Daybreak

“Deanna, is death a friend?”

The small woman untucked her legs from beneath her as Sebastian’s voice cut through the frigid autumn air. It was too early to turn on the heat and their pockets hadn’t been plump this year as it was. Wood was expensive and they had no kindling to speak of. So, they went cold.

“Don’t,” she warned.

Sebastian regarded her cooly, blue eyes reflecting the wild mess of curls bouncing as her feet smacked against the scratched wooden floors.

She would come around.

Until then, he waited, turning his gaze out the melting glass of an old window. Through it, the wind moaned as it slipped down the back collar of his dress shirt. Next year, he thought, they’d have a fire in October.

“Seb, I’m serious.”

“Mm.”

He kept his eyes trained on the empty road stretching past their home.

The key to forcing his topic lay in ignoring Deanna. She was a good woman but too full of fear these days to ever rise to the occasion of a good conversation. It was a shame she wouldn’t talk to him anymore, he thought as he watched two leaves fall from their maple. He blinked, casually wondering how long it would take for her spirit to wither completely.

“Tea?”

“You know I hate tea.”

Sebastian ran a hand through the fluffed top of his undercut. “Since when?”

Deanna clucked her tongue. “Since you made it with old, moldy leaves and I threw up for three days.”

“Ah,” he breathed. “A miscalculation.”

“A mis- Are you ever on planet Earth?”

He frowned. A soft cough cleared old smoke from his lungs. When the world demands it of me.

“Nevermind,” she muttered. “Forget I asked.”

He wouldn’t.

Every word that tumbled from her mouth lodged itself into the special section in his head reserved for Deanna. He clung to those words, his tether to the material.

Reality was a fickle thing for Sebastian. A fleeting illness really, it plagued him with acute moments of guilt so deep that it could fell a mammoth in its prime. When the episodes hit, Sebastian would crumble. Sinking deep into the scratchy cotton sheets, he would vacillate between weeping loudly and staring unseeing into the chasm of darkness beneath his heavy wool blanket as though it would give him an answer.

It never did.

He didn’t expect it would.

Sebastian clung to the hope that someday the looming threat of his world unraveling back into fabric and thread would evaporate. Every morning, he tinkered in the kitchen until eventually, he produced a cup of black coffee. The sludge would trickle down his throat while he occupied his fuzzed mind by staring at the cabinets which had settled with the ancient house, leaning North along with the foundation. Why North, he wondered, drinking long and slow. This too went without answer, though if Sebastian were ever to find one, it would deeply disrupt the sanctity of his morning.

The break of day was sacred. A time when the birds and the bees and the wildflowers all lifted their heads with the same whispered hope fluttering between them: live, live another day. He would be a fool if he ever tried to deny the voice in the back of his head muttering the same.

Night was different though.

Failures from the day struggled in the webs cluttering up his mind, bringing his gaze inward to watch his dreams die. Cold air, empty dinner plates, and financial woes curled at his feet and kissed his lips blue beneath the pale yellow light trickling in from the streetlamp. There was little to celebrate in his and Deanna’s life. The evening chime of the clock made sure he never forgot.

A large, annoyed sigh interrupted his thoughts.

“Death can’t be a friend.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, Sebastian. Death isn’t a friend.” She huffed, crossing her arms. “Of course, you’re going to say that it is. You know,” she said, waving her arms. “All that macabre junk.”

That macabre junk was his life’s work. Crippled, burned pieces of metal set deep into marble statues of great men contorted by sorrow, dark slashes across bright canvases, and massive projects that floated through the best museums in the world reduced to “macabre junk”. His hands rolled into two fists, clenching hard at the black slacks covering thin, underfed legs.

“Was it junk when we met?”

Deanna responded by rolling her eyes. “God, always dramatic.”

“It’s my art, Deanna. How am I supposed to be?”

“You’re supposed to take criticism.”

He blinked hard before turning his attention to the light snow turning the sky pink. It was hard to imagine that he had met his wife at his own show as she fawned over a particularly despairing oil painting.

A myriad of words flowered on his tongue before wilting.

“Why can’t death be a friend?” Snow glittered below the lamp as an old, rusted car rumbled past the home. “It isn’t malicious.” His hands unclenched, smoothing down the wrinkles in his pants as he tore his gaze from the window. Furious brown eyes glared back. “I think death is a friend,” he continued softly, turning his attention back to the empty fireplace. “It’s just a conduit. A train between two places.”

His small, dainty fingers drew a line back and forth outside of his field of vision.

“You wouldn’t be mad at the train for a delay, would you? I mean the actual metal body. Something else caused the delay.” He narrowed his eyes, trying to pin her with a glare. “The metal isn’t at fault, so neither is death but if you fear the consequences of the life you’ve lived...well, that’s hardly the fault of the end, is it? Death is a friend, just not yours.”

Turning the full weight of his gaze on Deanna, Sebastian drew in a long breath and sneered. He knew where she’d crept out to all those nights. He’d seen every time she crawled back in drunk.

