I suck in a deep breath of the ice-cold air because I think I need it, then I regret because it freezes my throat and all that is within. The words tumble down my trachea, down my spinal cord and into the collagen-condensed bones of my phalanges. Then I jerk to lift my head up, because my synapses are no longer functioning and I am robotising. I see her in the distance, swirling like a snowflake.

 

Please, help, I want to beg. But no sound comes out. My voice has already slipped away as quickly as your white breath in winter... All I can depend on is my eyes, wide and pleading; and my body, quivering ever so violently in the frigid air.

 

But she is far away and cannot see me properly. She is still slipping away as quickly as the letters are draining out of my phalanges; yes, my distal and proximal phalanges. Now a biting winter in my face is to her a sun-kissed summer! She swings her lissome body in the air as she makes a Figure 8 on those skates, laughing, come join me! come join me!

 

8, a beautiful number of infinite possibilities. She springs into the air like a mad woman and a graceful ballerina all at once. Meanwhile I am stuck somewhere at the starting line, hopping stupidly between 1 and 0 like a broken record. I give up. Forget about telling her. I must get back to the house. My every nerve is set alight with the fiery burn of ice. I can feel them screaming. Just a perpetual, wordless, shrill, shriek that pierces through my intestines like a knife.

 

When I reach the house, a rush of warmth wraps around my battered arms and legs. Throwing off my facemask, I draw in a deep breath of the life-giving, sane air. The screams of my nerves die down into a muffled roar.

 

“Mom? Dad? Where is everyone?”

 

Then I see the pile of bodies on the floor, and a million chills blast through me like the hysterical polar vortex again. To open my mouth is to poison myself. Too late. Every bodily sense that had previously gone into overdrive now succumbs to my fate. I am not a breath or whisper, I am a scream. I am not a being. I am a piece of skin metallising, I am a piece of Siri cloning.

 

My body crashes to the floor noiselessly. The words unspool themselves into idealess digits. I am just a number.

 

CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING FROM INDOOR HEATING: DEATH TOLL FROM TEXAS’ WINTER STORM RISES TO 210