Winter, Fracturing by Sam Podnar (17, Pennsylvania)

I’ve stopped trying to get out of bed, and I rest my laptop on my stomach. Water droplets form on the screen, hairline cracks creep up the sides. The glass melts into a sludge onto the keyboard, and I shut my laptop and pull the blankets over my face. ​

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My school has slid into a sinkhole. We can’t go back until it’s safe. I think they’re trying to fill it back in with shovels, use the snow as a new foundation—it will melt when spring comes. Until then, we’ll do our lessons online. We Are All In This Together. 

The information I absorb is in the negative. I haven’t seen any anecdotes in those long reports on learning loss, which inform me that by the end of the year, I will have fallen one to three months behind in math. The cosine of pi is negative one. 15 seconds to recall that—not quick enough. 

When it comes time for my lunch period, no more snow has fallen, and the sky is still gray. As I leave my bedroom and walk down the hallway, a wall slides in front of me. I squeeze past it and come to the stairs, which have turned upward to break through the roof. The picture frame hanging on the wall duplicates again and again, the picture inside unfolding into a pattern that plasters the hallway. I guess I’ll have lunch later. 

Loneliness congeals itself into a ball that sits on my desk, it thins and expands to fill my room, it sloshes onto the floor as I wade through it. A new state of matter. I did not learn about this in AP Bio. 

My mind floats away as I get ready for practice. I drive to the school I cannot enter, talk to people I do not know anymore, run as part of a team that is unrecognizable. My legs feel heavy as I jog around the track that has just one lane open, even after the coaches have taken their shovels to the snow. I walk into the locker room after practice and watch the girls move around me, like a timelapse. I tug at my shoelaces inside a glass box. It is soundproof. 

I am the only person in the world. My reflections are my companions. The one in my bedroom mirror has a lot to say. The one in my laptop screen says “here” for me during attendance. 

My head swims with noise. I don’t let myself have a clear thought without blotting it out with some sort of distraction. Maybe if I cut my brain from my skull, wring it out, and leave it outside to dry, I’ll be able to think more clearly. That doesn’t work—it freezes on the clothesline. I convince myself that this is seasonal. 

The light from my phone burns cursive into my retinas as I scroll through videos that I don’t remember, every other one about a tragedy happening an ocean away that I am supposed to fix. I
hear a coughing noise and look up. A girl appears in my room, falls onto my bed and calls for help in a language I do not know. I cannot stop her from bleeding out. 

I think this is the longest winter we’ve ever had. The sun has been gone for 64 days now. I keep a tally and write messages in the margins of my paper, urging her to come back. 

They have pulled our school from the sinkhole—with a crane buoyed by half-promises, I think. My friend wants to show me and someone else something on her phone. We crowd, six feet together. The sinkhole opens again. Some people are hurling themselves into it. 

I drop each minute to the floor, and they shatter, one by one, into milliseconds. The world is nothing but lost time. 

I drive to the park for a run, my chest straining against the cold air. I lay on a field, letting the snow slowly seep into my clothes, and my eyes turn upwards to the snow resting on top of the Earth’s atmosphere, a sheet thrown on top of old furniture. The sky darkens; asteroids appear. I exhale, watching the universe rain down on me, and the snow muffles the sound of the world fracturing. 
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Months pass, I lie there and the snow melts around me, the sun comes back to an empty planet. I die and am resurrected. Spring is here. My skin sizzles, with the heat.