorial stones aged from polished, cut marble to old river stones pulled from the Delaware three centuries before. The living burdened these markers with remembering the dead, obviating the remembrance of the deceased, so people could exist in ignorance of their mortality.
“So still,” she whispered. “Those who sleep here in the earth.”
Her body seized with another coughing fit. Mister Spring jogged back to the Volkswagen, grabbed her oxygen and returned to her. He fit the tubing over her nose. Her head swayed, and she dropped, the strength sucked from her. He caught her willowy body.
“Leave me here,” she whispered. He laid his ear to her lips to hear her faint words. “You have brought me this far. Winter must end. I am sleepy.”
“More time. A handful of ticks and tocks. Stay with me. You are my love. You’ve always been my love since I meet you in the radiation ward at Penn, but we couldn’t let ourselves feel it, not yet.”
He blew onto her chest with fevered breath, fueling the meager flame. He carried his love through the cemetery, winding time back, tightening the coil.
“Here now,” he said.
“Darling, what is this place? I think I must be blind, but instead of the dark, I see white, only white.”
He carried her to the heart of the orchard, into the grove of black, gnarled trees. The magnolias wouldn’t have stood up to the knee of a tall oak. Angels sculpted their furrowed trunks and branches with children’s hands, pressing curves into the bark. White blossoms decorated their crowns, a ballet of hoary dancers adorned in white silk. These nascent flowers bloomed defiant against time.
“They are the first to blossom in my season,” Mister Spring said. “Are they not angelic art? Worthy of your struggle to life?”
“Foolish, my darling Spring,” Lady Winter replied. “My life is not yet spent. I might still blow down a late storm. When my life is spent and I am sleeping below a river stone, your spirit and magnolia blossoms will die with me.”
“Yes. One late storm will kill the blossoms. They’ll fall to earth. The trees will rip open. Their hearts will shatter. But no one can predict a late storm, not old women with weather-sensitive bones that ache or modern climate-mancers with their instruments.”
“You will be torn open,” she said. “Your heart will die on the branch, fall and grow soggy on the earth.”
“I must love you. It was why man was shaped from clay and salty seawater. And yes, I am a fool and will suffer for it.”
He set her to her feet. She leaned on a tree, and the magnolia kept her standing.
“We have this one moment,” she said.
She took off her coat, dropped it into the mud and exposed roots.
“We only ever have the one grain of sand. The world turns. Seasons change.”
He wrapped his arms around her rag doll body, cupped her shoulders with his palms. Her frozen body thawed in his sun’s radiation, melting into his wells.
“What comes after?” she said.
“We will marry in June. I will be Mister Summer. You will be Lady Summer.”
They touched lips, exploring at first their pink flesh, negotiating a mutual cadence for their mouths to follow, then they joined their bodies through conduit kiss. They accepted this divine moment—the vapid vessel given to them by their creator—and they filled it with their fusion, their love.
She slipped off her scarf and hung it from a branch.
“So warm for the season,” she said.
- - -
T. Fox Dunham is a new author, having had over fifty stories accepted in the last year. He is a cancer survivor, often writing about his near death from Lymphoma at the age of 18 and his miracle survivor, being the first person to survive his cell type. He is a modern bard and a rising author. His motto: Wrecking civilization one story at a time.
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