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I woke up knowing a strange word
Back when I was in college, life seemed easy. You gotta work hard, sure, but it’s predictable. Even hard work doesn’t seem all that hard when you know it’s coming. You can prepare yourself. You can mentally put yourself in a place and say, ‘this is what life is going to be like, to some extent’.
What makes life hard is when that expectation is broken. When you’re thrown into something you not only can’t prepare for, but never knew about to begin with.
That’s what happened to me in my last year of college.
I want to preface with the fact that we weren’t party animals. We were gonna be engineers. We were, in one way or another, nerds. But when we had a good enough reason to cut loose and test our boundaries, we took that opportunity to heart. Myself included.
We’d just finished our midterms. Some of us had spent the afternoon preparing notes and trying to figure out how we did, while others stayed at home and tried to handle their anxiety. Not all were as emotionally tempered as me and my crew. And yeah, I say crew, but we were little more than acquaintances. We gave each other little nicknames and had a group chat, sure, but we could tell that once we were done with college we were never gonna see each other again. Except for Samson, he was cool.
On that one particular night, I’d been out a little too long, and had a few too many drinks. I’d been running up the stairs and my stuffy one-room apartment (that my parents paid for) was feeling a bit claustrophobic. I opened a window and turned on my floor fan. I can’t overstate how big this thing was. They used it at a department store when the AC didn’t quite cut it, but sold it off cheap at the end of summer to bring in new models. Damn thing was half as tall as me and sounded like a jet engine.
When I finally went to bed, I did so with the white noise of an open window and a blaring fan in my head, and I was too drunk to care.
It was the strangest night of sleep I’ve ever had. The noise of the fan and the street outside melted away in my head, and after a while I didn’t even hear it. I remember twisting and turning, wondering why it was suddenly so cold. I pulled the covers over my head, and I could hear the wind passing over me.
I conjured this strange image. For a moment, the covers didn’t feel soft and warm. They felt like ice. Like layers of thick, unbreaking cold. I could imagine myself beneath the surface as the wind screamed past, clawing to get at me. For a couple of hours, I didn’t feel like me. There was no fan, and there was no busy street.
It was layers of darkness, pressing down on me, suffocating me in the crystal cold. Holding my bones in a generational grip as the world wrestled with my presence. Frost sticking to my skin and cutting my flesh at a glacial pace.
Then I woke up.
The first thing I did was to sit straight up, look ahead, and speak.
“Tra.”
It was a two-syllable word. The ‘T’ sounded the ‘Thu’ noise in ‘Thus’. The ‘r’ sound in ‘row’. The ‘a’ sounded like the ‘a’ in ‘act’. In combination, it was like ‘Thu-ra’. With emphasis on the ‘A’.
I said it over and over. It was just stuck on my mind, and I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard it before. It took me a couple of minutes before I even realized how hung over I was. A couple more minutes to close my damn window and turn off the fan. I’d been hearing the noise for so long that when it finally got quiet, I could feel my own heartbeat pushing through my ears.
I brushed my teeth, shaved, and looked in the bathroom mirror.
Tra.
Why was I thinking that? Where’d I heard it? And why did I feel so *cold* saying it?
I kept mumbling it over and over during the day. Not because I was afraid I’d forget it, but because it felt different every time I said it. It felt like tuning a radio, saying it just a little more right every time. A little more emphasis on the ‘A’. A little more roll of the tongue on the ‘r’. Tra. Thu-ra. How did I know the spelling?
I remember getting some strange looks at the coffee shop. I was craving an Americano and there’s this place just off campus that had a huge discount for students, so I liked to stop by there at least once every other day or so. I dropped in just after the lunch rush to get myself a coffee and a bear claw.
As I’m walking around, looking for a place to sit, I’m still saying the word. I don’t realize I’m doing it, but I am. It’s like an audio stim, like how an old man might mumble “tut-tut-tut” and snap his suspenders. It didn’t mean anything, it just felt good to say. At one point, there’s this guy with these big headphones that tap me on the shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said. “Did you say something?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you said my name.”
“No, I said…”
I trailed off. He looked at me, confused. Part of me felt like I had an obligation to just shut the hell up. A part of me split straight down the middle; a conscious thought telling me to excuse myself, and a subconscious thought telling me to keep saying it. And why shouldn’t I? It was just noise.
“Tra,” I said, looking him in the eye. “It’s just this-“
He gasped.
Now, when I say gasped, I don’t mean as in recognition, or fear. I’d seen that gasp before. It was the same kind of gasp my dad would make when stepping out into the cold. The same gasp my ex-girlfriend would do when stepping out of a warm shower onto a cold floor. Not a dramatic gasp, but a very distinct one.
Except headphone guy didn’t just gasp; he kept inhaling. He kept sucking in air, going, and going, and going. Then he stopped. He just stood there, leaning back, his mouth twitching. I could see his eyes shaking as he looked at me, then around the room.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He pointed to his chest. He tried to close his mouth, but it’s like his jaw muscles cramped. His eyes looked up, and I could see something shift. Everyone turned to us as his big headphones rolled off his head, barely hanging on by a line. His macchiato fell out of his hands, crashing onto the floor with a splash.
I asked again if he was okay, but someone was already yelling that he’s having a seizure. I backed away to make space. Someone tried to sit him down, but he couldn’t bend his legs. He couldn’t breathe. His fingers were shaking as his hands constricted into curled fists. Someone was calling for help. They threw a towel on the floor to keep people from slipping. Some were crowding at the door to leave; others were standing up to get a video.
And I’m just standing there, trying to make sense of what I’d witnessed. They drove him off in an ambulance. I thought I heard him cough when the EMTs put one of those pumping valve masks on him. I didn’t finish my Americano. I think I left it on the counter.
I spent most of the day thinking about that word. I got lost in my thoughts at the supermarket, mumbling to myself as I forgot to put up my groceries. I said it when I slowed down to look for a parking spot outside the dry cleaners. I said it a couple more times as I walked around town. No one seemed to react the way that guy at the coffee shop did. And yet, when I looked at my reflection in a passing store window, I didn’t want to say it again. Your reflection looks different in glass. It looks darker, and your eyes take on a different shape. The sharp edges of your face get a contrast. If you just squint a little, it barely looks human.
I didn’t want to say it to him. To me. Maybe I’d gasp. And yet, I couldn’t help myself. I turned to my reflection, defiant to a feeling I’d made up in my mind and said it out loud with the same intensity as a man screaming from the hilltops.
“Tra.”
A chill of anticipation passed over me, but nothing happened.
As I got home and put my groceries away, I called up Samson. I had my headset on as I fumbled about in the kitchen, taking some time to put away one of my four plates and two sets of cutleries.
“I can’t explain it,” I said as I popped a root beer. “I wake up, and it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“You sure it’s not a name?” he asked. “I saw you talking to that Korean chick last night. Saw you talking an *awfully* long time.”
“You mean Sue?” I snorted. “She’s from *Wisconsin*, you fucking pancake.”
“I feel like there’s a story there that’s *far* more interesting than fever dreams.”
“My guy, she believes in *crystals*. I don’t want my kids getting good vibes and tarot card readings instead of vaccines.”
“You two already having kids?”
