by Nara Dakota
Snow crunched under Lila’s snowshoes while chunky flakes continued to drift from the sky. Given enough time, the white dust could bury anything.
The farther they climbed before the sun rose, the more they could ride the mountain that day. When the morning darkness gave way to the sun, the clock began ticking down, and at sunset they had to go home.
Lila’s body burned from hiking uphill, and her snowshoes were beginning to drag. Didn’t matter. She ignored everything around her, and focused on calculating how many runs they could take before the sun set and they had to go home. The math required all her brainpower as she tried to guess how much time Josh and Alex would spend building a jump out of snow and how quickly she could hike back uphill—which would take longer later in the day due to exhaustion.
None of her attention was left over to listen to the ever-present music she felt the mountains singing to her soul. She would hardly look at them until they reached the summit, and then she would spend a few moments enjoying the craggy outcroppings where boulders broke free, the ridgelines where the earth caressed the sky, and the sharp valleys where water and ice played. After greeting her beloved landscape, she would snowboard. The wind would rush around her body, and she would feel her board beneath her feet, swishing over the fresh powder and twisting and turning for her every command. The snow would sink away as she launched off her favorite jump, and she would fly through the wintery air.
Ahead of her, puffs of snow piled on Alex’s black Never Summer snowboard. The snow sparkled blue in the moonlight, and the board, strapped to his backpack, rocked gently with each step he took up the mountain.
Above Alex, Josh stomped through the thick powder and forged a trail for the two behind him. He was the one to crawl out of bed at four-thirty this morning and check the snow report. Seconds after he read about the thirty-seven inches of freshies on their favorite backcountry mountains, he was dressed and banging on his roommates’ door.
A ray of pink broke over the crest of a distant mountain. It melted into the blue moonlight. The purple mist crept around the pine trees’ shadows until it found Lila.
Lila glanced up in horror. They hadn’t reached the top yet; they would waste precious sunlight. The yellow tip of the sun reminded her of her calculations about how many years she had left. She forgot her time estimations on the day’s riding and worried how much longer her love affair with the mountains would last.
Before she could start guessing how long she had before arthritis, the snow lurched beneath her with an ominous crunch.
She snapped out of her reverie and put her arms out to balance herself as she fell into the snow.
When she looked around, however, nothing was wrong. Her shoes were just as deep as they had been the whole hike.
“Did you feel that?”
Alex called over his shoulder, “Feel what?”
She glanced around at the white-barked aspens and the snow-laden pine trees. Everything looked normal, but she was sure she’d felt her legs drop at least two feet. The more she thought about it, the more she knew she’d felt not only her legs drop into the snow, but also the snow rushing downhill onto her.
As she stood, glaring at the trees in search of answers, the air got thicker. Moments ago, it had been crispy and too cold to hold scents. Usually, Lila enjoyed the sensation of air too cold for her to smell anything because that meant the snow wouldn’t melt. Now the lack of forest smells felt eerie and empty.
The air grew thick and heavy, until it was the consistency of peanut butter. The lack of scent became even more anoxic.
Alex noticed the absence of footsteps behind him, so he stopped and turned around. “What are you doing?”
Her jaw worked, but she couldn’t feel the breath in her throat. She felt herself begin to panic as a weight pressed on her chest. She couldn’t expand her ribs. Her body was encased in concrete, though for some inexplicable reason she could see nothing threatening around her. The mountain was peaceful and beautiful in the dawn.
“Lila?” Her boyfriend stepped down in his own tracks.
As quickly as it came, the feeling passed, and she could breathe again. She gasped in a couple frozen breaths. “Alex.”
“You okay? You don’t look so good.”
She checked her pulse. It was exactly what she expected after an hour’s hike. She marched a few steps upward, and her legs burned exactly the way they should after so much uphill snowshoeing, and no more. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Okay.” He turned and continued climbing.
She hadn’t hiked three feet before she saw it: a rocky cloud of snow crashed through the trees, swept over them, and sucked them down into the darkness. “Alex!”
The scream erased the vision, and they were again hiking in the moonlight.
Alex jumped and spun around. “What the fuck was that?”
She was hyperventilating; she knew it because the air was rushing through her throat too quickly and the edges of her vision were blurring the way they did when she ran out of oxygen. Breathing didn’t seem to help, though, and she felt like she was drowning. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
Josh stopped and peered down through the thick pine trees at them. “What are you screaming about?”
