"Windswept" by Alexa Barstow
If you were to see me, even though you cannot, you would think I’m fifteen. I cannot remember being any younger, and I will never grow any older. I have been fifteen for centuries. Centuries, time I do not measure. For what is time to me if I am forever fifteen?
I am, first and foremost, a traveler—of time and of the world. I have seen nations expand, fought in countless battles, and witnessed the worst of humankind. I’ve stepped foot on every continent. I’ve seen every city, every small town, every hamlet in existence. And I’ve watched as they’ve fallen like leaves on a tree, unable to withstand the wind.
I am that wind.
If you were to see me, I would appear white as snow and cold as the harshest winter. You would see something like spilled ink within my veins, blood that never moves. You would see the darkness, the black, of a broken heart, the same color as my hair and eyes, which appear as if my pupils have expanded until they cover the whites and irises. I smell of smoke and blood, and though no one has ever been able to say they’ve seen me, they associate this scent, my scent, with fast-approaching death.
The truth is, though, humans know nothing of death. They certainly pretend to. Their awareness of its inevitability makes them believe they understand it, but how can they understand something they have never been able to live through? They preach about the endless peace of the other side, of sweet and soothing darkness. Death is none of those things.
Death is a boy, immortalized at fifteen, who smells of smoke and blood. A boy with veins of ink, and with eyes dark as a starless sky. Humans know nothing of death, because for all of their ramblings, they never mention that death is handsome.
On the nineteenth day of January, I step into a hospital. I think, not for the first time, about what a strange place a hospital is. On the third floor, a sick woman, who had already begun planning her funeral, has just been informed she is cancer-free, and is crying for joy with her husband and children. On the seventh floor, a middle-aged man has just woken from a coma, and his family is rushing to get to him as soon as possible, flying through traffic lights as if the accident that split their family apart can now be left in the rearview mirror.
And on the sixth floor, there is a woman waiting for me, though she does not know it yet.
I step into the nearby open elevator, just before the doors slide shut. The other occupants of the elevator cannot see me, but they shiver at my presence, wrapping their coats closer around them. My wind chills them, though they do not know to call it that. I stare down at my bare feet, fascinated by the yellow carpet they’ve installed on the elevator floor. It is bright enough to hurt my eyes, bright enough to nearly make me wince at their desperation to force light into such a dark building.
I get off on the sixth floor, walking silently down the corridor. There’s a family gathered in the room closest to the elevator. As I make my way down the hall, I almost want to pause for a moment and listen to their laughter. I want to etch it into my memory. But room 633 is my destination, and the door is already open for me. I fight the urge to linger at the threshold, forcing myself to stride to the side of the bed, trying to straighten up as I prepare for the task ahead.
There is only one person in the room. A woman, young and pale and withered with sickness. Her cheeks have hollowed into deep oceans of sadness in the weeks she’s been here. Pity pulls at me as I look at her. I know she must be expecting what is to come, but I also know that will not make it any easier on her or her husband, who I know has run downstairs to grab coffee.
I glance toward the door, almost hoping her husband will reappear and come hold her hand as her world shatters. Alone with the sick woman, I reach out for a moment, letting my fingers brush hers. She shivers and shoves her hands beneath her thin hospital blanket.
Slowly, I reach my hands out, laying my palms down on the woman’s pregnant belly. The baby beneath her skin seems to come awake, moving more than it has in weeks. The woman had been still before, lingering at the edge of sleep, but she is not now. Her eyes fly open, for where my hands touch, where they make her baby move, there is indescribable pain. Her mouth opens in a scream, her hands grabbing at her abdomen, going right through my grasp.
I hold still, letting my endless cold seep through her. The child within her goes still, its heart fading out into a silence that sticks to me like syrup. I pull my hands away from the mother, sighing as she continues to scream. I leave out the window, just before the nurses come streaming in.
Next, I go to a school. This one, I know, will make the news. There is a man in the school. A man who should not be there. A man with a gun. The teachers and children run from him, shrieking for help, but if I have learned anything over the ages, it’s that there’s nothing more dangerous than an aching soul and a gun.