Samson had this ability to pull me out of my funk. No matter if it was test anxiety or missing a deadline, he could keep me from spiraling. But for the first time, a single word persisted through his best efforts. And it wasn’t like I was sad or anything. I was doing pretty good. But I kept hearing that inhale from the guy at the coffee shop. I could hear it behind my ears.
And it made me shiver.
I hoped it’d go away, but it was on my mind the next day, and the day after that. I noticed myself saying it every now and then, even in passing. Sometimes it didn’t even feel like me saying it, it was a word that fell out of me like a verbal tic. Some people might have heard me saying it as they passed me on the street, but no one reacted like that guy did. No one did the *gasp*.
I still had this knot in my stomach about it. Like I was missing something. If I could figure out why I was thinking about that damn word, maybe I wouldn’t have to worry as much. And if I could say it straight to someone without them reacting, I could exclude the thought that maybe, somehow, I’d been responsible for that man’s reaction.
Tra.
It wasn’t really a conscious thing. It was a kind of experimentation. As an engineer, you gotta know the structural properties of the materials you’re working with. You gotta map it out and make predictions based on observable data points. I could say the word in a crowd without anyone caring. I could say it in passing. I could record it and play it back to myself. No reaction, apart from a heightened pulse, but that was probably just anticipation.
It all boiled down to one property. Looking someone in the eye and telling them *directly*. That’s what I’d done. I had to figure out if that was a trigger. So I called someone I trusted. I called Samson.
He came over to my place. Samson is just below 6 feet tall but wears the kind of shoes that give him that extra boost. He had short reddish-brown hair, with a goatee that’d grown way too wild, giving him the side profile of a monkey. The guy was thin as a twig but made of sturdier stuff than most pro athletes. He’d brought a six-pack, thinking we were gonna have a night out. I asked him to sit down as I explained.
“There was this guy at the coffee shop the other day,” I said. “He had some kind of seizure.”
“Shit, like epilepsy?”
“Kinda, yeah. Right next to me.”
“How bad was it?”
“Pretty bad.”
He snapped a beer and passed it to me. I cracked it open, but just sipped it. He noticed, but kept quiet.
“He had it right as I said this… thing. That word. I said it, and he freaked out.”
Samson shook his head, making an uncomfortable noise. Like a 12-year-old kid squirming at a scary campfire story. I continued.
“I’m not saying I *caused* it. I’m not saying that. But I got this feeling that I did something wrong.”
“This really bothers you, huh?”
I looked at my open beer, nodding.
“Yeah. It does.”
We talked about it for a while. I wrote it down, explained the spelling, and talked about the various things I’d done around town. Not so much to explain, but to illustrate my point about how much this’d bothered me. I could tell Samson was a bit freaked out, but in the end, he shook it off. He finished his beer.
“Say it to me.”
“No, I’m good.”
“Look, this is bothering you. Just say it to me, you’ll see it’s fine.”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“See, that’s why you’re feeling this. You got the feeling it’s bad. You gotta *test* that. *Challenge* it. So look me in the eye and say the damn thing. Get it over with. See that it’s fake.”
“You sure?”
“One word, then drinks are on you.”
I looked him in the eye. I thought about that word. *Really* thought about it. I thought about that night under the covers, the fan blasting through my bedroom. But it wasn’t my fan. It was the arctic winds, clawing at the ice pressing me into this broken shape. Screaming gales demanding that the ground give way. Expanding cold sucking me down into the dark, like being slowly unbirthed. A grave womb, wearing a word.
I open my mouth, and I say it.
Tra.
Samson blinks. He looks at me and nods. He sighs, giving me a shrug. Then he sighs again. His eyes wander a little. He sighs a third time, drawing in a deep breath.
And he doesn’t stop.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no…”
He sucks in air and leans back in his chair. He leans back too far and tips over, knocking one of our half-drunk beers off the table. His mouth opens wider and wider, sucking in more air, and he can’t press it back out. His eyes flail as he smacks the floor with the palm of his hand like a boxer tapping out.
I’m already calling for help. I’m screaming at the operator. For anyone. His eyes roll up, and I see his lips turning blue. But is it lack of oxygen, or the cold?
It’s a blur after that. A nice lady on the phone. Someone rushing in from the hallway. Chest compressions. Pinching his nose and blowing into his mouth. Someone says ‘seizure’. Someone asks me questions with words I don’t understand. By the time the EMTs get there, I’m begging them to put a mask over his face. I tell them he can’t breathe.
By the time they’re leaving with him, something unclogs in his chest, making him spit up over my hallway carpet.
I followed Samson to the hospital. It didn’t take all that long before I could see him. He’d had some kind of attack, but he was recovering fast. He’d probably be back out after a couple hours of observation. They’d called his mom and dad. His dad just looked like a bigger, chubbier version of him. Even the same goatee.
When I could finally see him, Samson was already sitting up in his hospital bed. The others were waiting outside for him to get dressed. As they left, I saw something in his eyes change. His hands were trembling as I sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder.
For a moment, we just sat there. We knew this one word held some kind of property, and it was causing real, physical, harm. We’d never seen anything like it before. No one had. That realization just dumbstruck us, making our minds race to find something to say.
“It’s real,” Samson settled on.
“Yeah. It is.”
“It’s fucking real.”
I put a hand on his shoulder as he broke down crying. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Samson told me what he’d experienced. At first, it was nothing. A cold puff of air, at most. Then there’d been this tension in his chest, like he was sinking underwater. A pressure building, forcing him to push back by sucking in air. Then it hit him; an immense, all-encompassing, cold.
“Like someone dunked my spine in an ice bucket,” he mumbled. “But not like… ice, ice. It was colder. *Impossibly* fucking cold.”
He’d been waiting for it to pass. When it never did, his mind had been locked and the key got thrown away.
“It’s like you get frozen,” he explained. “But not just your body, it’s like… everything. Even your thoughts”.
He was discharged from the hospital not long after that. Thank God he had insurance.
Things were a little strange after that. We still had obligations. We had new classes to take, friends who invited us out to things, and plenty of fun to be had. Few people even knew that Samson had been in the hospital. The way he explained it, it sounded like nothing more than an allergic reaction. But whenever he talked about it, he’d give me this look, like there was something more to be said.
We tried to forget it. It’s one thing for an accident to happen, you can still pretend like it’s a coincidence. But even so, I would find myself whispering that same word. I’d say it while brushing my teeth, the ‘th’ sound making me spit toothpaste on my bathroom mirror.
But Samson and I weren’t talking about it. We didn’t want to think about the implications. If this one word could have an actual effect on people, it wouldn’t just challenge my conventional view of language.
It would change my view of the world at large.
I remember going to a house party about a week after Samson’s hospital visit. He was there too. I was trying my best to survive an encounter with crystal child Sue, while Samson was off in the corner on his phone. Except, I could see he wasn’t really on his phone. There was no light shining on him; the screen was off. He wanted it to look like that to get some space. There was a thousand-yard stare to him, and a redness around his eyes told me he was forgetting to blink.
Prying myself away from Sue, I made my way to Samson. I knelt down next to him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. At first he put the mask back on, smiling at me and doing a ceremonial guy kind of handshake. But his smile stuck there, hanging on by a thread. The second I asked him if he was okay, he shook his head.