“What have you done that makes you think death isn’t a friend?”

She stiffened. The easy rise and fall of her chest stuttered to a stop as her eyebrows drew up towards her high hairline. A gentle “o” formed as her lips parted and Sebastian knew he had finally wrangled a submission from her.

“Screw you, Seb,” she snapped.

The worn fabric chair wobbled as she stood. Tapping against the ground, the legs regained their balance while she remained looking out-of-sorts.

Sebastian folded his hands in his lap.

“I don’t have any answers for you, Deanna.”

“God, screw you, Sebastian. You think you know everything? You think-”

“I think I know when my wife is cheating on me.”

The color drained from her face before rushing back red and splotchy.

“I’m going to my sister's. She was right about you, you know. Said you were nothing but a narcissistic artist with his head shoved so far up his-”

“Yes, I’m familiar with what Elizabeth thinks of me.” He tsked with a slight smirk. “I would have thought that my wife would have enjoyed my company. Enough at least not to sneak off to O’Malleys Bar at one a.m. Troubled artists never sleep, my dear.”

She stood quietly for a moment. The tension crept higher between them until at last she barked out a shrill laugh and flipped him off.

“You’re unbelievable. I love you. But you know what? I don’t care. You hear me? I don’t care. I’m going to my sister’s and I’m not coming back, not until you quit going down to that stupid puddle and get some help.”

“Oh, here we go again. You’re sleeping with other men and it’s the lake that’s the problem?”

“I’m not-” She lowered her voice but Sebastian smirked. He had her. “I’m so tired of hearing about that thing.”

“The lake?”

She rolled her lips together.

“It’s in all your work, every statue, every painting, every sketch. You even talk in your sleep about it! You didn’t even pay the electric because what, you wanted a drainage system? Seriously? Then the rest of the money goes up in smoke while you drink yourself to death all day looking at that...that puddle. Is that art? What am I supposed to do about that?”

“It’s a process,” he screamed as he slammed his open hand against a beam. “Support me!”

“No,” she shouted, taking three steps back to the door. “No, you’re going nuts, Seb. I won’t support that.”

Hand wrapped around the door handle, Deanna’s face crumbled inward. She turned as she wrenched the door open.

“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I love you, just not who you’ve become. Get help.” As an afterthought, she whispered, “Please.”

The door slammed hard enough to bounce back open and lodge itself into the plaster wall. Sebastian followed its movements, lunging to catch a pair of crystal birds he’d bought for their wedding day.

One landed between curled fingers and broken nails while a clatter of glass stabbed through his chest. A hot rush of guilt followed.

Unfurling his hand, he stared down at the smaller of the two dusted lightly with pink and adorned with small black eyes. Deanna’s bird. He cursed quietly as he shuffled backward, scratching the glass of the obliterated partner piece. She’d left and his bird was the one to shatter.

“Of course,” he grumbled.

Turning his back to the mess, Sebastian was about to leave it all and tuck himself in for an early sleep when his lower lip trembled and pulled down sharply. His vision grew blurry until tears dropped to the dirty entryway floor.

“I liked the bird,” he whispered. “Loved it.”

He slunk his arms around his middle and, without a jacket and with only his sneakers, he pivoted away from the mess and walked out into the snow, crying as he went. The door stuck in the wall and snow waltzed in, undeterred and rather welcomed as the wind increased to billowing gusts.

Sebastian, gripped by the heat of his pain, didn’t even shiver as he descended the three porch steps to the ground.

Stretched off to the right, Deanna’s footprints had already been filled in by the snow but Sebastian gave them only a cursory glance and a sharp sniffle. He shuffled past them, laying tracks of his own as he headed straight down the path to the lake. If she wanted to go, so be it. Going from a shuffle to a dangerous run, his arms unwound from his belly and haphazardly flailed at his sides. The lake would have an answer. The lake would give him comfort. The lake never betrayed him.

He continued slipping his way to the lake until he hit the second set of concrete stairs.

Cuddled at the bottom slept the most beautiful sight in his world: a labyrinth.

It was a short thing, only a five-minute walk at most to get down to the waters but as he skidded down the bottom step over the slick snow, clutching desperately at the familiar, rusted railing Sebastian felt his heart soar in anticipation. The labyrinth hugged the lake along his edge of the property with mystical arms of overgrown hedges that forced a sense of adventure from Sebastian. Frequently, life was dull. Covered by a thick fog and limiting the brilliancy of the world down to blurred shapes. In the labyrinth, Sebastian felt as alive as the birds and the bees with their summer daydreams.

He stood at the entrance, hardly aware of cold creeping in from the periphery.

Deanna may have left. She may have destroyed his little crystal bird and broken his heart, but he would have the comfort of the lake. That was his and his alone.

Hardly my fault if she is too dense to see the artistic beauty in those waters.

He harrumphed to himself, feeling quite justified in choosing the pebbled shores tonight, and disappeared into the mouth of the maze. The labyrinth swallowed up both the pale streetlight filtering through the snowstorm and his shadow.

