The River

The woods that were once full of emerald-green life were now seemingly dead and covered in a heavy layer of snow. Not a single leaf remained untouched. The moss, the ferns, every little rock had disappeared underneath the frozen precipitation. There was no sign of any animal, any life hidden from the winter’s wrath. 

I stood staring out at those woods, the only thing separating me from them a narrow river that ran perhaps infinitely on either side of me. Despite the cold, all I wore was a thrifted cardigan and stolen jeans that sagged around my hips. I had nothing else, for he had taken it all. I shivered at the thought of crossing the river, hoping it was shallow and cold enough to have frozen over. I had never learned to swim, and the thought of falling in, sucked under the sheet of ice and drowning preoccupied my mind like some long-forgotten mantra: you’ll die, you’ll die, you’ll die. 

“Alice! Alice, where are you?” His voice rang out behind me and suddenly, the river was no longer threatening. 

Jasper had caught me in his Venus Fly Trap-arms once before, back in the summer when the river was still flowing and I was too afraid to cross. Fences surrounded every other part of his country-side property, and I had quickly learned that I was never going to be agile enough to jump them. 

“Alice, come back.” He was closer now, and sounded more desperate. The trees shaked from his voice or the wind. I couldn’t tell, and I was too afraid to find out.

Images of his china hutch flooded my mind. It was his mother’s before she died. The entire property was. If only she knew what happened here, in her house, all of the miserable things he had done to me. I had never met her, but from the stories Jasper had told me, she was a kind woman, always taking in hitchhikers and stray pets abandoned by the city folk. Sometimes I wondered if her death was the reason he’d turned so mean. I reached up to my forehead and pulled a piece of glass from my skin. The snow beneath me was stained with blood, and I realized he’d found me so quickly from my blood trail. Removing my cardigan, I ripped the arm off and pressed it to my wound, hoping it would stop the blood from dripping to the ground.

I turned around and was greeted by his silhouette, undoubtedly getting closer to where I stood, shaking from the cold. 

It was always the same thing: him throwing me into a wall or the floor, or this time, the cabinet full of his mother’s antique china. And when he saw I’d broken most of the collection in my fall, he flew into a blind rage. His words still echoed in my head. I’ll kill you, Alice. I’ll kill you. He had only been so violent once before, the only other time I’d tried to run. He tried to drown me in the river when he’d found me, but the current had swept me out of his reach before he could. 

“There you are. Baby, I’m sorry. What are you doing out here, it’s cold,” his outline shouted. His voice was soft, as it had been when I first met him, but I knew better than to trust it. He’d used that voice too many times to keep me here, only to attack me the next time he didn’t get his way. He was still some distance away, but he had seen me. I had some time before he’d reach me, and in that time, I needed to put as much distance between him and myself as possible. It was the only way someone else would find me before he did.

Everything came back to me, like some sort of sick mirage, images of him dancing in the snow around me. He was perfect when I met him, a man infatuated with me at Good Times Bar, the place I’d ended up at nearly every night after my shift at the nursing home. One of my clients had died, I’d later tell him, and returning to work as though nothing had happened every day had taken a toll on my mind. No one else seemed to care. But he did, ensuring me nothing could have been done to save her. His mother had died the same way: stage 4 breast cancer that lay undiscovered in her body until after her death. The world worked in mysterious ways, taking the people we loved from us, leaving us with holes that couldn’t be filled. 

Shortly after that, I’d moved in with him. And then he had changed. The man I’d met was kind, soft-spoken and empathetic, but the man I knew was cruel, aggressive and ill-tempered. He threw me into a wall, once, and refused to let me seek treatment for the concussion he had given me. I wanted to leave, but never did. I excused his behaviors as some sort of twisted coping mechanism, trying to fight the reality that his mother was dead. Perhaps I’d thought he would go back to the person I’d met those years ago. But now I know he’ll never change. It was a facade, nothing more than a trick to make me feel safe around him. Once he knew I’d never leave, he had morphed into the person he truly was, like a caterpillar turning into some poisonous butterfly. 

If he caught me, I’d die. There was no other choice. I looked forward towards the river. Snow covered its frozen surface, making it impossible to tell whether the ice was thick enough to cross. But I didn’t have time to contemplate. It’s what I had to do. My survival depended on it. Slowly, I stepped onto the river’s surface, hoping it would support my weight. But I didn’t care what happened next. Anything would be better than his embrace.