“I can’t do this,” he said, still smiling. “I can’t fucking do this.”
We stepped outside and found a quiet spot on the corner of the house. I made sure no one was around when Samson finally let his guard down and the words poured out.
“I can’t stop saying it. I can’t stop thinking it. I write it in a dozen different fonts, and it’s like it has a *look*. It feels like it’s supposed to not just *sound* a certain way, but *look* a certain way. What fucking word has a *look?*”
“So we can’t stop saying it,” I concede. “What do we do? We sit here and say it until we drop dead?”
“What if I say it to you?” he asks. “You think that’ll work?”
“Work how, as in killing me?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
We paced back and forth. He chucked his empty beer bottle over a fence and buried his fingers in his hair. He was so frustrated he could cry. There was a sob beneath every word he spoke.
“I want it out of my goddamn head. I don’t want to say it anymore.”
“So let’s figure it out. We can do that. We can figure. Shit. Out.”
“We figure shit out,” he agreed. “Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s figure shit out.”
We tried a bunch of things. We tried recording it and playing it back, both to ourselves and others. We tried whispering it. Samson tried yelling it late at night. We tried getting people to read it. Then we tried getting people to read it while *looking* at us. We even tried it phonetically. Nothing seemed to work. We made lists of possible factors and it all boiled down to a couple of things; intent, and knowledge. You had to *intend* the word you were saying, and you had to have the knowledge *behind* that intent.
We had to test our hypothesis. The only way to do that was for Samson to say it back to me. He had the knowledge now, having learned the word through me. He could muster the intent.
This time, we prepared ourselves properly. Crystal Sue was a med student, and she let us use one of the diagnostic rooms as long as we promised not to touch anything expensive. I’d insisted on keeping a valve mask nearby. It’s one of those masks with a pump you can use to push air; it’s the one thing I’d seen help both Samson and the coffee shop guy.
We got there and I sat down on one of the chairs. Samson had the mask ready, and a phone for emergency services. We waited until no one was around and reviewed.
“Intent and knowledge,” I said. “You intend to say it, with me as the recipient. You have knowledge of the word. You know how to say it in the way it’s intended to be said.”
“We’re confirming two things,” Samson added. “We’re proving the components necessary, and that knowing the word does not provide immunity.”
“Maybe it does?”
“Maybe.”
He leaned down in front of me, meeting my eye level.
“You ready?”
I nodded.
When he spoke the word, I barely registered it. It wasn’t so much the word itself, but the reverberation of it. It’s like I saw it before I heard it, having it pierce through my eyes and prop up my eyelids from inside. By the time I understood I’d heard it, I was halfway through inhaling, trying to get enough air in to speak.
But I couldn’t speak. All I could do was to keep sucking in air, hoping it’d somehow be enough for something I wanted to say. I kept inhaling more, and more, and more, and even though my lungs ached at the edge of capacity, I tried to take in *more*.
I wanted to scream and shout, but there wasn’t enough oxygen in the word to get the sensation out of me.
As my vision blurred with black spots, I heard that icy wind in the back of my mind. That shriek of air passing above. The weight of the world pushing me to the ground, and if I gave it an inch it would crush me like a bug.
At some point, I was breathing again. I was lying on the floor of the diagnostics room, looking up at Samson. I felt the silicone surrounding my face. He’d brought me back with that air pump thing. Maybe the sensation of moving air snapped me out of something, bringing me back to the moment. My stomach rolled as I leaned over and threw up into a wastepaper basket.
“You alright?!”
“…I’m alright.”
“Jesus H Christ, what the hell was that?!”
“…I dunno. But I’m alright.”
I threw up two more times before I could really say I was really okay. I sprayed my face with some water and stayed on the floor for a while, waiting for my body to settle into itself. It took me a good fifteen minutes before the spots disappeared from my vision and my pulse settled into a steady rhythm. I coughed a little, and looked up at Samson.
“Intent,” I said, nodding at his notebook. “And knowledge. And we’re not immune.”
No matter what we wanted, we couldn’t let it go. We couldn’t walk away from this one thing that kept popping into our minds. I would mumble it to myself in the shower. Samson told me he almost ran a red light. This one time when I was trying on a shirt, I ended up standing in the changing room for twenty minutes, staring at my reflection and saying that damned word over and over.
Samson and I had dozens of talks. Talks that ran late into the night, where we plastered my kitchen table in notes and speculation.
“It’s not an English word.”
“Not a word at all,” I added. “There are things that sound similar, but… yeah. Not a word.”
“Not a word,” Samson agreed, underlining a line on a note with a marker. “It’s not a disease. Not a disorder. Not a-“
“We can’t just keep making lists of things it ain’t,” I said. “We gotta… you know. Flip it around. Like…”
I took a piece of paper and wrote down ‘cold’. Samson picked it up and looked at it. His brow furrowed, but he agreed. The word was *cold*. We both knew that. We’d felt that.
We twisted and turned the word over a couple of times, but that got us nowhere. We ended up on the couch, finishing whatever beer I had left in the fridge. Turns out, it was more than enough to get us tipsy. For a short moment, it’s like that word took the back seat to how things were supposed to be. Friends saying dumb things, making each other laugh.
I was sitting with my notebook, writing the word down over and over in increasingly absurd ways. After a while, I was just drawing. The word as a spiral. The word as a box. The word as a sunflower, albeit blue from the ink pen I was using. None of it looked right, despite all being the same word.
“I can’t believe Sue is a med student,” Samson snorted. “How does a med student believe in healing?”
“How does an engineering student believe in magic words?”
“That’s different,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s real. And why’re you defending her anyway?”
“I dunno, she kinda cute.”
“You fucking…”
He put another beer in front of me. I wasn’t entirely lying, Sue and I had been sending each other a lot of messages. Weird or not, she was surprisingly fun to be around. As I picked up my phone to send her another message, I noticed Samson spacing out for a bit. I sent my message and looked at him as his eyes drifted off.
“What if it’s not a word?”
He turned to me, looking me in the eye.
“What if it’s a name?”
It was an interesting thought. There were plenty of references to things and Gods trapped in ice. We looked at different names throughout history and myth to see if we could find anything that resembled what we’d experienced. It was hours of scrolling and comparing notes. Anything from stories about the Ginnungagap of Norse mythology, to the ice spirit Agloolik of the Inuit people. I remember us sitting there in the middle of the night, having exchanged our beers for caffeine.
“There’s a word in Inuktitut that’s sort of spelled ‘Tra’. It means ‘between’.”
I shook my head.
“We’re working on the premise that it’s a name.”
“What if the word *comes* from a name?”
“That’s a separate premise. How are we supposed to prove that?”
“I’m just saying, it’s the same.”
“Does it *look* right?”
Samson peered at the word on his screen, turning it over, and zooming in. After a couple of seconds, he shook his head.
“No.”
“So then that ain’t it.”
“How do we know that? How can we feel that it’s wrong?”
I didn’t have an answer. I settled for falling down a separate rabbit hole on another site.
It was about an hour before dawn when we ended up at the kitchen table, our options exhausted. We’d been up all night. Samson was nodding on and off. We’d wanted to figure this out so badly, but all we’d ended up doing was write down more questions. You can’t figure out something of this magnitude overnight. It was all speculation and presumption. Samson spoke up, his head resting against the table.
