“Were you dreaming?”
Corin blinked the last of her tears and scanned the room, her surroundings turning clearer. A hand-carved oak table sat in the corner, the surface completely covered with sketch paper full of drawings and illegible scribbles. A wobbly stool much too tall for the table stood in front, and on top of the seat, a worn-out pillow sat deflated from overuse. She vaguely remembered the soreness of a hunched back and late nights. She did not know where those memories came from, only that they were there.
In the opposite corner, a tall mirror perched against the wall. Corin sat up and gawked at the glass, unable to discern the stranger in the mirror. There were still familiar qualities she recognized: her broad shoulders and dark skin, her thick black hair, which looked like tumbleweed from too much time spent in bed. But other things had disappeared: scars that once nicked her cheeks, broken bones beneath a crooked nose. A gaping wound in her abdomen that should have lost too much blood for her to survive.
She looked clean. More alarmingly, she felt lighter. Like whatever weight she had carried disappeared, a discarded bag of rocks that no longer would have dragged her to the bottom of the ocean if she fell.
Corin wasn’t drowning anymore.
Her trembling hand cupped Elly’s face. She feared her palm would go through her sister like a ghost. “Is this real?” she whispered.
Elly swatted Corin’s hand away. Even their fingers brushing sent a warm jolt through Corin. “You’re being weird—”
Corin crushed her sister into an embrace. She hugged Elly so tight that even if the girl were a dream, she would never escape from Corin’s arms. But Elly wasn’t a figment of imagination. Her heart beat loudly against her chest, and she yelled protests in Corin’s ear. Their limbs wrestled as she wriggled her way out of Corin’s arms and ran out the door.
“Ma!” she shouted. “Corin’s acting strange!”
Corin froze in place. Before she determined if she’d heard Elly correctly, their mother already stood at the door. Her black hair was tied neatly in a bun, a stray strand curled over her earlobe. Faded paint peppered over her apron like raindrops, while new stains of tomato paste streaked across the lower half, like she’d wiped the cloth absentmindedly. Corin remembered their mother using the same apron for painting and cooking, the way that habit created a chaos of colors splattered across her abdomen. That tiny detail, somehow, confirmed she was real. It was more solid proof than her own flesh.
“What’s wrong, Corin?” Her voice was rich and warm like toffee. She approached the bed and placed a hand on Corin’s forehead, checking her temperature. Corin nearly burst into tears, like a child taken care of.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“Maybe you’re disoriented from sleeping too long. You missed dinner when you went to bed early.”
Corin stared at the wrinkles etched around her mother’s mouth. Years spent laughing at jokes and tasting homemade meals carved into her dark skin. Countless lines traced her face, trailing like a map that proved she lived a long and full life.
“I missed you, Ma,” Corin whispered.
Her mother laughed. “You make it sound like you’ve been gone for centuries.”
“But I—” The words were lost upon her. Had she been dreaming this whole time? No, that couldn’t be true. They were dreams, yes, but they were real. Her head fell in her hands, straining to piece together a logical explanation. Memories blurred with each passing second, like watercolors washed away before having time to dry. She clung onto broken fragments of snow and ice castles, sunflowers and rolling hills, sticky summers and secret confessions below waterfalls. Hazy visions of Elly with spiky hair, a demon with two horns, a raven as black as night. A girl whose hands Corin wanted to keep in hers forever.
Who had that girl been? There had been a faint taste on her lips, salty with tears and promise. A searing pain in her stomach, like Corin had been stabbed—no, there was a deeper pain than this, clawing its way up to her chest, a beating heart that reached for another.
But Corin hardly remembered her dreams, and she sensed she was already forgetting.
“She was real,” Corin insisted, though she couldn’t remember who. “I gave her—”
Her hand stopped at a sensation of cold chain around her neck. The familiar shape of a pendant pressed itself underneath her shirt,absent of any amulet. Corin had not given anything away. The necklace had always been here.
Then her father came home, and he was alive as well. He smelled like cedarwood and smoke, and his hands were calloused from work. Corin could not make sense of it all, the familiarity of their skin, the warmth of their breaths. In the kitchen, there were four mugs side by side in the sink, a bowl chipped from when Elly dropped it as an infant, a lopsided table that Corin clumsily put together after splitting one of the legs while playing hide-and-seek. At the entryway, there was ugly wallpaper with plaster cracks, ink marks that measured their heights, drying bunches of lavender and thyme that her mother hung on the door for good luck.
Corin did not know why she broke down crying. She could not explain the feeling of existing with a family that was never missing, while missing another family that only existed in dreams. She could not make sense of spending an entire life thinking how much easier it was to die, and in her final moments, realizing she desperately, truly wanted to live, after all. That perhaps, if she were to keep living, she could have another chance.
• • •
IN WINTERS, THE cold was harsh and bitter. It turned the tips of her fingers purple and the skin of her knuckles raw. Corin blew shuddering breaths into Elly’s hands to warm her sister. Though their father had covered the window cracks with a heavy tarp, her bones felt brittle, as if they would break under the slightest breeze. Corin hated how powerless she was under the wrath of snowstorms. How easily they could coat her body in white and bury her, forgotten with the earth.
With a shuddering breath, Elly insisted, “We’ll survive this.”
“How do you know?” Corin hissed.
“Because the ice will melt, like it always does,” she replied, “and there’s so much left to see.”
At the break of dawn, Corin woke to light slipping into the cracks of the window, a fallen tarp draped on the ground, and her sister gone. Panic struck Corin, making her lunge through the door and nearly slip on melted snow. She found Elly kneeling over a shining cold patch. Her boots crunched the snow as she approached the scene and discovered what had caught her sister’s attention.
The ice had thawed into a puddle, revealing a bundle of daisies that sprouted from the ground. The flowers were so small that she would never have noticed them before, or realized they were capable of surviving.