Swaddled by the familiar comfort of the overgrown hedges, Sebastian ignored the tickle of wrong, wrong, wrong, in the back of his head.

“Lovely night,” he muttered to himself as a distinct need to vanquish the silence gripped him. “Shame she had to…” Leave. Come to her senses. Abandon him. Let him rot along with the house. Love him. “...ruin it.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

“She’s supposed to be here.”

First snowfall was something of a tradition with them and seeing as they had very few traditions, it was particularly important to Sebastian. He would tuck her under his arm as they weaved their way through the labyrinth. Then, beneath a pink-tinged sky, the two would watch the dizzying descent of the snow. Sometimes, if they were in a particularly jubilant mood, they would dance around, stick out their tongues, and catch snowflakes.

A sensation as though he were being watched scratched at the back of his skull. Deanna, he thought with a faded smile. He shuffled on, feigning ignorance but slowing down. Of course, she would come back. She loved him.

Whipping around at the first corner, he glanced over his shoulder to see clean lines tracked through the snow instead of his wife. The hopeful smile crashed to the piling snow and he continued forward.

A fool, he thought, trudging around another corner. An absolute fool. Cheated on me. Mocked my work.

“She wouldn’t come back for...tradition,” he spat.

The skittering scratch of something shooting under the bushes raised his hackles and halted his progress at the second turn. Sebastian stood in the silence, acutely aware of his suddenly labored breathing huffing puffs of fear into the air. Nothing lived in the labyrinth and nothing approached the dark waters of the lake. Its hollow lack of life was what initially piqued Sebastian’s interest.

It’s nothing, he thought as he chided himself.

Instead of turning around to look for a second time, he marched forward through the labyrinth. The sounds grew in intensity with the storm. Great screeches vibrated through him, forcing a sense of vertigo to rock and wobble each step he took. An owl. Just a cold, angry owl. Loud hissing followed behind, getting closer if he slowed at all. It was difficult to ignore, even for a man like Sebastian. The only rational explanation, he decided, was to get to the lake.

It became his escape. His protection.

The last, smallest stretch of labyrinth spread out before him and Sebastian, panting from nearly running through the snow, took a moment to look over his shoulder. A scream tore long lines down his throat. The hedges, untrimmed and feral, swayed towards him with real, human arms sticking out at odd angles. Something small and black and leaving a long trail of slime behind it was in the process of dragging itself closer to him, hissing. Worst of all, the shadow of something incredibly tall lumbered closer.

Yelling a stream of expletives, Sebastian turned on his heel, intending to run but stopped short. Stretched in front of him was the same small stretch of the labyrinth but instead of a clear view to the lake, Sebastian could only see snow-covered hedges with small arms beginning to blossom. It had changed.

“No,” he shouted. Whipping back toward the house, Sebastian looked for his footprints in the snow but found none. His head shook back and forth as he looked at the clean snow and creatures surrounding him. “That’s not possible. That isn’t possible!”

A loud grumble rocked the earth below his feet and for a moment, all the creatures approaching him settled. Jarring him further, a wicked wind drove snow and ice through the thin dress shirt and across the shaved sides of his head, cutting him apart. Shouting over the shrieking wind while clutching at his face to protect it, Sebastian filled his lungs with cold air and took off running, leaving a cloud of hot breath and terror behind him.

The hedges scratched at him with long fingernails, coming away with flesh and fabric. He did not slow. Teeth sank into his ankles but he pushed forward, leaving a trail of poor decisions and crimson behind him. Blood ran down his arms in rivulets beside the shredded shirt. Sebastian ran in frantic loops through the labyrinth searching for a way to the lake. Sebastian ran until his muscles burned, spun around, and ran some more.

“Not possible. Not possible. Not possible,” he muttered.

Sebastian evaded the creatures as best he could, ducking and dodging the distorted reality until sunrise shed light on his saving grace. The lake. In the end, he turned frozen eyelashes to the hedges and clawed his way through. At last, the lake stretched before him this time adorning the pink crown of dawn.

A bird landed above him, tweeting, “Live. Live another day.”

Sebastian sighed and turned his gaze to the water. Now, he could dream again.

Several days later, Deanna stood outside the labyrinth bathed in flickering police lights, watching in abject horror as her husband was extricated frozen solid but otherwise unharmed from the hedges. Sebastian’s face, calm and cracked open in a soft smile was angled down. His hand was frozen in an outstretched position, giving the rescue workers trouble as they tried removing him without snapping it off. Deanna grimaced and wound her arms more tightly around her middle.

Sebastian’s frozen eyes gazed fondly at a spot of water just below his finger. A puddle.

“You fool,” she whispered. “You damn fool.”

Frowning, she approached him and slowly crouched to cup his face. Tears glittered in her eyes while fresh snow coated her hair.

Her voice wobbled as she said, “No, Sebastian. Death is not a friend.”