Snapshots
Naomi Krupitsky Wernham    4th period
1.
The girl was dead. She had been dead for about an hour. Her hair was dark and fanned around her head. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was stretched in a horrified grimace. She was dead, and she wasn’t moving. She was skinny and wearing a t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt was green and thin, and her arms looked like pale toothpicks, splayed across the still-warm asphalt.
The boy was sitting on a bench near the girl. He was looking at her closed eyes. He was crying. His breath hiccupped and shook, and tears rolled down his face in time with his crying. Sometimes his tears paused on their journey, caught up by the miniscule crannies in his skin. Dark spots littered his lap from where his tears had dropped, silently.
The boy was wringing his hands as he cried. They swooped over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under over under in a frenzied dance that kept time with the tears and the hiccupping sobbing noises. His hands were pale and soft, but the nails were brittle and cracked and his cuticles were destroyed – small scabs punctuated the corners of his nails and the nails themselves were oblong nubs, mutilated by anxious tooth marks.
The girl was dead, and the boy was sitting on a bench nearby, watching her.
The sun was low in the sky. It hugged the horizon, one edge threatening to dip below. The wavering autumn light danced through trees, turning yelloworangered leaves slightly different shades of mottled fall technicolor.
Under the relentlessly shifting shadow of one of those yelloworangered trees, the girl lay, dead, and the boy sat on a bench, looking at her through tear-glazed eyes and a puffy face.  Her skin seemed to darken in the growing shadow and the boy strained through dampsquinting eyes, peering into the evening as the nuances and details of her face were blurred by darkness. She was rendered anonymous and the boy sobbed incrementally louder for every one of her features hidden by the coming night.
A deep red trickle was winding its way from her head down through asphalt irregularities; eventually, it met with the skin of her right arm and pooled there, staining the edge of her t-shirt as the blood seeped into the green cotton threads.
She was dead and the boy saw her and while he watched the blood pooling and the dusk erasing her features he wrung his hands rhythmically and tears squeezed themselves out of his swollentired eyes. The air was rusty with early fall and the only sound, now that the birds had been scared off, came from the boy’s choked, sniffling misery.
The axe between them glistened in the setting sun.

2.
The girl was dancing. She had been dancing for hours. Her hair was dark and fanned around her head. Her eyes were half-open and her mouth slack; her toothpick arms swung as the music thundered; there was a faint sweat-stain forming on her back as her shirt glued itself to her sticky skin.
       The boy stared at the girl with brown eyes that were round and soft around the edges. He kept one foot placed slightly in front of the other, as if he were preparing to approach her, and every so often his jaw clenched and a tremor went through his otherwise still body as if he couldn’t force himself to move from the spot onto which he appeared to be frozen.
       The girls stared and the boy watched and her shirt fluttered with frantic breathing and the walls seemed to slide inward, closing in on the boy and the girl and the suffocating, dusty light.
       The boy saw the girl. He turned and began to swim through a sea of throbbing bodies, winding around the interlocked limbs of couples and the free-flying hands and feet of those for whom dancing was a solitary activity. Fingers and elbows landed across his face, shoulders, chest, arms, as he shuffled in the girl’s direction. Someone stumbled, laughing, and instinctually grabbed at the boy’s shirt. Strobe lights flashed across his face, momentarily illuminating them both and then, just as suddenly, leaving them in darkness that was only penetrated by the music’s baseline and the shuffling of feet.
       The boy kept walking.
The room was dark save for the sporadic flashing of strobe lights that wavered over the undulating crowd. It was full-packed and suffocatingly hot and the throngs of people moved in time to the music that pounded so loudly it bypassed their ears and went soul-deep, lightning quick in jolts through their heads to the vibrating floor. The people moved as if they were one entity, swaying and dipping, swooping and grinding in the ecstatic chaos of released energy.
The boy kept scanning the dance floor, winding slowly but surely towards the girl, who was dancing. He was an ant, distracted by nothing, drawn solely by the scented trail left for him.
       A disco ball on the ceiling turned lazily and spit multicolored drops of light onto the people below. Those who had their eyes open could see, in the half-seconds when strobes flashed, the sweat drops flying, mingling in the already humid air, and the hair swooshing in convoluted orbits around the heads of people who had abandoned themselves to beat and rhythm, oblivious.
       The girl was looking at the boy. Her eyes caught his as he scanned the crowd. The girl had been dancing, limbs and hair flying, but she saw the boy, and she stopped.
       The people were moving and the music was playing and the air was palpably sot and sticky and the girl was looking at the boy as he crossed the dance floor and her mouth was open and her eyes were wide and her once-swinging arms lay limply at her sides and her feet began to shuffle robotically toward the boy.
3.

       The girl was staring into the mirror. She had been staring for as long as the boy had been watching her – five minutes, maybe ten. Maybe more.  She was standing and gripping the edges of the sink with both hands and staring into the mirror with piercing eyes the color of celery and a thin cotton shirt that matched them and the boy was standing a few paces behind her, watching silently.
       The girl wasn’t blinking. Her eyes only flickered slightly, scanning her reflection, and her mouth twitched periodically, and her nostrils flared with heavy breathing, but her eyes remained open and her gaze steady, bright celery green and steady.
       Each of her hands held an edge of the sink in an iron grip. Her knuckles were white with the pressure of skin against porcelain and her fingernail beds were tomato-red at the base and occasionally she shifted her fingers, changed her grip slightly to a new, equally vice-like grip on the dirty white edge.
       She drew deep, fast, ragged breaths that caused the green cotton t-shirt to rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, frenziedly rising and falling as she sucked air into her panicked lungs and the boy stood watching.
       A jagged crack ran down the mirror, mildew climbing out of its edges and traversing the reflection of the girl’s collarbone. The sink had once been white, but was covered in streaks of dirt and grime.  The walls, too, had been white once, although brownish-yellow water stains had since leaked from an unidentifiable source and spread in abstract, grotesque shapes down the peeling white paint. Worn and split linoleum covered most of the floor. It had been ripped away from the walls in places to reveal years’ worth of accumulated dust and partially decomposed bugs.  Light streamed through a window that was clouded with dirt and age and illuminated suspended particles of dust, hovering in the musty air. The light was reflected in the mirror and multiplied by the mirror’s pockmarked irregularities into a million little dots of shimmering light on the weathered walls.
       The boy stared at the girl with brown eyes that were round and soft around the edges. He kept one foot placed slightly in front of the other, as if he were preparing to approach her, and every so often his jaw clenched and a tremor went through his otherwise still body as if he couldn’t force himself to move from the spot onto which he appeared to be frozen.
       The girls stared and the boy watched and her shirt fluttered with frantic breathing and the walls seemed to slide inward, closing in on the boy and the girl and the suffocating, dusty light.
       The sun was hanging in the sky as the limbo between afternoon and evening grew heavy. The light coming in the window of the room where the girl was staring and the boy was watching would soon be thicker, weighted with the day’s imminent end.
       Outside the room, light glistened and shined on the blade of a recently sharpened axe.