I find who I’m looking for easily. She is six years old, curled up on the ground, blood pouring from her stomach like water from a tap. She is six years old, just old enough to read and write. Just old enough to adore her baby brother at home, to recognize the scent of her father (coffee and cologne) when he hugs her, and the sound of her mother’s voice lulling her to sleep. She is six years old, and has barely lived, and yet her time is up.
She cannot see me, but she feels my chill. I wrap my arms around her in a hug, my eyes looking into hers as we lie side by side on the tiled linoleum. She does not know it, but I am making sure she does not die alone.
She is six years old, and she deserves one last hug.
Her breath stutters out, and I am gone once again.
I travel very far for the next one. It is night where I arrive next, and it is raining. The roads are as slick as the girl’s blood on the school floor and it makes the red sedan coming down the street seem as if it’s flying. I watch its headlights grow closer, cutting through the darkness like shooting stars across a black canvas. The car doesn’t slow down, not until it swings off the road and runs into a nearby tree, the metal folding up on itself like origami.
I touch my hands to all four of the passengers’ chests, and each one takes a final breath. They are all teenagers. They would have graduated next year. The one in the front is the only one who does not smell like alcohol, but sobriety could not save him, nor his passengers, from the slick roads or the darkness ahead. In the minds of most people, the driver deserves to live for not drinking and driving, for being smart enough not to. But death doesn’t discriminate between the stupid and the smart.
On my next stop, the person I am visiting is very alone. He is an old man, sitting in a rocking chair in his living room, the cup of tea beside him gone cold. He is looking at a photo album, filled with pictures of his daughter and son and their daughters and sons. They have not come to see him for over two years, and he attributes the pain in his chest to the lonesomeness of missing them.
I gaze at the pictures for a while, trying to commit them to memory as tears roll down the man’s wrinkled face. I may not be alive, but I can feel some of the worst parts of being alive. I certainly feel this man’s lonesomeness.
Especially when I reach my hand out, clenching it around the old man’s heart until the photo album drops to the floor and he falls back in his chair, the life gone from his eyes.
My days go on like this. A dark alleyway, a junkie shaking, surrounded by needles. A blazing fire, twin boys trapped inside their bedroom, screaming for help ‘til smoke fills their lungs. Atop a mountain, a woman who has been lost for days, the water in her bottle finally run out.
All the same. An icy touch, a final breath, and then stillness. I feel great remorse pull at me each time, sadness clawing at me with its shadowy touch. But it is not until February twenty-third of that same year that I feel something different, something more.
At nine o’clock, I arrive in London. I’m at a flat on the top floor of the building, and only one person is home. And strangely enough, I feel she is waiting for me.
She is perched on her bedroom windowsill when I arrive. The window is wide open, her feet hanging down, swinging carelessly above the traffic honking far below. It is late, but neither her nor the city is sleeping. Her fingertips curl gently around the windowsill, as if she’s ready to push herself forward, to lift herself out of the window and fly.
The truth is, though, she does not plan to fly. She plans to fall.
She shivers as I come closer, as everyone does. I still cannot see her face, but I can feel her heart. Its pulse beats in my ears, and I’m caught off guard by the lack of fear in it. The human body tends to sense when I’m coming, and when it does, it fills with some fear, even in those who wish for my presence. This girl, though…she is filled with something less like resignation and more like determination.
I pause a foot away from her. She turns to look over her shoulder.
She is fifteen, but unlike me, she can remember being other ages, other times. She can remember being four, wiping a buttercup beneath her late mother’s chin. She can remember being eight, writing wishes in the sand and watching them get stolen by the tide. She can remember an hour before, when her father struck her across the face, creating the hurricane-purple bruise smeared across her cheek.
She smells like freshly cut roses. Her hair is amber honey, dripping down to her waist. Her eyes are dark mahogany, her facial features soft, as in sleep. Looking at her, I can think only of a porcelain doll.
I’m so caught up in this thought that I almost stumble back when she speaks. “Have you come to help me down?” she asks simply. When I don’t answer, she gestures to the open window and at the busy street ten flights below.
