Dreaming of Winter
"Jack!" Hazel screamed as she watched her brother disappear under the fractured ice. She dared not run forward and try to reach for him—he had fallen under saving her from the frozen pond's perils, and she didn't want to have the same fate as him. But as bubbles of air floated up to the surface, Hazel found it hard to not leap forward to save him. Instead, she sat on the ice, shivering, useless, as the bubbles grew smaller and less frequent... until at last the water settled, and no more came at all.
Jack was dead.
No. No, he couldn't be dead. Surely he was just faking; surely he would come bursting out of the water, laughing at her shocked expression; surely this was just another one of his jokes...
But only part of Hazel tried to fight the truth. The other part had gone numb and cold with shock.
Hazel began to cry.
"Jack!" she sobbed, desperately beginning to crawl forward toward the hole in the ice where Jack had fallen in. "Jack!"
She came to her senses when she heard ominous creaking noises beneath her knees. Hazel quickly scrambled backwards, dazed and still crying.
The salty tears warmed the numbness in her heart. Hazel stopped crawling backwards as soon as she hit the snow-covered shore. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
That was where she was found, an hour later: sitting in the snow, still crying. It was Andrew who discovered her, Andrew who helped her to her shaky feet, Andrew who led across the short distance to her house. Hazel never forget that, not for the rest of her life.
Once she reached home, Hazel had to explain to her parents what had happened. Andrew had almost stopped her tears; now they began afresh as she described, in a halting voice, the events on the ice.
"I... We were skating, when, when I fell," she stammered as her mother handed her a mug of hot drink and her father wrapped her in a blanket. "I tried to stand by myself, but the ice... the ice started to c-crack." Hazel swallowed as she began to choke up again. "Jack told me... he told me we would make a game of it. H-hopscotch. He—he grabbed a stick, and, and..." She swallowed again. "He picked me up, he slid me ac-cross the ice, to where it was safer... And then..."
Hazel closed her eyes, not wanting to remember. Her mother helped her take a sip of the drink. "Then he stood up. We thought it would be fine, b-but... the ice b-broke all the w-way... J-jack f-fell under..."
She could tell no more. Her tears flowed down her cheeks. Andrew, who had been standing silently in the corner, handed her a clean handkerchief. Gratefully, she took it, and blew her nose to clear her head.
Hazel's mother, too, began to cry. Her father stood and walked to the fireplace, where he leaned his arm against the mantle and stared into nothing.
Outside, it began to snow.
Spring came, as it always did, filling the world with hope and new life. Not Hazel. She still remembered Jack, though the rest of the village seemed to have forgotten him in the spring festivities.
"Do... D'you think we ought to look for Jack's body, in the pond?" she asked one morning.
Her father nodded, and enlisted the village's best swimmer, Derek Johnson, to help look. But though together the two men searched the whole pond, they found no trace that Jack had ever been there—only his skates, warped and slimy from so many months underwater.
It was at this point where her mother sat her down and told Hazel that she needed to move on with her life. "Jack is dead, Hazel," she said gently. "We all miss him, but it's time to let him go. He died saving you. He wouldn't want you to waste the life he saved by dwelling on him."
"You don't know what he would want!" Hazel threw back at her mother. "I can't just forget him, not after what he did for me!"
"Hazel—"
But Hazel had run out of the room.
That night, Hazel had a very strange dream.
She dreamt it was snowing. Hazel couldn't hardly see anything but snow at first—snow in the trees, snow on the ground, snow covering the housetops. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed people in the streets. She saw her mother, her father, Andrew, her friends, Mr. Burgess... nearly half the town's population was wandering around outside, happily chatting and playing in the dim light.
And then, out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Jack.
He was smiling, walking up the lane from the direction of the pond. Hazel's heart leaped with hope, and she tried to cry out to him, but some invisible force prevented her from opening her mouth or moving towards her brother.
"Hello," he said, waving to the townspeople. He was laughing and smiling, eyes bright. "Hello! Good evening, ma'am." To Hazel's surprise, no one noticed him. The woman he was talking to ignored him. "Ma'am?" he asked.