Alex reached behind him and unclipped a flashlight from his pack. He stepped down to Lila and shined it in her face.
The shock of the light made burning trails in her sight. “Ow!” She jerked away from him.
“Look at me.” He took her chin and inspected her pupils like he habitually did in the emergency room. He pressed a finger into her throat and checked her pulse. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I saw an avalanche. It came down through the trees.”
“Avalanche?”
“Yes.” She pointed uphill where she’d seen the tsunami of powder and heavy blocks of frozen water tumbling down to kill them. “I saw it. Coming down at us.”
He glanced up at the quiet forest. He pursed his lips and cocked an eyebrow as if to say, “Where is it now?”
“I saw it, damn it.”
He flicked off the light and clipped it on his pack. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket.
Lila knew she sounded ludicrous. She looked away as the yellow flame lit the cigarette—the bright light hurt her dark-adjusted eyes.
Slices of heavy shadows cut through the purple haze. The odd mixture of hues made it hard to distinguish what was there and what wasn’t. “I want to go home.”
Alex dragged on the cigarette, making the cherry glow with a painful brightness in the darkness. “Go home? What are you talking about?”
“I saw an avalanche. It was real, so real I can’t describe it. I just want to go home.”
“Are you nuts? Thirty-seven inches of freshies. You were probably sleep-walking and dreamed it. You’ve never been a morning person.”
“I’ve never been a somnambulist, either. Please. There will be other powder days. Let’s go.” She glared uphill, daring the avalanche to repeat itself.
Grey smoke streamed out of his nostrils. “No way. If you want to pussy out, go down and wait in the car. Josh and I have some first tracks to make.”
“I’m not a pussy.”
“Well, I’m not leaving powder because you had some weird psychic moment or whatever you think you had.” He turned and trudged uphill.
The wall of snow crashed down through the trees again. It thundered so loudly Lila couldn’t hear anything else.
She bit her tongue and stood her ground, and the sticky wave gushed over and through her. She watched it run down the hill like a double-exposed film strip: she could see the forest in the moonlight just as she knew it should be, and superimposed on it was the slope they were going to ride, and the blocks of snow crashing over themselves and sucking down her boyfriend and their roommate. She knew by the yellow light the event occurred just as the sun was coming up, probably seconds after they reached the top of the slope.
They were going to start the avalanche. The knowledge sliced through her coldly, making her shiver.
Looking through the yellow vision and focusing on the blue and purple present, she ran uphill to her still-living boyfriend. She grabbed his backpack. “Alex! Please!”
He shook her off and kept marching.
The yellow vision was still in front of her, and she saw a lone girl in a black jacket and snow pants running frantically over the settled snow. She recognized her immediately as herself. The girl had a small machine in her hand and was scanning for frequencies—the signals transmitted by Josh and Alex’s transponders. They always wore transponders when they went hiking in the backcountry, and each one had a locater. In case of avalanche, the one or two left had only minutes before the buried friend suffocated.
Heart racing, she stopped hiking and watched the girl.
She couldn’t find a signal. The seconds were ticking by, and she didn’t even have a signal.
Lila pushed back her sleeve and checked her watch.
A minute passed, then another.
Finally the girl found a signal and began running in the right direction.
Her watch counted off five minutes.
The girl hadn’t even located the first person yet, and if she didn’t finish digging in about thirty seconds, she’d be hunting for bodies, not friends.
Either she was going insane or she was having her first clairvoyant episode in a lifetime of not believing that shit. Whichever, she wasn’t willing to risk being the girl hunting for dead bodies.
Lila flung her backpack off and ran uphill. Both men were well ahead of her by now.
Alex could hear her running. “Glad you came to your senses.”
Without responding, she reached up with both hands and grabbed the clips of the straps holding his precious snowboard. It was worth hundreds of dollars, but she didn’t care right now. She pinched the clips, and they snapped open. In the same sweeping motion, she reached down for the lower binding and yanked it up and back, causing the board to straighten out and soar several feet down the mountain before it hit the snow.
Alex whipped around. When he saw his board sailing downhill on the perfect fresh powder, he screamed.
Lila didn’t wait for the rest of his reaction. She leapt off the men’s trail and charged up hill through the fresh snow. She sank deeper than she was used to in the virgin snow and struggled breathlessly not to trip over her wide shoes. As soon as she passed Alex, she jumped back into Josh’s tracks and sprinted uphill after him.
