A Curious Moon

By Hannah Colbert

This piece has been selected by our editors to be nominated for the 2027 Pushcart Prize.

I wake up in the spring, sun above me and icy ground below, as soon as my body thaws.

The soft snow is dirty, and the forest floor is wet. I shift my spine experimentally; it’s stiff after the winter, but it’ll move. My clothes come unstuck from the ice beneath my back. I brace for something bad, half-remembered–

–And, yep, there it is. Physical sensation returns all at once: pins and needles, twitching hands and feet, and then for the first time since November I feel the cold on my skin. A violent shiver rips through my whole body, wrenching me onto my hands and knees. I shake like prey caught in a beast’s jaws, while my blood unfreezes enough to let me move.

A long time after that, my wool base layers get warm, and I hike up the mountain.

· ✶ · ─ ·⏾· ─ · ✶ ·

Eliza’s pacing in the soft snow, naked, swinging her arms. Her wet clothing adorns the bare trees around her, drying in the sunny breeze. Her skin is white and blotchy red, and her hair is soaked in its long, ropy braid. Even so there’s a stark, painful beauty to her–the morning light on her, and the glint of those gray eyes as she sees me and darts her gaze away.

Every time Eliza wakes up, everything that happened to us is fresh and raw for her. She has to remember why she hates me all over again. And every time I wake up, it all feels a little farther away.

We’re in a forest clearing, kept private by rocky outcroppings. The closest trail is over a mile away, and you have to scale some serious cliffs to get there. We’ve had years to find good places to freeze.

“I don’t know how you can stand those wet clothes,” she tells me gruffly, when we’re close enough. So she’s not too angry to talk to me–but it’s not exactly good morning, sweetheart.

“What’s weirder out here in April, a nudist or fully drenched gear on a sunny day?” I ask. There’s a lot I want to tell her, every time I see her in the spring, but there’s no good way to name the stupid bubble of joy in me. Just this, deliriously happy: I know you. There you are. You’re here. You’re still here. I finally found you.

When I woke up in the snow, that first time, I didn’t know where I was–it had been dark when I went to sleep in the cold. As soon as I shook off the blood freeze and recognized the spot, I stumbled uphill towards the last place I saw her. I found her naked and stunned with her wet hair plastered to her shoulders like a mermaid in the snow, and I still didn’t understand but I didn’t care. I said that stuff out loud, the first time. When she got her voice back from the furious sobs, she shoved me away and growled in a voice raw from the winter: You didn’t find me soon enough.

I don’t know how many years have passed since then. I don’t try to put it into words anymore. But we don’t try to stay away from each other anymore, either.

“It’s not even April,” she snaps. “God. You don’t know anything. It’s January.”

“What?” I ask, stunned.

“Look at the sky,” she says. “It’s noon, and the sun’s been up for five hours.”

She’s right. She learned to read the time from the sun out here, and she’s quicker than I am now. She always wakes up first; she says her body thaws faster because there’s less of it to freeze.

“Jesus!” It’ll be a while before I stop shivering altogether, but this isn’t from the cold. “Do you think Dan and Chuck are still up on the ridge?”

“Let’s find out,” she says. “One thing’s for damn sure, I’m not going up there alone. I was waiting for you.”

· ✶ · ─ ·⏾· ─ · ✶ ·

Eliza and I freeze in the winter; Dan and Chuck melt in the spring. They’re old college skiing buddies, spry retired guys full of dad jokes. They talk to me when I’m frozen asleep under the snow, and sometimes I remember it afterwards. I know it’s just because they get lonely, but it’s nice. They understand. It was a ski trip gone wrong, for them.

We all died somewhere up here, until we didn’t.

A memory, like a dream: Do you want to be remembered? Or do you want to live?

Most places in the world, people die and that’s it. Sometimes people die in the wrong spot, though, and then they get like us. It hasn’t been happening for too long, I think. Usually the winters are cold enough to make sure the dead stay still.

But the winters are getting warmer, and the thaws are getting longer. So the dead are waking earlier, and worse things than us are out here. We’re only half dead, Eliza and I.