“What if we just keep saying it? Like an immunization thing.”
“That’s like… shooting yourself in the foot to build up immunity to bigger bullets.”
“No, it’s like getting snakebites,” he insisted. “That’s how you build immunity. To snakebites.”
“But what if it doesn’t work like that? We’ll just be killing ourselves.”
“But what if it does? Are you going to disprove my hypothesis, or are you gonna let an option dangle in the wind?”
I was tired, and frustrated, and bored. I’d gotten my own valve mask a couple days prior. I went to my bedroom, picked it up, and slammed it on the table. Samson had almost fallen asleep.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s disprove it. Let’s go.”
In that moment, we both made an assumption. I assumed that, since Samson suggested it, he was willing to be the test subject. He assumed, since I agreed and had the equipment, that I was the willing test subject. We made the same assumption, and before we knew it, we looked one another in the eye and said it at the same time.
Tra.
Time stopped for a second as we realized what we’d done. If both of us were affected, neither could help the other. We’d gasp for air until we suffocated on the floor. Our eyes locked, and I felt that familiar tingle in my eye. The word entering, propping up my eyelids from within. My pulse was hammering in my head. Samson’s eyes grew wide.
It felt like something was looking at me. Paying attention. Like I’d called out, and it noticed me in return. This wasn’t just cold I was experiencing; it was that feeling of being *watched*.
There was a lull. The attention wasn’t absolute; it was split between us, allowing me to force a little air out of my lungs. Samson and I both exhaled a little, taking tiny sips of air.
“…*again*,” I gasped. “…*we do it again*.”
He nodded and used his fingers to count down from three. Then, we said it again.
Saying the word was the only way to reliably breathe out. It allowed us this strange rhythm of exhaling, and inhaling, in an almost ritualistic pattern. We sat there frozen in our seats around my kitchen table, an hour before dawn, chanting that same word over, and over, and over.
No, not a word. A name.
And little by little, I started seeing things.
My mind felt like it was filling up with every breath of the word, expanding like a balloon. An image became clearer. The unbreaking ice, encapsulating me in knife-edged crystal structures. My eyes moving, but no light to capture. The arctic winds tearing at the surface. But now, I turn. I look a different way.
There’s a glimpse. Not just from eyes, but from a sense I didn’t know I had. There’s a membrane flaring, accepting my intrusion. It sees me, and it sees that I’m seeing. It turns its head at an impossible angle, thrusting viscous flesh through corridor, like pressing peanut butter through a straw.
A glimpse of light reaches me, and I see a reflection, like I’d seen my reflection a thousand times before. I see the sharp edges, and the contour, and the dark eyes.
And it’s nothing human.
It’s *nothing* *human*.
I’m looking at Samson across the table. We’re barely breathing. Puffs of smoke escape our breaths, and our lips are turning blue. We can’t keep saying the word as our tongues freeze in our skulls. The syllables grow sluggish and dry. Then we just… stop.
My teeth are chattering, making my skull rattle. Samson’s left eye has frozen shut. We sit there, waiting for the world to make sense.
“Did you see it?” Samson stammered.
I couldn’t get the words out, so I nodded at him.
“It’s killing us,” he says. “It’s killing us.”
I keep nodding. I try moving my arm, but I can’t feel it. I can swing my leg just enough to push myself out of balance, forcing my body to topple over. I crash to the floor, feeling nothing as I bruise my shoulder. Samson looks my way with his one healthy eye.
“Can’t fight it,” he says. “Can’t fight it.”
I don’t want to, but I can’t help but keep nodding. He’s right. We can’t fight it. We’re too damaged to get help, and we’re freezing to death in an air-conditioned apartment. We have to do something. Our eyes meet as we force the chant anew.
Tra. Tra. Tra.
Somewhere in the middle of a breath, I forget what I’m doing and saying. It becomes this thing your body does on its own, like your beating heart. An automatic function of necessity. The word, the name, becoming a background pulse as my world fades away. It takes me far away from the kitchen table, and deep into the ice.
It puts my mind to rest in the dark of its construction. As I step away, it steps forward, its many reflections basking in its glory.
And I sleep. I sleep in a way I’ve only slept once before. Far beneath the ice, as the screeching winds cry.
I woke up on the bathroom floor, my legs in the shower. It was running. Medium temperature. Half my face was covered in this black, foul-smelling liquid. I could taste it on the back of my teeth. The wall was covered in smudges, like I’d written something in black and smeared it out. My hands were a mess.
I tried calling out for Samson, but my voice was too hoarse. I got up on my knees and looked out, only to see him in the kitchen. He’d thrown out everything from my fridge and crawled in, leaving the door half-open. The warning buzzer was going crazy. Forcing myself to my feet, I leaned against the doorframe and pushed a noise past my tongue.
“Samson.”
There was no movement. I took a step out, leaned too hard to the left, and collapsed over an accent table. Crashing to the floor, I got a better view. He was sitting in the fridge, knees up to his chin, hugging himself.
“Samson!”
He blinked. A black liquid poured out between his teeth as he opened his mouth, trying to say the only word that came to his boxed-in mind. The syllables betrayed him as he sputtered again and again. He couldn’t get it *right*. Thank God, he couldn’t get it right.
We eventually figured we’d been out of it for 16 hours straight. We had no recollection of what we’d done in that time. There’d been noise complaints about someone screaming in the shower and flushing the toilet over and over. Someone had smashed the living room window, and the apartment looked like a bomb had gone off. I had to hand-scrub the black stains with lemon juice and chlorine, and even then, I couldn’t get it out of the textiles. Samson tried helping me.
In some absurd way, that night helped us deal with the word. While I still thought about it, I no longer *obsessed* about it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I had to mutter in line at the supermarket, or while looking in the bathroom mirror. The mystery had been delegated to an itching spot in the back of my memory. Something I could poke at without feeling the need to break the scab wide open. Maybe there’s something to be said about Samson’s immunization theory after all.
Samson and I agreed, unanimously, not to speak of it again. This was the kind of thing that we weren’t meant to look closer at. We could kill someone, least of all ourselves.
My college years are behind me now. It was a crazy time, but not for the reasons my classmates talk about. While I remember the parties, and the late nights, it’s that first gasp of a man at the coffee shop that keeps me awake at night. Someone feeling a cold that isn’t meant to be felt.
I still keep in touch with Samson, but we talk about other things. But we do so from a place of understanding. We acknowledge that whatever world view we had once defined, we had to reconsider. Even if we don’t openly talk about it, it’s comforting to know that there is someone out there who truly knows.
I don’t like to think of those times, but it’s even worse to misremember it. If I never write it down, I’ll always second-guess myself. I have to put it into words, because words have meaning. They have intent, and knowledge.
But there are times when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I think of that moment. That moment, far beneath the ice, where something impossible turns to a glimpse of light. And as I see my mirror, I picture another reflection. One that I shouldn’t have seen. One that should have been impossible to see.
In that moment, I want to look a little longer. A little closer. And when I get this intense need to *know*, I whisper two syllables, hoping to get a glimpse of something I shouldn’t.
It’s nothing human.
Tra.