Josh turned to see what Alex was screaming about, and he only needed half a view of the board-less backpack and the wild-eyed roommate to size up the situation. “Holy shit!” He turned and charged uphill as fast as he could.
Even without her backpack weighing her down and with Josh’s tracks to run in, Lila wasn’t a match for him. Her roommate outdistanced her quickly. She screamed at him to come back down, but her screams were soon cut off when Alex caught up to her. He grabbed her arm and whipped her around to face him.
Their screams echoed over the mountains, and it only slowed down when Lila’s nose started to bleed.
She’d never had a nosebleed before, and the sticky liquid was a creepy black color in the shadows. They paused yelling just long enough to pinch her nose shut and tilt her head back. Once the bleeding was addressed, they resumed screaming.
The next interruption in their fight was a sickening crack. They felt a heavy thump beneath their feet, as if the whole mountain had shuddered. They stopped mid-sentence, but their horrified silence only lasted a heartbeat before their ears were filled with an unearthly rumble. The roar billowed louder and louder, and mists of snow whooshed down through the trees.
They couldn’t see the torrent of snow behind the thick trees, but they knew exactly what happened.
Alex flung his pack on the ground and ripped the zippers open.
Lila ran down to her backpack to fetch her own locator. She flicked it on while she sprinted through the snow, her shoes kicking waves of powder up around her feet. They had five minutes before Josh was dead.
* * *
The emergency room in Salt Lake City was home territory to Alex and Lila, who laid Josh on a bed and went to get their own medical supplies to patch him up. His left arm was broken, as were at least two of his ribs, and the blooming bruises threatened internal bleeding.
Alex worked on inserting the IV needle without speaking to Lila. He hadn’t said a word to her since their argument was ended by the avalanche. Instead of speaking to her, he’d quietly informed Josh of the tests they were going to run and what they were going to do about his ribs and arm.
Josh listened to Alex, but he kept glancing at Lila.
His glances felt suspicious, and when combined with Alex’s reticence, they made Lila feel even freakier than she had when she watched the avalanche scene. As soon as she could see Alex had everything under control, she slipped out of their curtained area and stood staring at the incoming patients.
She didn’t look like much of a doctor since she was wearing snow clothes and her hair was sweaty and rumpled after being in a beanie for so long. The streaks of blood from her nosebleed made her look even less presentable. Nonetheless, the nurses didn’t bother her. An attending surgeon, one of her superiors, walked past and gave her a bewildered double-take, but he didn’t say anything after seeing the wild look in her eyes.
Her eyes trailed unseeing around the emergency room. The memories of the avalanche and the visions that preceded it haunted her. They played over and over in her mind, like a broken record of horror.
Every replay made fresh chills crawl on her sweaty skin. She hugged herself and tried to think of something else, but the memories crowded tighter around her.
She was about to stop a doctor and ask for some Valium when her memory was interrupted by a fresh vision—a black haired man lying in a hospital room.
Blinking, she reminded herself there were no rooms in this part of the hospital, only areas partitioned off with curtains. The man and his room disappeared for a second, but then they were back, in the double-exposure style of the avalanche visions.
As she watched, he grunted and rubbed his stomach. Moments later, he was dying. The scene rewound itself, and her focus zoomed in until she was actually inside him, and she could see the inflamed appendix. Without being told, she knew he was on morphine after a painful surgery and hadn’t felt the appendicitis. It burst, flooding his body with bacteria and sepsis. The surgeons came and tried to clean him out, but it was too late. Somehow, she knew the date was tomorrow. Then the scene zoomed out, all without her control, and she watched him die again.
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the man died again and again in front of her anyway.
Finally, she opened her eyes and peered through the scene to the present moment in the ER.
The black haired man was sitting in front of her. He was shot through the chest, and he was surrounded by doctors, nurses, and police. One doctor was saying something about surgery to remove the bullet and repair the damaged lung. The man was barely conscious.
Without thinking, Lila strode over to them.
The police glared at her, and a uniformed man held up his hand. “You can’t come in here.”
A doctor recognized her. “Lila?” He waved away the police. “It’s okay, she’s a surgeon here.”
Lila reached out and grabbed his arm. She pulled him away from the patient.
“What happened to you?” He stared at the streaks of blood.
“Did you ask him about abdominal pain?”