Some people are all dead.

Today it’s above freezing, probably in the forties, wet black spruce limbs dripping. In the winter it’s Dan and Chuck’s job to find the dead, before the dead find the living. But if we’re awake, it’s our job too. So Eliza and I plough uphill through the rotten snow in silence. Just two cold girls, going to work.

When we get up to the fire tower, there’s nothing left of Dan and Chuck but a few piles of clothes. The boots are still dry–the guys must have melted this morning. Chuck always tries to take care of the leather, and goes barefoot when he feels himself leaving for the spring. We roll up the boots inside the clothes and stuff it all behind the usual rocks. Eliza swears, angry.

From the view, we see the fuzzy sea of gray-brown-green that’s the mountains in winter. Late winter. Early spring. Too early. This isn’t a normal thaw; a lot’s already melted. More brown than white, up on the slopes, where the wind has blown the snow thin and then gone. It’s a gorgeous day, sunlight mingling with a cool breeze, and feathers of clouds in the blue sky. Hikers will swarm the slopes today for sure, despite the rotting snow. 

Where will the dead rise this time?

We scan the forest, not each other. The space between us feels charged, magnetized, but the magnets are pushing apart.

Soon hikers reach the fire tower, stripped down to baselayers and panting from the climb. We talk with them a little. Wow, what a day, what a view–the inanities of the living. Hours pass; people eat and snap selfies, which we mostly ignore. Scanning, scanning. Eliza and I don’t need to eat anymore, and our phones are ruined. Actually, they actually died before we did. That was one of the problems.

Midafternoon. A red cloud of smoke floats from behind the ridge.

I point. “Eliza, look!”

And we run.

· ✶ · ─ ·⏾· ─ · ✶ ·

Eliza and I are used to skipping up those rocky slopes in summer, hopping from boulder to boulder, but rotten snow is hard work. It clings to our boots and slows our strides like we’re walking through cement. Our gear is made for summer. If we get over the ridge and we’re too late–

We push our dead muscles to their frozen limit, needing to pass the living hikers on the same trail. Needing to get there first. We know where we’re going, now. The dead leave trails in the air, whatever we’ve got instead of real heat, rising up in those red columns of smoke that only other dead can see.

Over the ridge and down, sliding in the slush. Finally. There’s a woman in a clearing, alone, spinning around like she’s looking for something. Watching, waiting.

Red smoke rising off her like steam.

Eliza and I split up. We don’t need to talk for this part. We learned how to do this the first year we woke up, and we’re good at it. Back then, it was the only thing that felt easy.

It always comes back so easy, too.

I go down to the dead woman first. She looks up at me with wild eyes full of red smoke. Her winter jacket and rain pants are new and clean, like she bought them for the trip right before she died, and her curly hair is neat. Everything about her is respectable, unthreatening, except for the feral look in her face.

When I come close enough she hisses, bares her teeth, and lunges for me.

We crash into the soft snow together, sinking. Her teeth snap like a rabid dog’s, rooting for bare skin. If I were really alive, she could tear my throat out. She’s so new that I still look living to her–she doesn’t know that she’ll get nothing from me. I push back, wrenching her hands and jaw away from my face, because if she breaks one of my bones it might stay like that. Hindbrain fear floods me, even though my pulse can’t beat like it did, but a viscous, elated triumph rises past it. She can’t really hurt me. I just have to distract her for a little longer.

The feral dead woman is all focused on me until Eliza crashes into us like an avenging angel.

She is magnificent. Her silent wariness is gone, but the anger never went far below the surface, and now there’s only rage. I hold the dead lady, but get my head clear–we’ve done this dance before. Eliza lands on her and wrestles her still, smashing that dead blue face into the snow and wrenching her arms behind her back while I trap her legs.

It takes us both to hold her down. The newly dead are strong. She writhes beneath us, still fighting–she doesn’t get it yet.

I meet Eliza’s eyes. Should we snap the neck and put her out of her misery, not to mention all the misery she’d cause the next live person she found? But as we look at each other across the thrashing body, there’s a question in my brave Eliza’s face.