“You can see me,” I say. I want to say more, but the words seem to have burned up in my throat.
“Of course. I’ve seen you before, though. I dreamt of you.”
We do not speak anymore that night. Apart from her room, the flat is quiet and empty. There are no photo frames on the walls, no personal belongings scattered on tabletops or shelves. It even smells empty; the only scent that hovers in the air is the one of roses that seems to cling to her skin. The whole time I’m in the empty flat, she stays still, until the moment her father comes home, yelling for her to shut the window and stop letting the heat out. She clambers back into her room, her back to me as she pulls the sash down. I disappear before she can turn around again.
But I find myself back the next night, prepared to talk.
She’s on the windowsill again, and she smiles when she sees me. “Have you come to help me down?”
I don’t reply. Her warmth stretches over the space between us, proof that she is vividly human, though she feels like more when I look at her. She is aglow in the city light, a developing memory frozen in time. Looking at her, I only know she is human from her smudged lip gloss, from the way she has bitten her nails (but only her thumbs), from her beating heart.
“My name is Ainsley,” she says, as if she knew I wanted to ask. “Do you have a name?”
Again, I come closer but do not speak a word.
“I guessed as much, but it would be rude to not at least ask,” she says in answer to my silence, a smile on her lips. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?”
I’m close enough to see the garden she has drawn onto the top of her hand in pen. My gaze rises from her hand to her eyes. I answer her question slowly, words coming to me at last. “I thought so, but I’m not quite sure.”
“I do hope you are. I’m not up on this windowsill for nothing.”
She is not the first I’ve known to want to die. I know she will not be the last. Yet, she is the only one who waits at the window of death and seems to have wings. “I know why you’re up here, for I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. But allow me to ask, why do you wish to die?”
She looks out at the city, smiling even wider. “Because Death seems so lovely.” I come back every night after that. The conversations between us ebb and flow, though I usually let her speak. I learn little things first; I come to know that she sings in her school’s choir, that her favorite color is yellow, that she collects vinyl records and seashells. When she tells me all of this, she already speaks as if everything she knows is a memory.
On the first Tuesday after we meet, her feet aren’t hanging out the window when I arrive. Instead she has her knees propped up on the windowsill, head tilted to face the inside of the room instead of the streets below. “I have a name for you,” she says as I appear in the hallway.
I approach her carefully, sitting down across from her on the sill. “There is no reason for me to have a name. There is no one for me to answer to.”
“Everyone deserves a name.”
“What is mine to be?”
“Vito,” she grins, eyes aglow. “I’d like to call you Vito.”
On Thursday, I tell her about the world as it was before. “It used to be quieter. Things used to be smaller,” I say, keenly aware of how close her hand rests to mine on the windowsill. “I remember there used to be so many trees.”
She shifts, her hand moving closer to mine. “Do you think it will be like that again, in the future?”
“Things are always changing. The trees could grow back.”
“Things could be different?”
“Things could be different.”
On Sunday, her lip is split. Her face is the surface of a pond, holding still but rippling, if you look close enough to see it. Her feet are hanging out the window. “How many people have you met?” she asks.
“I have seen millions, but met only one.”
“You’ve been there for all those people, at the end, yet they’ve never known you.” She shakes her head. “Do you ever get lonely?”
“All the time,” I admit. She stays silent, so I add, “More so since I met you.” No blush can creep into my cheeks, but I glance away from her, scared for a moment to meet her gaze.
“I’ve made you lonelier?”
“You have made me remember the loneliness is there.”
On Wednesday, she’s crying. There’s a photo frame on the floor, the first I’ve seen in the flat at all. The glass is shattered. On the floor beside it, a picture has been torn into pieces. I can just make out the blonde hair of a little girl, the smile of an older woman with brown eyes. All around us, the rest of the room is in shambles. Her belongings have been wiped onto the ground, records ripped off the wall and snapped in two. I see broken pieces of seashells near the edge of the bed.
I lift myself onto the windowsill. For a moment, I nearly reach out, my hand hovering in the air between us. I wish to wipe her tears away, to hold her close, if only for a minute. But my touch can bring only pain, and we both know it.