“What?” He glanced up at her face, then stared at the blood again. It was smeared all the way down her front. “No, it’s pretty obvious what the problem is.”
Lila glanced at the patient to find a reason to say what she was going to say. “Look at the way he’s got his hand over his stomach.”
“The nurse dropped it there after putting in the IV.”
“No, they usually put it beside the patient, on the gurney. I think you should ask about his abdominal pain. Look where he’s holding his hand. Right over his appendix.”
He squinted at her. “Are you okay? That man’s so doped up he can’t tell his right foot from his left, much less feel any pain.”
“I think you need to check his appendix. Look at him. Look at the way he’s holding himself. Clearly he’s got some pain there.”
“His appendix is fine.”
“Just ask him,” she hissed.
The doctor decided he didn’t feel like arguing with a woman covered in blood. He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I’ll ask him.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, are you okay? What’s with the blood?”
“It’s just a nosebleed. It’s nothing.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.
Her eyes flashed at him. “Are you going to ask about the appendix or not?”
“You sure are cranky today. What happened to bright and shiny Lila?”
“Are you going to ask him or not?”
“I said I—“
The vision of the black-haired man disappeared, and she was only in the emergency room.
The doctor’s eyes narrowed. “You’re bleeding.”
“What?” She touched her face, and sure enough felt a sludge of blood coming from her nose.
As she pulled her hands away from her face, a line of blood followed her fingers. “What the fuck….”
“Nurse,” the doctor called.
She blinked, and two more people were in front of her, and they were dying. One was an elderly woman, and she was falling down her own stairs in two weeks. The other was a teenage boy with long hair, and he was slitting his wrists, also in two weeks. His blood trailed out of his body the same way her own blood poured from her nose.
She wiped feverishly, but only succeeded in smearing the blood all over her hands and arms. Somewhere behind the vision of the dying teen was a nurse with gauze. The boy’s face was clear against the blue background of her scrubs.
The nurse washed her face, but the blood continued to pour.
Lila tried to turn away from her ministrations, and as she did so, she spotted the teenaged boy sitting beside a gurney. On the gurney was a young girl, about ten. Her face was similar to the boy’s, and they might be brother and sister. She was covered in blood and glass. She looked like she’d been hit by a car….or perhaps been in the car driven by her brother.
The doctor was asking her if she could wiggle her toes.
The boy watched her feet. His eyes begged her toes to move.
Her feet were wrapped in blood-stained socks. They didn’t even twitch.
* * *
Every day she saved more people, and with each new person she rescued, her nose bled and the span of time before the death scene lengthened. It only took her a week to see deaths within five years.
She was beginning to feel like she was losing her mind, but she didn’t dare tell anyone because she’d be sent to the psych ward. Instead, she lived surrounded by visions of death. The only way to escape them was to leave the hospital and go somewhere filled only with people who would live five years or longer.
The hard part was leaving the hospital when she knew she could save people. Armed with the precise knowledge of their day of death, she could save them. She alone could rescue these people from their deaths, and that knowledge drove her to work longer hours than ever before.
Finally, Friday came and she couldn’t take any more death. She went home, relieved to know the only people at home were her roommate and her boyfriend, both of whom were healthy.
The instant she unlocked the door, she knew something was wrong. Her sight of the front door blurred, and she recognized the double-exposure ghosts coming on. Her hands shook as she opened the door, afraid to know which one was going to die.
When the door swung open, she could see both men sitting on the couch in the present time. They were smoking hooka, and the room was filled with the perfume of cloves and tobacco.
Superimposed over them, another door swung open. It was a hospital door, and behind it was a white bed surrounded by machines. She recognized the whistling puffs of a positive-pressure breathing machine.
Present-day Alex, healthy and beautiful, looked up. Smoke billowed from his perfect lips. “Lila?”
Future Alex was lying in bed, with a CPAP mask over his face, helping him breathe.
She couldn’t breathe. Her eyes started to water.
He put down the hooka mouthpiece and stood up.
The Alex in the hospital turned his head to her. He blinked weakly; it was all he could do on his dying day.
She knew the ugly close-up was next, and she squeezed her eyes shut defensively.
With her eyes closed, she couldn’t see today’s Alex, only the future one. Her view zoomed into his body, and she could see warty cancers littering his lungs. Bits broke off and entered his blood stream, and she could see his heart. His sweet, kind heart—the heart she loved so dearly these past years—the heart that stuck by her in med school and throughout their internships and the beginnings of their residencies—was clogged with ugly cancers, and she felt helpless. She could feel the tears in her eyes, but they couldn’t wash away the sight of his heart stopping.
