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A WALK IN THE SNOW
I tested the weight of the spare manacle, offering a silent apology to Bob. It had taken most of the night to get the irons off his legs. It was a good job he'd been dead so long, or we'd never have managed.
Paul said, "It'll be a picnic. A walk in the snow."
I shook my head. It had been a walk in the snow that had got us caught. There was no trial, not for us political dissidents. Just a short, cold future in the grey stone of the Spire.
I glanced up at our one narrow window. It was unbarred, but at this height that hardly mattered. The faint winter-pink sunset filtered through a cloud of iridescent shining-sharp bubbles. They floated ever upwards, a pale sparkling hoard of them. We'd taken turns to watch them; in three months they hadn't stopped. Every so often it would snow and the bubbles would gain their own little white peaks, like mountains.
They were just another part of the prison; it wasn't wise to watch them for long.
"He's coming," Paul whispered, nudging me in the ribs. "Picnic, remember?"
"Yeah, walk in the snow," I replied.
A whistle was blown, food was coming. I really needed to eat, but just thinking of our night's work with Bob and that half a wooden spoon put me right off.
The door opened, and the jailor entered, food first. Paul struck, winding his half of Bob's chains around the man's legs. The jailor fell, and I slammed his head against the bare stone floor. Paul flashed his grin again—he never thought of the impossibility of it all—and went for the keys.
Even without our irons, we still hobbled, wasted muscles making long work of the even flagged floor. Paul paused at a stairwell, wheezing. I must have shook my head, got turned about or something, but there was another window.
The sky, pink and blue and dotted with the suspicion of white cloud, came to me through a craze of refraction. The bubbles were streaming faster than I'd ever seen them, straining up and further up. I must have reached out.
"Think of Bob," Paul managed. "Remember what happened when he ate one?"
I was about to answer, but the panorama of iridescent, translucent spheres sucked at my eyes and drew them upwards into a sky I could hardly see. There were new noises behind me, the clank and clatter of fresh iron on the stairs, hoarse shouts of the guards and the oh-so-quiet protests of Paul as he tried desperately to grab my attention.
I could smell the cheap beer, the filth and sweat of the guards as I tipped us both over the sill. The bubbles caught us, lifted us, little mounds of snow melting through our clothes.
After a moment, and with a vertiginous elastic lurch, I got to my feet. I pulled Paul up beside me. He grinned.
"Walk in the snow?" I asked.
Marie is a trainee art historian in the third year of her PhD at York (UK), where she teaches undergrads and helps to run Creative Writing Group. Her work has appeared in Dark Tales magazine.
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