#entertainment
source
Back when I was in college, life seemed easy. You gotta work hard, sure, but it’s predictable. Even hard work doesn’t seem all that hard when you know it’s coming. You can prepare yourself. You can mentally put yourself in a place and say, ‘this is what life is going to be like, to some extent’.
What makes life hard is when that expectation is broken. When you’re thrown into something you not only can’t prepare for, but never knew about to begin with.
That’s what happened to me in my last year of college.
I want to preface with the fact that we weren’t party animals. We were gonna be engineers. We were, in one way or another, nerds. But when we had a good enough reason to cut loose and test our boundaries, we took that opportunity to heart. Myself included.
We’d just finished our midterms. Some of us had spent the afternoon preparing notes and trying to figure out how we did, while others stayed at home and tried to handle their anxiety. Not all were as emotionally tempered as me and my crew. And yeah, I say crew, but we were little more than acquaintances. We gave each other little nicknames and had a group chat, sure, but we could tell that once we were done with college we were never gonna see each other again. Except for Samson, he was cool.
On that one particular night, I’d been out a little too long, and had a few too many drinks. I’d been running up the stairs and my stuffy one-room apartment (that my parents paid for) was feeling a bit claustrophobic. I opened a window and turned on my floor fan. I can’t overstate how big this thing was. They used it at a department store when the AC didn’t quite cut it, but sold it off cheap at the end of summer to bring in new models. Damn thing was half as tall as me and sounded like a jet engine.
When I finally went to bed, I did so with the white noise of an open window and a blaring fan in my head, and I was too drunk to care.
It was the strangest night of sleep I’ve ever had. The noise of the fan and the street outside melted away in my head, and after a while I didn’t even hear it. I remember twisting and turning, wondering why it was suddenly so cold. I pulled the covers over my head, and I could hear the wind passing over me.
I conjured this strange image. For a moment, the covers didn’t feel soft and warm. They felt like ice. Like layers of thick, unbreaking cold. I could imagine myself beneath the surface as the wind screamed past, clawing to get at me. For a couple of hours, I didn’t feel like me. There was no fan, and there was no busy street.
It was layers of darkness, pressing down on me, suffocating me in the crystal cold. Holding my bones in a generational grip as the world wrestled with my presence. Frost sticking to my skin and cutting my flesh at a glacial pace.
Then I woke up.
The first thing I did was to sit straight up, look ahead, and speak.
“Tra.”
It was a two-syllable word. The ‘T’ sounded the ‘Thu’ noise in ‘Thus’. The ‘r’ sound in ‘row’. The ‘a’ sounded like the ‘a’ in ‘act’. In combination, it was like ‘Thu-ra’. With emphasis on the ‘A’.
I said it over and over. It was just stuck on my mind, and I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard it before. It took me a couple of minutes before I even realized how hung over I was. A couple more minutes to close my damn window and turn off the fan. I’d been hearing the noise for so long that when it finally got quiet, I could feel my own heartbeat pushing through my ears.
I brushed my teeth, shaved, and looked in the bathroom mirror.
Tra.
Why was I thinking that? Where’d I heard it? And why did I feel so *cold* saying it?
I kept mumbling it over and over during the day. Not because I was afraid I’d forget it, but because it felt different every time I said it. It felt like tuning a radio, saying it just a little more right every time. A little more emphasis on the ‘A’. A little more roll of the tongue on the ‘r’. Tra. Thu-ra. How did I know the spelling?
I remember getting some strange looks at the coffee shop. I was craving an Americano and there’s this place just off campus that had a huge discount for students, so I liked to stop by there at least once every other day or so. I dropped in just after the lunch rush to get myself a coffee and a bear claw.
As I’m walking around, looking for a place to sit, I’m still saying the word. I don’t realize I’m doing it, but I am. It’s like an audio stim, like how an old man might mumble “tut-tut-tut” and snap his suspenders. It didn’t mean anything, it just felt good to say. At one point, there’s this guy with these big headphones that tap me on the shoulder.
“Sorry,” he said. “Did you say something?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you said my name.”
“No, I said…”
I trailed off. He looked at me, confused. Part of me felt like I had an obligation to just shut the hell up. A part of me split straight down the middle; a conscious thought telling me to excuse myself, and a subconscious thought telling me to keep saying it. And why shouldn’t I? It was just noise.
“Tra,” I said, looking him in the eye. “It’s just this-“
He gasped.
Now, when I say gasped, I don’t mean as in recognition, or fear. I’d seen that gasp before. It was the same kind of gasp my dad would make when stepping out into the cold. The same gasp my ex-girlfriend would do when stepping out of a warm shower onto a cold floor. Not a dramatic gasp, but a very distinct one.
Except headphone guy didn’t just gasp; he kept inhaling. He kept sucking in air, going, and going, and going. Then he stopped. He just stood there, leaning back, his mouth twitching. I could see his eyes shaking as he looked at me, then around the room.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He pointed to his chest. He tried to close his mouth, but it’s like his jaw muscles cramped. His eyes looked up, and I could see something shift. Everyone turned to us as his big headphones rolled off his head, barely hanging on by a line. His macchiato fell out of his hands, crashing onto the floor with a splash.
I asked again if he was okay, but someone was already yelling that he’s having a seizure. I backed away to make space. Someone tried to sit him down, but he couldn’t bend his legs. He couldn’t breathe. His fingers were shaking as his hands constricted into curled fists. Someone was calling for help. They threw a towel on the floor to keep people from slipping. Some were crowding at the door to leave; others were standing up to get a video.
And I’m just standing there, trying to make sense of what I’d witnessed. They drove him off in an ambulance. I thought I heard him cough when the EMTs put one of those pumping valve masks on him. I didn’t finish my Americano. I think I left it on the counter.
I spent most of the day thinking about that word. I got lost in my thoughts at the supermarket, mumbling to myself as I forgot to put up my groceries. I said it when I slowed down to look for a parking spot outside the dry cleaners. I said it a couple more times as I walked around town. No one seemed to react the way that guy at the coffee shop did. And yet, when I looked at my reflection in a passing store window, I didn’t want to say it again. Your reflection looks different in glass. It looks darker, and your eyes take on a different shape. The sharp edges of your face get a contrast. If you just squint a little, it barely looks human.
I didn’t want to say it to him. To me. Maybe I’d gasp. And yet, I couldn’t help myself. I turned to my reflection, defiant to a feeling I’d made up in my mind and said it out loud with the same intensity as a man screaming from the hilltops.
“Tra.”
A chill of anticipation passed over me, but nothing happened.
As I got home and put my groceries away, I called up Samson. I had my headset on as I fumbled about in the kitchen, taking some time to put away one of my four plates and two sets of cutleries.
“I can’t explain it,” I said as I popped a root beer. “I wake up, and it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“You sure it’s not a name?” he asked. “I saw you talking to that Korean chick last night. Saw you talking an *awfully* long time.”
“You mean Sue?” I snorted. “She’s from *Wisconsin*, you fucking pancake.”
“I feel like there’s a story there that’s *far* more interesting than fever dreams.”
“My guy, she believes in *crystals*. I don’t want my kids getting good vibes and tarot card readings instead of vaccines.”
“You two already having kids?”