She felt his touch on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay.” His arms were around her. “Bad day, huh? Want me to order pizza? That always makes you feel better.”
She could feel his heartbeat against her face, but in her vision it was still stopped, and it would never beat again.
Her own heart felt like it was crushed under the pain. She shoved him off and wiped her eyes. “You have to stop smoking.”
He nodded with understanding. “So it was a lung cancer surgery. What happened, the guy was too far gone and you couldn’t bring him back? Did you open him up and just have to close him back up without removing anything?”
“Alex, I’m serious. Stop smoking right now and go in tomorrow and get tested for cancer markers.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his phone. “What do you want on your pizza?” He walked back to the couch. “Bacon and pineapple or barbecue chicken?”
“Alex!”
“I just bought more Guinness if you want some.”
Josh took a long drag on the hooka, then blew smoke rings.
She shut the door and marched over to him. “I mean it, Alex. I want you to quit smoking and get tested.”
“No. Now sit down and tell me what happened.” He held out his hand to her.
She wiped her nose hopefully. It wasn’t bleeding.
* * *
Blood. Cancer. Vomit. They were everywhere. Lila could hardly focus well enough to navigate the party. Every time she saw a friend, she immediately saw their death.
Her best friend from grade school was going to die at the age of forty-eight in a car accident. Her brains, which once came up with the cleverest homework excuses, were splattered across the asphalt.
Her sister, who was hosting the party, was going to die an excruciating death when she was eighty-three. She was going to struggle with Alzheimer’s for nine years. She was going to forget the faces of her children and her husband—who was going to leave her for someone who recognized him. Eventually, she would forget to breathe.
Josh was going to die in a motorcycle accident in ten years. He was going to race a BMW at a light, and after outrunning the car, he would sweep in and out of lanes until he misjudged a truck. The truck would switch lanes just in time to knick him and send his powerless body soaring over the guard rail and into a valley.
Alex’s best friend was going to die at ninety-nine—he would be the longest living of anyone at the party, which was the saddest part of his death. He would see all his friends die, and he would spend his last days feeding ducks in a park. One day his heart would quit, and he’d sit slumped over for several hours before the police noticed he was dead.
Alex’s brother was going to die of leukemia in sixteen years. He couldn’t find a bone marrow donor in time, and his brother, who might have been a match, was already dead from lung cancer.
The mess of visions was impossible to sift through, and she was constantly bumping into someone as she forgot which reality she was living in and tried to walk along a duck-filled park lane or dodge cars on the highway.
Josh was standing in front of her, and as she looked at him, she saw his body hit the rocks over and over. He was flailing desperately, wishing he could fly, and then he was dead. She could see all his broken bones and his hemorrhaging in a vivid montage, and then it rewound and she was watching him fall again, and she couldn’t help but wish this time he’d fly.
Standing next to Josh was Alex. His dying smile was hidden by a CPAP machine. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning in his own fluids, which his esophagus wasn’t strong enough to keep in his stomach.
She grabbed his shirt. “Please. I can’t watch you die.”
He pushed her off. “I’m not dying.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “You’ve been weird all month. Are you going to snap out of it anytime soon?”
“Please. You only have five years left. I’m telling you, you’re going to die. Please stop.” Tears pricked at her eyes, like they often did these days. She was exhausted. She hadn’t slept a full night in three weeks, not since she started seeing Alex die every time he was around. The visions were so distracting she could hardly eat. She’d lost fifteen pounds so far, a dangerous rate she knew, but she couldn’t make herself eat when she was watching the people around her die.
He grabbed her wrist. He had a lot of patience, but she was wearing him down. “Lila, quit worrying about when I’m going to die. Keep it up and you won’t be around to see it anyway.”
“Just listen to me, please—“
He threw his hands in the air. “Okay, I give up. You won’t let it go. That’s enough. Do you want to move out or me?”
The sight of everyone dying in front of her made it hard to comprehend what he was doing. “What?”
“Do I have to spell it out? That’s it. We’re over. Just tell me who’s moving out.”
