Idaho Winter by Tony Burgess

Author:Tony Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2011-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

Try to be funny. Try to learn.

We reach a long white room at the end of which is a small makeshift bed of cloth and straw. A tiny figure lies still under a blanket. Madison.

I take a quick step ahead of Alex and Eric, but they grab my arm to stop me. I turn to Alex and see that she is crying. Big tears are rolling down her cheeks. Eric, too, is sobbing into his hands.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“She affects how you feel. At about fifty feet you feel a little sad. At thirty feet you will suddenly burst out crying. That’s about where we are now. From here every step gets more painful. At some point, I’d say, about five feet from the edge of her bed, you can’t come back. You give up. You have no reason to leave. Look.”

There are two people on their knees on the far side of the bed. I can’t make them out, their faces are hung.

“Who are they?”

“Two boys. Young boys. They came up here and ran in when they saw her. Eric thinks they were taunting her, but I’m not sure. We’ll never know. They are too heavy with despair to ever move.”

Alex and Eric are both sobbing heavily now. It’s a strange sound: people crying for no reason. An emotion controlled by the space in a room. Eric is overcome; his cries are emotional barks, a sound of such acute unhappiness that you may make once, if ever, in your lifetime. He steps back, clearly uncomfortable, and Alex joins him. They whimper softly, consoling each other. Alex places a hand on Eric’s head and looks at me.

I feel a pulling at my chest, as if hands are holding my lungs. I’m aware that my cheeks are shaking. It feels so strange, so violent, to be affected this way. It’s not like real sadness, more like a kind of electrical current causing these minor tremors throughout my body. I wink at Alex, to assure her that I’m fine. I step forward into the dark cave. Oh. Oh. Oh, no. Uh-oh. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. My mind is getting dim. I am so sad. My heart is breaking. I can hear my hoarse voice sobbing. I can’t let this stop me. When I was young these farm boys ran over my dog. In front of me and my whole family. My little longhair dachshund, its back broken, bleeding from its side. I had a friend in school who got very sick, went into the hospital and never came back. I never saw him again. I think the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz is the more evil one. She smiles neatly and chirps happily when a house crushes the Wicked Witch of the West’s sister. It makes me feel lonely that no one sees the meanness in happy fairies. I fell once, tripped off a low bridge across a shallow ditch. It would have been easy to just get up.

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