A Boy's Book of Nervous Breakdowns by Tom Paine

Author:Tom Paine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Giant snowflakes were melting on my face, and a brisk wind wrestled the cedars along the lakeshore. I raised my head. I saw the ruined and smoking snowmobile, and Joe Bull’s paper-clipped body, but no sign of Eloise Red Crow. Then trembling fingers brushed my cheek. I reached up and touched her hair. I could feel her weeping.

The weeping got me to my knees, every part of me in eye-squinting pain. I bent over Eloise. Her collarbone was pushing unnaturally against her skin, as if trying to break through, and her knee was wrecked. I looked down the long, empty lake; and the distance disappeared before my eyes, lost in dark shadows and the swirling snow. We were at the bottom of a dirty well.

I scooped her up and stumbled to a tiny, rocky island five hundred feet away. Eloise’s voice was cracking and small as she told me this had been the destination all along: Wild Goose Island. The snow was thicker, spun by the wind into ghostly shapes. Eloise said the island had a legend. Two lovers from tribes at war were left there to say good-bye before they were to be separated forever. But the Great Spirit saw the depth of their love. He turned them into geese, and together they flew away.

On the lee side of the island, I kicked and scraped out a shallow bowl in the snow and placed Eloise in it. She was shivering violently. I gathered branches of lodgepole pines and built a tepee over her, then crawled in, too; she buried her face in my neck. She said she was thirsty, so I put snow in her mouth. As I held her in my arms, the blizzard intensified—soon we were entombed. She said, “It hurts so much,” and drifted off to sleep.

Hours passed in the darkness, and then a single drop of water fell on my forehead, followed by more drops. I punched my hand through the wall of our igloo, and it was fucking warm as summer again. Eloise was breathing dreamily beside me.

I crawled out and stood under a crystalline night sky. Everything was rapidly melting all around. Water is alive. I am water. It hurts so much. I killed my daughter. I broke the ice.

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