Samson had this ability to pull me out of my funk. No matter if it was test anxiety or missing a deadline, he could keep me from spiraling. But for the first time, a single word persisted through his best efforts. And it wasn’t like I was sad or anything. I was doing pretty good. But I kept hearing that inhale from the guy at the coffee shop. I could hear it behind my ears.
And it made me shiver.
I hoped it’d go away, but it was on my mind the next day, and the day after that. I noticed myself saying it every now and then, even in passing. Sometimes it didn’t even feel like me saying it, it was a word that fell out of me like a verbal tic. Some people might have heard me saying it as they passed me on the street, but no one reacted like that guy did. No one did the *gasp*.
I still had this knot in my stomach about it. Like I was missing something. If I could figure out why I was thinking about that damn word, maybe I wouldn’t have to worry as much. And if I could say it straight to someone without them reacting, I could exclude the thought that maybe, somehow, I’d been responsible for that man’s reaction.
Tra.
It wasn’t really a conscious thing. It was a kind of experimentation. As an engineer, you gotta know the structural properties of the materials you’re working with. You gotta map it out and make predictions based on observable data points. I could say the word in a crowd without anyone caring. I could say it in passing. I could record it and play it back to myself. No reaction, apart from a heightened pulse, but that was probably just anticipation.
It all boiled down to one property. Looking someone in the eye and telling them *directly*. That’s what I’d done. I had to figure out if that was a trigger. So I called someone I trusted. I called Samson.
He came over to my place. Samson is just below 6 feet tall but wears the kind of shoes that give him that extra boost. He had short reddish-brown hair, with a goatee that’d grown way too wild, giving him the side profile of a monkey. The guy was thin as a twig but made of sturdier stuff than most pro athletes. He’d brought a six-pack, thinking we were gonna have a night out. I asked him to sit down as I explained.
“There was this guy at the coffee shop the other day,” I said. “He had some kind of seizure.”
“Shit, like epilepsy?”
“Kinda, yeah. Right next to me.”
“How bad was it?”
“Pretty bad.”
He snapped a beer and passed it to me. I cracked it open, but just sipped it. He noticed, but kept quiet.
“He had it right as I said this… thing. That word. I said it, and he freaked out.”
Samson shook his head, making an uncomfortable noise. Like a 12-year-old kid squirming at a scary campfire story. I continued.
“I’m not saying I *caused* it. I’m not saying that. But I got this feeling that I did something wrong.”
“This really bothers you, huh?”
I looked at my open beer, nodding.
“Yeah. It does.”
We talked about it for a while. I wrote it down, explained the spelling, and talked about the various things I’d done around town. Not so much to explain, but to illustrate my point about how much this’d bothered me. I could tell Samson was a bit freaked out, but in the end, he shook it off. He finished his beer.
“Say it to me.”
“No, I’m good.”
“Look, this is bothering you. Just say it to me, you’ll see it’s fine.”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“See, that’s why you’re feeling this. You got the feeling it’s bad. You gotta *test* that. *Challenge* it. So look me in the eye and say the damn thing. Get it over with. See that it’s fake.”
“You sure?”
“One word, then drinks are on you.”
I looked him in the eye. I thought about that word. *Really* thought about it. I thought about that night under the covers, the fan blasting through my bedroom. But it wasn’t my fan. It was the arctic winds, clawing at the ice pressing me into this broken shape. Screaming gales demanding that the ground give way. Expanding cold sucking me down into the dark, like being slowly unbirthed. A grave womb, wearing a word.
I open my mouth, and I say it.
Tra.
Samson blinks. He looks at me and nods. He sighs, giving me a shrug. Then he sighs again. His eyes wander a little. He sighs a third time, drawing in a deep breath.
And he doesn’t stop.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no…”
He sucks in air and leans back in his chair. He leans back too far and tips over, knocking one of our half-drunk beers off the table. His mouth opens wider and wider, sucking in more air, and he can’t press it back out. His eyes flail as he smacks the floor with the palm of his hand like a boxer tapping out.
I’m already calling for help. I’m screaming at the operator. For anyone. His eyes roll up, and I see his lips turning blue. But is it lack of oxygen, or the cold?
It’s a blur after that. A nice lady on the phone. Someone rushing in from the hallway. Chest compressions. Pinching his nose and blowing into his mouth. Someone says ‘seizure’. Someone asks me questions with words I don’t understand. By the time the EMTs get there, I’m begging them to put a mask over his face. I tell them he can’t breathe.
By the time they’re leaving with him, something unclogs in his chest, making him spit up over my hallway carpet.
I followed Samson to the hospital. It didn’t take all that long before I could see him. He’d had some kind of attack, but he was recovering fast. He’d probably be back out after a couple hours of observation. They’d called his mom and dad. His dad just looked like a bigger, chubbier version of him. Even the same goatee.
When I could finally see him, Samson was already sitting up in his hospital bed. The others were waiting outside for him to get dressed. As they left, I saw something in his eyes change. His hands were trembling as I sat down next to him, shoulder to shoulder.
For a moment, we just sat there. We knew this one word held some kind of property, and it was causing real, physical, harm. We’d never seen anything like it before. No one had. That realization just dumbstruck us, making our minds race to find something to say.
“It’s real,” Samson settled on.
“Yeah. It is.”
“It’s fucking real.”
I put a hand on his shoulder as he broke down crying. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Samson told me what he’d experienced. At first, it was nothing. A cold puff of air, at most. Then there’d been this tension in his chest, like he was sinking underwater. A pressure building, forcing him to push back by sucking in air. Then it hit him; an immense, all-encompassing, cold.
“Like someone dunked my spine in an ice bucket,” he mumbled. “But not like… ice, ice. It was colder. *Impossibly* fucking cold.”
He’d been waiting for it to pass. When it never did, his mind had been locked and the key got thrown away.
“It’s like you get frozen,” he explained. “But not just your body, it’s like… everything. Even your thoughts”.
He was discharged from the hospital not long after that. Thank God he had insurance.
Things were a little strange after that. We still had obligations. We had new classes to take, friends who invited us out to things, and plenty of fun to be had. Few people even knew that Samson had been in the hospital. The way he explained it, it sounded like nothing more than an allergic reaction. But whenever he talked about it, he’d give me this look, like there was something more to be said.
We tried to forget it. It’s one thing for an accident to happen, you can still pretend like it’s a coincidence. But even so, I would find myself whispering that same word. I’d say it while brushing my teeth, the ‘th’ sound making me spit toothpaste on my bathroom mirror.
But Samson and I weren’t talking about it. We didn’t want to think about the implications. If this one word could have an actual effect on people, it wouldn’t just challenge my conventional view of language.
It would change my view of the world at large.
I remember going to a house party about a week after Samson’s hospital visit. He was there too. I was trying my best to survive an encounter with crystal child Sue, while Samson was off in the corner on his phone. Except, I could see he wasn’t really on his phone. There was no light shining on him; the screen was off. He wanted it to look like that to get some space. There was a thousand-yard stare to him, and a redness around his eyes told me he was forgetting to blink.
Prying myself away from Sue, I made my way to Samson. I knelt down next to him, giving him a pat on the shoulder. At first he put the mask back on, smiling at me and doing a ceremonial guy kind of handshake. But his smile stuck there, hanging on by a thread. The second I asked him if he was okay, he shook his head.
