Sandvika, 1895 Hallie Tunnicliff Johnson

SANDVIKA, 1895

Hallie Tunnicliff Johnson

A red house, a white house, a bridge, and every surface of the dead and sleeping earth are cloaked in austere white. The air is still, not a single tree branch or leaf or stalk of dry grass bends or shows any sign that it ever breathed warm air, that its conception was anything but snow and stillness. The river is frozen, no sound of wind or water. I can see my breath. It’s greyblue, and if I were to reach out to tap it with my fingertip, it would shatter into a thousand slivers of ice. I used to try and remember the features of your face without looking at your photos, as if that would prove something. A laundry list of what you are: Round glasses, curly hair. White hair, no hair at all, tawny brown hair, blue eyes. I know for a fact that you have blue eyes, but I can’t seem to recall if they were tinted with grey or pale green.

Briefly I see your hands, the cracks in them, your thick ridged fingernails. I can picture plaid button-downs, white button-downs, black shoes. Never t-shirts.

I still remember your nose because it looks like mine-- straight, proud. Too masculine for my face, I think, but I appreciate it more when I remember it was once yours. I think there must be more to you than this. Surely you smelled of a certain lilac hand soap or your aftershave, perhaps car oil or laundry detergent, things I no longer remember.

I remember being ten years old and walking by the big river, where the current had pushed out thick reams of river ice. The ice was strong enough to hold my weight, but if you stomped on the edge it would fold in on itself, splintering perfect fragments like an impossibly thin sheet of glass.

It made the sound of stars shattering, I had thought. I’d never seen anything like it, I still haven’t, I still can’t name or define the phenomenon, and the words I came up with were never specific enough to produce answers from a google search. I had to try to decipher it on my own, what had made it fragment this way;

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perhaps liquid water rushed through the cracks in the solid ice, maybe it melted and was frozen again and melted and froze, the layers forming gradually over months and weeks of biting wind followed by warmer days that melted ice. Then it would freeze again.

The air here is lifeless. No one skates on the frozen stream or ambles across the snow covered bridge. If they did, their footprints would mar the white silk blanket of snow, and I’d resent them for it. I don’t dare to move my own feet. This world is as real as any, as cold as any of the winters I’ve seen, but I’m sure if I moved, the illusion would shatter. I choose to watch the sky, to look for birds, for movement in the blue evergreens on the hill, for smoke to rise and feather from the chimney of the white house.

There are no birds and nothing moves. I wonder if everything else is as afraid to move as I am. My breath is still frozen in front of me.

The ice crystals push into the sand when my boot crashes down on them. My boot is rubber at the bottom, and pink vinyl fabric clutches my ankles, a hand of scraping plasticy fabric. All ten-year-old girls wore boots like this. They weren’t particularly warm but they would keep feet dry, and a few layers of wool socks would make up for the lack of insulation.

I don’t wonder about you as much as I did before, and when I do it's always somehow selfish, in connection to myself. Would you think I’m funny? Would you like the sound of my voice, think I talked too much or too little? Would you try to notice yourself in me the way I still try to notice myself in you?

I don’t think of your features anymore unless it's in conjunction with mine. My sleepy eyes, purple around the nose bridge after too many waking hours and not looking out the window enough to stretch them, staring at a screen or little words on a page. Sunken and blue, with a yellow ring around the pupil. I don’t think your eyes had yellow around the pupil. All I remember is how yours were set, deep in your skull. When you were young, your eyes looked ancient because of this. I only remember this from the pictures.

I tap the cloud of breath with my finger tip, and it shatters into a hundred thousand fragments of ice and disappears.

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