“Wait—“
He shoved her hands off. “You used to be this happy girl I had fun with, but now you’re this freak who won’t speak two words to me if they aren’t begging that I’ll give up smoking. I was thinking of giving it up for you, but you won’t let it go for two seconds. You won’t just be with me and be happy, and I can’t be perfect for you, so if this is how you’re going to treat my flaws, then I’m out.” He stormed away, dodging through the guests.
She tried to follow him, but she couldn’t tell which people were really here and which ones would be there in the future. She bumped into ten people, two bookcases and a couch before she gave up and stood still.
* * *
The only time the visions got out of her way was when she was saving someone. The visions didn’t go away, but they did crowd around the periphery of her sight, allowing her to see what she was doing.
That was how she did surgeries.
Now she was doing a triple bypass on an overweight man. Everything was textbook, and she was just closing up when a fresh vision popped into her head.
The man on the table popped a suture after being taken off bypass and bled out.
The vision was so close to what she was actually looking at that she jumped and grabbed a gauze pad to fight the blood spurt, but when she looked back, he wasn’t bleeding.
Still holding the gauze, she waited dutifully for the vision to replay, and she saw the suture that popped. It was the one she’d just put in. Calmly she set down the gauze pad. “I don’t like these stitches. Hand me the suture scissors.”
The intern glanced at the beautifully sewn threads. Without a word, she fetched the scissors.
While she was waiting for the scissors, visions of deaths popped in her mind. She knew how each person in the room was going to die. Most of them were going to live long lives and then linger slowly, losing loved ones and being abandoned by children who had more interesting things to do than watch old people stumble around on walkers.
It had been two months since the first episode on the mountain, one month since Alex kicked her out. She’d been living in the on-call room—if you could call it living, since she hardly slept or ate and spent all her time trying to hold back death. Deep circles underlined her eyes, and she moved with the stiffness of a zombie.
She hadn’t lost a single patient in two months—a good reward for the exhaustion, she thought.
Carefully Lila snipped away the sutures she’d just sewn. The incision was open again, and she set down the scissors and picked up her needle holders. She began resewing the cut. She took more time than usual to make sure she got each suture perfectly.
The line of sutures was gorgeous—possibly the best she’d ever done. Before she was finished, however, another vision popped up.
It took all her energy to suppress the shivers. She couldn’t take another sight of death.
Her patient was dying again. This time he suffered a stroke from being on bypass too long. All she had to do was tell someone to administer heparin, and he would live.
In all this time, she hadn’t considered why the visions started. She knew why. Even that first one on the mountain, she knew. She wanted them. She invited them. It was her greatest wish to know how everything ended.
Her whole life revolved around the likely ending of everything she did. Each time she went snowboarding, she wondered if today she would tear her ACL and never ride at the same level again. She figured if all went well, she could ride until she was forty, maybe fifty if she was really dedicated, but not until sixty. When she was eighty, it would definitely be over.
She never smoked because she wanted to ride when she was forty-five.
When her birthday came, she didn’t calculate how many years she’d been alive, but instead how many she had left in her riding life.
It didn’t stop with snowboarding. When she saw her family, she worried how much longer they could eat fried chicken and hamburgers until they died of coronary disease. When she made a new friend, she wondered how long it would last before they’d piss each other off and never make up.
When she was with Alex, she wondered every day when their relationship would end, starting from the beginning. The first date ended with her wondering if that was it. After two months, she felt sure it would end when they graduated med school. When they were interns at the University of Utah’s hospital, she knew it would end when they moved to different hospitals for their residencies. Three months ago, despite the fact they’d been together six years, she was still trying to guess when it would end. Two months ago, she had her answer: he was going to die in five years.
Heparin. She needed to tell the nurse to administer heparin or this man would die.
She glanced up at the intern across from her. After catching his eye, she looked back down and continued suturing. “Can I ask you something off subject?”
His eyebrows twitched curiously. “Sure, doctor.”
“Why do you want to be a doctor?”
“Save lives.”
“Yeah, me too.” The vision of the blood clot grew more and more opaque in her mind. She was running out of time to save this man.
Would the visions stop if she let him die? No one would know. No other surgeon could know the exact moment a blood clot would form and cause a stroke. Maybe if she just let this man die, it would all end.
“What do you think this man will do after he leaves the hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
The seconds were counting down. A few more sutures and she could take him off bypass, but it would be too late.
The sight of the blood clot was so dark she could hardly see her own sutures. All around the clot, she could see her companions dying.