“I think it’s time for you to help me down,” she says after a few minutes of silent crying. She keeps her eyes on her lap as she speaks, the tears dripping down onto her floral nightgown.
“I don’t want to.”
She looks up, eyes flashing. “Why not?”
“Because you have so much to live for.” She opens her mouth, as if to retort, but I beat her to it. “Have you ever seen beyond this city? Things are quieter in other places, almost as quiet as the world used to be. There are so many things you have left to see. I–I want you to see the trees.” The words come out in a rush, and I find myself stuttering over the last few.
She pauses, watching me carefully. “Not tonight. We won’t go down tonight.”
It is the best that I can hope for.
A week later, we sit in silence on the windowsill. We are nearly touching, but every time she moves closer to me, I move farther away. On this night, I cannot read her. She has disappeared in front of me. I can’t even read her in her heartbeats.
“No one’s ever listened to me like you do, you know,” she says at last, voice hushed. “No one’s ever heard me.”
I smile. “You are the only person to have ever seen me, to give me a name.”
She turns to face me then. “Do you love me, Vito?”
The question stops me. I do not measure time, but I have had lots of it. Time to watch, to see, to hear. Time to think. I have always been what I have been; I have always been the shadow people fear most. Death is a promise, and love is too, but neither were ever to be mine personally. To me, love and life had been one in the same, two things I could see but never hold, never know. Yet looking at Ainsley, with her matted honey hair and dark eyes and soft face, looking at her and hearing her heartbeat wild in her chest, I think yes. Yes, I love her.
“I have never known love myself, but I understand it better with you,” I say at last.
She smiles sadly, “Then help me down.”
She is a flame in the night. If I help her, if I give her what she wants, my wind will blow her out. She deserves more than this window, more than this city, more than me. I want her to know a real love, one that can touch her. I want her to know something more.
“I know what you’re thinking.” She shakes her head. “You’re thinking something deep, about a future I don’t know yet. You’re wiser than I am. But I know what I want. I want to go, but I just…I need you to come with me. I don’t want to jump alone.”
She pushes herself to the edge of the sill. I know what an end looks like. I was brought here for a reason.
I cannot save her life.
I swing my feet out into the open air. She scooches closer to me, her hand moving so her fingers are hovering just above mine. When I look at her, I can see a quieter, softer world. When she looks at me, it is as if she sees some kind of hero.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whisper to her, my voice one with the wind.
She smiles. “I’m not. I never was.”
We leap, hand in hand. I can feel her heart flutter; she is finally flying. The world is hers, stretched out before her, my hand clutched in hers. She can taste life at last, and oh, how sweet it is.
The ground rises up to meet us. We were flying, and now we’re crashing, and I’m feeling more remorse than I’ve ever known. On the ground, Ainsley lies still, a porcelain doll fallen to pieces.
I lean over her. She looks at me through partially closed eyes, the pain begging her to go to sleep. I lean down, breathing in her scent of roses, and press my lips to hers in a final goodbye.
You’d never expect a kiss from death to be so warm.
We are, first and foremost, travelers. We have stepped foot on every continent. We have seen every city, every small town, every hamlet in existence. We have watched as they’ve fallen like leaves on a tree that cannot withstand the wind.
We are that wind.
When we come, hand in hand, there is the smell of smoke and blood. But when we leave, there is almost the faint aroma of roses.
Alexa Barstow is a senior at Oceanside High School in Rockland, Maine. For a year, they drove three hours every Tuesday to Portland to participate as a fellow in the Young Emerging Authors program at The Telling Room. Outside of Young Emerging Authors, Alexa was awarded the 2019 Maine Literary Award for Youth Fiction, has been published in three other Telling Room publications, and is currently an editor on Skidompha Library’s literary magazine, Epoch, while also running Psyche, the literary magazine at their school. After high school, they hope to attend college somewhere on the east coast and study political science and history; it is their goal to spend their life fighting for positive change and sharing stories, both fictional and those based in the “real” world.