“I can’t do this,” he said, still smiling. “I can’t fucking do this.”
We stepped outside and found a quiet spot on the corner of the house. I made sure no one was around when Samson finally let his guard down and the words poured out.
“I can’t stop saying it. I can’t stop thinking it. I write it in a dozen different fonts, and it’s like it has a *look*. It feels like it’s supposed to not just *sound* a certain way, but *look* a certain way. What fucking word has a *look?*”
“So we can’t stop saying it,” I concede. “What do we do? We sit here and say it until we drop dead?”
“What if I say it to you?” he asks. “You think that’ll work?”
“Work how, as in killing me?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
We paced back and forth. He chucked his empty beer bottle over a fence and buried his fingers in his hair. He was so frustrated he could cry. There was a sob beneath every word he spoke.
“I want it out of my goddamn head. I don’t want to say it anymore.”
“So let’s figure it out. We can do that. We can figure. Shit. Out.”
“We figure shit out,” he agreed. “Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s figure shit out.”
We tried a bunch of things. We tried recording it and playing it back, both to ourselves and others. We tried whispering it. Samson tried yelling it late at night. We tried getting people to read it. Then we tried getting people to read it while *looking* at us. We even tried it phonetically. Nothing seemed to work. We made lists of possible factors and it all boiled down to a couple of things; intent, and knowledge. You had to *intend* the word you were saying, and you had to have the knowledge *behind* that intent.
We had to test our hypothesis. The only way to do that was for Samson to say it back to me. He had the knowledge now, having learned the word through me. He could muster the intent.
This time, we prepared ourselves properly. Crystal Sue was a med student, and she let us use one of the diagnostic rooms as long as we promised not to touch anything expensive. I’d insisted on keeping a valve mask nearby. It’s one of those masks with a pump you can use to push air; it’s the one thing I’d seen help both Samson and the coffee shop guy.
We got there and I sat down on one of the chairs. Samson had the mask ready, and a phone for emergency services. We waited until no one was around and reviewed.
“Intent and knowledge,” I said. “You intend to say it, with me as the recipient. You have knowledge of the word. You know how to say it in the way it’s intended to be said.”
“We’re confirming two things,” Samson added. “We’re proving the components necessary, and that knowing the word does not provide immunity.”
“Maybe it does?”
“Maybe.”
He leaned down in front of me, meeting my eye level.
“You ready?”
I nodded.
When he spoke the word, I barely registered it. It wasn’t so much the word itself, but the reverberation of it. It’s like I saw it before I heard it, having it pierce through my eyes and prop up my eyelids from inside. By the time I understood I’d heard it, I was halfway through inhaling, trying to get enough air in to speak.
But I couldn’t speak. All I could do was to keep sucking in air, hoping it’d somehow be enough for something I wanted to say. I kept inhaling more, and more, and more, and even though my lungs ached at the edge of capacity, I tried to take in *more*.
I wanted to scream and shout, but there wasn’t enough oxygen in the word to get the sensation out of me.
As my vision blurred with black spots, I heard that icy wind in the back of my mind. That shriek of air passing above. The weight of the world pushing me to the ground, and if I gave it an inch it would crush me like a bug.
At some point, I was breathing again. I was lying on the floor of the diagnostics room, looking up at Samson. I felt the silicone surrounding my face. He’d brought me back with that air pump thing. Maybe the sensation of moving air snapped me out of something, bringing me back to the moment. My stomach rolled as I leaned over and threw up into a wastepaper basket.
“You alright?!”
“…I’m alright.”
“Jesus H Christ, what the hell was that?!”
“…I dunno. But I’m alright.”
I threw up two more times before I could really say I was really okay. I sprayed my face with some water and stayed on the floor for a while, waiting for my body to settle into itself. It took me a good fifteen minutes before the spots disappeared from my vision and my pulse settled into a steady rhythm. I coughed a little, and looked up at Samson.
“Intent,” I said, nodding at his notebook. “And knowledge. And we’re not immune.”
No matter what we wanted, we couldn’t let it go. We couldn’t walk away from this one thing that kept popping into our minds. I would mumble it to myself in the shower. Samson told me he almost ran a red light. This one time when I was trying on a shirt, I ended up standing in the changing room for twenty minutes, staring at my reflection and saying that damned word over and over.
Samson and I had dozens of talks. Talks that ran late into the night, where we plastered my kitchen table in notes and speculation.
“It’s not an English word.”
“Not a word at all,” I added. “There are things that sound similar, but… yeah. Not a word.”
“Not a word,” Samson agreed, underlining a line on a note with a marker. “It’s not a disease. Not a disorder. Not a-“
“We can’t just keep making lists of things it ain’t,” I said. “We gotta… you know. Flip it around. Like…”
I took a piece of paper and wrote down ‘cold’. Samson picked it up and looked at it. His brow furrowed, but he agreed. The word was *cold*. We both knew that. We’d felt that.
We twisted and turned the word over a couple of times, but that got us nowhere. We ended up on the couch, finishing whatever beer I had left in the fridge. Turns out, it was more than enough to get us tipsy. For a short moment, it’s like that word took the back seat to how things were supposed to be. Friends saying dumb things, making each other laugh.
I was sitting with my notebook, writing the word down over and over in increasingly absurd ways. After a while, I was just drawing. The word as a spiral. The word as a box. The word as a sunflower, albeit blue from the ink pen I was using. None of it looked right, despite all being the same word.
“I can’t believe Sue is a med student,” Samson snorted. “How does a med student believe in healing?”
“How does an engineering student believe in magic words?”
“That’s different,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s real. And why’re you defending her anyway?”
“I dunno, she kinda cute.”
“You fucking…”
He put another beer in front of me. I wasn’t entirely lying, Sue and I had been sending each other a lot of messages. Weird or not, she was surprisingly fun to be around. As I picked up my phone to send her another message, I noticed Samson spacing out for a bit. I sent my message and looked at him as his eyes drifted off.
“What if it’s not a word?”
He turned to me, looking me in the eye.
“What if it’s a name?”
It was an interesting thought. There were plenty of references to things and Gods trapped in ice. We looked at different names throughout history and myth to see if we could find anything that resembled what we’d experienced. It was hours of scrolling and comparing notes. Anything from stories about the Ginnungagap of Norse mythology, to the ice spirit Agloolik of the Inuit people. I remember us sitting there in the middle of the night, having exchanged our beers for caffeine.
“There’s a word in Inuktitut that’s sort of spelled ‘Tra’. It means ‘between’.”
I shook my head.
“We’re working on the premise that it’s a name.”
“What if the word *comes* from a name?”
“That’s a separate premise. How are we supposed to prove that?”
“I’m just saying, it’s the same.”
“Does it *look* right?”
Samson peered at the word on his screen, turning it over, and zooming in. After a couple of seconds, he shook his head.
“No.”
“So then that ain’t it.”
“How do we know that? How can we feel that it’s wrong?”
I didn’t have an answer. I settled for falling down a separate rabbit hole on another site.
It was about an hour before dawn when we ended up at the kitchen table, our options exhausted. We’d been up all night. Samson was nodding on and off. We’d wanted to figure this out so badly, but all we’d ended up doing was write down more questions. You can’t figure out something of this magnitude overnight. It was all speculation and presumption. Samson spoke up, his head resting against the table.