“He’s been on bypass too long. Give him some heparin.”
The intern turned and obeyed.
The vision of the blood clot disappeared, and this time she could see her patient dying of a heart attack just after he left the hospital.
Lila’s hands quivered. The shivers were beyond her control.
The intern finished with the heparin and turned back to watch. He saw Lila’s hands. “Doctor?”
She inhaled deeply and settled her hands. “Sorry. Felt a sneeze coming on, but I’m better now. Would you like to close?”
The intern’s eyes widened in awe. “Yes.”
She set down her tools and wrapped her gloved hands in a sterile towel.
The patient was lying in bed with his wife when his chest began to hurt. Minutes later, his wife was screaming and crying and trying to dial 911, but it was too late.
Lila’s eyes were pointed in the direction of the intern, but she couldn’t see her anymore. The visions were so heavy she could feel them rubbing against her like a crowd at a rock concert. She felt trapped and claustrophobic, and the noise that blared into her head felt like a pillow smothering her. The tune was familiar: it was the same music she’d followed her whole life, but she didn’t think she could listen to another minute of it.
The man was going to die, and there was nothing she could do about it. There was nothing she even wanted to do about it.
* * *
“Alex, wait.” The moonlight was giving way to the cheery sunrise, but for once Lila didn’t count the sight of the sun as the beginning of the end.
The snow stopped crunching under his snowshoes. He turned and took a long drag on his cigarette. When he exhaled, the pink dawn light danced on the smoke cloud. “What?”
They were standing on the side of a mountain near Mt. Hood, Oregon. Fresh snow had dumped down in the night, and they were on their way to ride backcountry. They were crossing a clearing between two patches of trees, and piled up before them were craggy, snow covered mountains.
“Look. Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Course they are. They’re mountains.” A column of smoke billowed from his lips.
“I know, I just wanted to share it with you for a minute.”
“They’re gorgeous. They’re mountains. They’re romantic, blah blah blah. First tracks—come on, let’s go.” He turned and waved his hand for her to follow. He hiked a couple more paces, but when he didn’t hear her following, he stopped and turned again. “You know, my boss asked me yesterday if you’d like to apply for their heart surgeon position. He said he likes my work, and I told him you’re the better surgeon.”
“I told you, I quit.”
He grinned sardonically. “To be a riding instructor?”
“And what better place than Mt. Hood? It’s open year-round.”
“You’re a heart surgeon. You’re good. You should do that.”
“I’m a rider first. I love it. I want to spend my days outside with my snow and my mountains, not in a surgery room.”
“You save lives. People die without working hearts.”
“People can’t live without mountains. I’m tired of fighting death; I want to help people live.”
He stared at her a moment. “What are you going to do in twenty years when your body wears out? Surgery is a lifelong career.”
“Alex, stop it. I’m not worrying about that anymore. I’m happy, and you know it.”
It was hard to argue with her; since she quit surgery last year, she’d never been happier. Shaking his head, he turned and continued hiking. He crossed into the trees and began weaving through them as he made his way toward the spot they wanted to ride.
After she had her fill of the sun rising over her beloved mountains, she began trudging in Alex’s tracks.
The snow crunched peacefully for two steps, then something snapped.
Before she could do anything sensible, the snow in the clearing shifted beneath her. Cracks broke the surface of the snow, then deep fissures widened as the snow broke into heavy boulders of molten snow.
She tried to run, but she was sucked into the swirling snow before she even had time to yell.
The last thing she saw was her hands disappearing into roiling pink snow. Her body was sucked into a blackness deeper than a morning without a moon. Boulders of snow crashed into her, and she was tumbling end over end until she had no idea which way was out.
She tried to scream, but her lungs filled with thick powder, and though she tried to cough it back out, the snow gripped her insides and clung to her. The powder she loved wrapped around her like a swirling cocoon.
In her fear, she didn’t feel the boulder crack her skull. She sank from cold blackness into an unfeeling sleep.
The sunrise was over before Alex found her.
About the Author
Nara is a veterinary student with a compulsion to make things up and write them down. She was the editor of the 2009 edition of Hermes, the literary journal of the University of Sydney. She has contributed to Hermes, The Bull, and Honi Soit, which are all published by the University of Sydney. She’s also appeared several times in the University of Michigan’s Animal Diversity Web, and Mesa State College’s Literary Review.
©2009 Nara Dakota