A little confused, Jack crouched down next to little Trevor Johnson and asked, "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
He broke off as Trevor, who had been one of Jack's admirers among the village children, completely ignored him and then—to Hazel's horror—walked straight through her brother.
Jack seemed just as shocked as Hazel was. He stood up, gasping and patting at his chest. "Hello?" he called out, a note of fear in his voice, as more people walked through him.
It was then that Hazel realized there was something very different about her brother.
His hair was white. Before, Jack's hair had been a dusty brown color that seemed much lighter in the summer than it did in the winter. And his eyes... His eyes had been as brown as his hair, but now they were a blue-green color. What had happened?
Jack stood there for a moment before stumbling backward toward the pond. Hazel reached out her arm and tried to call his name, but he was gone.
The dream changed.
This time, Hazel saw a different kind of world. The little town she and her brother had grown up in had brick houses, black streets... people bustled along the streets, holding brightly-colored boxes with ribbons and bows. Words drifted through the air, and Hazel caught the phrase, "Christmas gifts for..."
It was snowing lightly. Suddenly, Hazel heard an achingly familiar laugh: Jack's laugh. She looked up and gasped in shock: Jack soared overhead. He was flying!
"Let it snow!" he sang out. Suddenly, the snow came thicker and heavier, turning into a blizzard.
"Jack!" she tried to call out, but her mouth was glued shut. Jack! she cried out in her mind.
Her dream changed again. The town looked newer, and much, much stronger. Buildings were more square-shaped. The streets were set deep into the ground, a had black substance coating them. Fireless lights glowed inside the buildings. Strange, frighteningly loud metal boxes on wheels zipped past her on the streets. Hazel thought she saw people inside the boxes, but her confused mind couldn't make sense of it. Loud, ugly noises filled the air, and Hazel began to cough from the smoky smells.
Across the street, Hazel thought she saw Jack. She blinked, but he was gone. Then she looked beside her. If she had been able to move, she would have jumped and possibly screamed.
Jack stood beside her, wearing strange blue clothes. He stuck his hands in pockets on his...was that supposed to be a sweater?
"It's nice," he said critically, "but it's missing something."
"Jack!" Hazel sobbed, but her mouth made no noise. Jack took no notice of her.
"Snow, that's it," he said with a grin. He took a hand out of his pocket and reached out his arm. He opened his fist, and a ball of snow just...appeared in it.
Magic? Hazel thought in wonder.
Jack threw the snowball into the air. Suddenly, it burst into a million snowflakes. A light snow began to fall.
"That's better," Jack said, grinning crookedly. Hazel's heart ached. She missed her brother more than ever. She would have done anything to get him back, even if he did have strange winter magic.
There was an excited squeal from a window above them. "Mommy, it's snowing!"
"Go back to bed, Lisa," a woman said in a tired voice.
"Snow day tomorrow!" the little girl squeaked again. The window closed. Jack sighed, his grin frozen on his face.
"You're welcome," he said bitterly to no one. "Yeah. Thanks for believing in me. Thanks for recognizing Jack Frost." He sighed. "Who am I kidding? Why would they know me when I don't even know who I am?"
His voice was so sad and full of longing that Hazel felt like crying. "Jack," she tried saying again.
Jack didn't hear her. He only sighed, forced a smile back on his face, and leapt up into the wind, flying away.
Hazel woke in the middle of the night, feeling compelled to write down the events of her sleep.
When she reached the end of her dream, she wrote,
Jack Frost, he called himself. Jack Frost, with magic winter powers. I wonder if he would have known who I was if he had seen me. He did say he didn't know who he was.
She sighed, a single tear falling from her eye and staining the paper.
I wonder if that dream was more than a dream—if it was a glimpse into the future. I want to believe it, but
Before finishing her sentence, Hazel glanced out her window and into the night sky. A full moon shone down onto her bed and pillow. The moon was big and bright and beautiful.
but it just seems so fantastical. So unreal.
She almost set her pen down right then, but something stopped her.
Still... it's the beginning of spring. If it wasn't real—if I shouldn't believe it—then why was I dreaming of winter?
Hazel went back to bed. As she mulled it over in her head, the moon shone down on her, as if to say, Believe it.
As Hazel drifted off to sleep, she smiled. She would.