“What if we just keep saying it? Like an immunization thing.”
“That’s like… shooting yourself in the foot to build up immunity to bigger bullets.”
“No, it’s like getting snakebites,” he insisted. “That’s how you build immunity. To snakebites.”
“But what if it doesn’t work like that? We’ll just be killing ourselves.”
“But what if it does? Are you going to disprove my hypothesis, or are you gonna let an option dangle in the wind?”
I was tired, and frustrated, and bored. I’d gotten my own valve mask a couple days prior. I went to my bedroom, picked it up, and slammed it on the table. Samson had almost fallen asleep.
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s disprove it. Let’s go.”
In that moment, we both made an assumption. I assumed that, since Samson suggested it, he was willing to be the test subject. He assumed, since I agreed and had the equipment, that I was the willing test subject. We made the same assumption, and before we knew it, we looked one another in the eye and said it at the same time.
Tra.
Time stopped for a second as we realized what we’d done. If both of us were affected, neither could help the other. We’d gasp for air until we suffocated on the floor. Our eyes locked, and I felt that familiar tingle in my eye. The word entering, propping up my eyelids from within. My pulse was hammering in my head. Samson’s eyes grew wide.
It felt like something was looking at me. Paying attention. Like I’d called out, and it noticed me in return. This wasn’t just cold I was experiencing; it was that feeling of being *watched*.
There was a lull. The attention wasn’t absolute; it was split between us, allowing me to force a little air out of my lungs. Samson and I both exhaled a little, taking tiny sips of air.
“…*again*,” I gasped. “…*we do it again*.”
He nodded and used his fingers to count down from three. Then, we said it again.
Saying the word was the only way to reliably breathe out. It allowed us this strange rhythm of exhaling, and inhaling, in an almost ritualistic pattern. We sat there frozen in our seats around my kitchen table, an hour before dawn, chanting that same word over, and over, and over.
No, not a word. A name.
And little by little, I started seeing things.
My mind felt like it was filling up with every breath of the word, expanding like a balloon. An image became clearer. The unbreaking ice, encapsulating me in knife-edged crystal structures. My eyes moving, but no light to capture. The arctic winds tearing at the surface. But now, I turn. I look a different way.
There’s a glimpse. Not just from eyes, but from a sense I didn’t know I had. There’s a membrane flaring, accepting my intrusion. It sees me, and it sees that I’m seeing. It turns its head at an impossible angle, thrusting viscous flesh through corridor, like pressing peanut butter through a straw.
A glimpse of light reaches me, and I see a reflection, like I’d seen my reflection a thousand times before. I see the sharp edges, and the contour, and the dark eyes.
And it’s nothing human.
It’s *nothing* *human*.
I’m looking at Samson across the table. We’re barely breathing. Puffs of smoke escape our breaths, and our lips are turning blue. We can’t keep saying the word as our tongues freeze in our skulls. The syllables grow sluggish and dry. Then we just… stop.
My teeth are chattering, making my skull rattle. Samson’s left eye has frozen shut. We sit there, waiting for the world to make sense.
“Did you see it?” Samson stammered.
I couldn’t get the words out, so I nodded at him.
“It’s killing us,” he says. “It’s killing us.”
I keep nodding. I try moving my arm, but I can’t feel it. I can swing my leg just enough to push myself out of balance, forcing my body to topple over. I crash to the floor, feeling nothing as I bruise my shoulder. Samson looks my way with his one healthy eye.
“Can’t fight it,” he says. “Can’t fight it.”
I don’t want to, but I can’t help but keep nodding. He’s right. We can’t fight it. We’re too damaged to get help, and we’re freezing to death in an air-conditioned apartment. We have to do something. Our eyes meet as we force the chant anew.
Tra. Tra. Tra.
Somewhere in the middle of a breath, I forget what I’m doing and saying. It becomes this thing your body does on its own, like your beating heart. An automatic function of necessity. The word, the name, becoming a background pulse as my world fades away. It takes me far away from the kitchen table, and deep into the ice.
It puts my mind to rest in the dark of its construction. As I step away, it steps forward, its many reflections basking in its glory.
And I sleep. I sleep in a way I’ve only slept once before. Far beneath the ice, as the screeching winds cry.
I woke up on the bathroom floor, my legs in the shower. It was running. Medium temperature. Half my face was covered in this black, foul-smelling liquid. I could taste it on the back of my teeth. The wall was covered in smudges, like I’d written something in black and smeared it out. My hands were a mess.
I tried calling out for Samson, but my voice was too hoarse. I got up on my knees and looked out, only to see him in the kitchen. He’d thrown out everything from my fridge and crawled in, leaving the door half-open. The warning buzzer was going crazy. Forcing myself to my feet, I leaned against the doorframe and pushed a noise past my tongue.
“Samson.”
There was no movement. I took a step out, leaned too hard to the left, and collapsed over an accent table. Crashing to the floor, I got a better view. He was sitting in the fridge, knees up to his chin, hugging himself.
“Samson!”
He blinked. A black liquid poured out between his teeth as he opened his mouth, trying to say the only word that came to his boxed-in mind. The syllables betrayed him as he sputtered again and again. He couldn’t get it *right*. Thank God, he couldn’t get it right.
We eventually figured we’d been out of it for 16 hours straight. We had no recollection of what we’d done in that time. There’d been noise complaints about someone screaming in the shower and flushing the toilet over and over. Someone had smashed the living room window, and the apartment looked like a bomb had gone off. I had to hand-scrub the black stains with lemon juice and chlorine, and even then, I couldn’t get it out of the textiles. Samson tried helping me.
In some absurd way, that night helped us deal with the word. While I still thought about it, I no longer *obsessed* about it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I had to mutter in line at the supermarket, or while looking in the bathroom mirror. The mystery had been delegated to an itching spot in the back of my memory. Something I could poke at without feeling the need to break the scab wide open. Maybe there’s something to be said about Samson’s immunization theory after all.
Samson and I agreed, unanimously, not to speak of it again. This was the kind of thing that we weren’t meant to look closer at. We could kill someone, least of all ourselves.
My college years are behind me now. It was a crazy time, but not for the reasons my classmates talk about. While I remember the parties, and the late nights, it’s that first gasp of a man at the coffee shop that keeps me awake at night. Someone feeling a cold that isn’t meant to be felt.
I still keep in touch with Samson, but we talk about other things. But we do so from a place of understanding. We acknowledge that whatever world view we had once defined, we had to reconsider. Even if we don’t openly talk about it, it’s comforting to know that there is someone out there who truly knows.
I don’t like to think of those times, but it’s even worse to misremember it. If I never write it down, I’ll always second-guess myself. I have to put it into words, because words have meaning. They have intent, and knowledge.
But there are times when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I think of that moment. That moment, far beneath the ice, where something impossible turns to a glimpse of light. And as I see my mirror, I picture another reflection. One that I shouldn’t have seen. One that should have been impossible to see.
In that moment, I want to look a little longer. A little closer. And when I get this intense need to *know*, I whisper two syllables, hoping to get a glimpse of something I shouldn’t.
It’s nothing human.
Tra.
#entertainment
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