“Worth a try?” she grunts, just for me.

Not a lot of stuff has felt worth a try, recently. But Eliza hasn’t asked me a lot of questions like she really wants to hear the answer recently, either.

I shrug. “Sure. Worth a try.”

Eliza grips the woman’s neck, keeping her still. She leans down until her half-dead mouth is right against the all-dead ear. And she says the words I remember, from the hazy darkness before I knew what had happened to me.

“Do you want to be remembered?” she hisses. “Or do you want to live?”

Then she lets the woman up, and we both back off to see which one she chooses.

The dead woman gets up and sways on her feet, center of gravity traveling up and down her spine so she slumps and gyrates like a dancing drunk. How long has she been frozen in the cold, and who’s missed her? Does she have friends, colleagues, a family, parents, kids? They’ll find her up here, if she wants to be remembered. They’ll finally find her body with the melting snow. It’s happened before.

She takes a few unsteady steps, red smoke wavering around her, like she doesn’t know which direction she’s going.

I can’t recall making the choice, to be remembered or to live. It’s not like you get to hear the pros and cons of both. I had people who loved me, back home; I know that much. It would have been harder, if I’d been able think about them. But it’s a hazy dream, and a voice from the darkness, and–if I really focus on the memory–seeing two paths. Maybe you always choose the place you were already trying to go.

I’d been trying to get back to Eliza, before I died.

It was our first trip together. I was the one who’d planned it, who loved hiking and loved Eliza and couldn’t wait to love them together. And she trusted me. God, she was so excited. On the first evening we set up camp, then hiked a mile to the peak. I’ll never forget her face as we watched that sunset. The fall foliage blazed like fire below us, and her hair glowed in the pink light. “I want to stay out here forever,” she said.

It was so easy to watch the stars come out, to count satellites, to snuggle in the cold. I named a comet after her; she drew a constellation for me. We laughed when we realized we’d forgotten our headlamps back at camp. I held her hand, and used my phone flashlight to show the path in the dark.

Then my phone died, and then her phone died, and then we stopped laughing.

She fell soon after that, and it got one ankle and the other knee badly. She says they both still hurt, although she can run on them. Back then she cried out in pain and couldn’t stand, and my heart was going so fast–my brave Eliza, following me into the mountains, trusting me to do the right thing. I’ll be honest; I panicked for real. Stay here, I told her. Take my jacket. I’ll be right back with the med kit and the headlamps.

But clouds raced across the stars so it was pitch dark, and then the storm came. I got very cold very quickly. Somehow I was off the trail, and couldn’t get back on. I called out to Eliza, but by then the rain was freezing. I realized I’d be no use to her if I didn’t lay down and rest, under a tree that seemed like shelter.

Then I woke up in April.

I don’t know who gave us the choice. I’ve never wanted to look at that gift too closely.

Now Eliza and I face each other in the clearing. Two paths fork before the dead woman swaying between us. One: she really dies, and her loved ones remember her. Two: a half-life like ours.

Eliza’s face is hard, and her eyes never leave mine. The woman gasps and falls to her knees, and with a shock I know which one she’s chosen.

We move in towards her fast. Now we’re the attackers, the feral ones, and instinct tells us what to do. We sink our teeth into her neck. It’ll take, since she’s chosen to live. She bucks beneath us, yelling. We break the skin, and feel her pulse go slow but steady in our jaws, just like ours. Then we sit back, all of our knees sinking down in the melting snow.

Her face looks like a person’s now. That red smoke still rises off her, but the feral look is gone. Her wide brown eyes blink, like she’s just starting to see.

Eliza and I have made sure the dead stay dead. We’ve done it a lot. Usually we run, afterwards, before someone finds the body with its snapped neck. A couple times we’ve given them the choice that we just gave this woman. They’ve slumped down afterwards, lifeless. Those times, we run back to the main trail and tell someone that we’ve just found a body, to make sure search and rescue comes quickly.

This is the first time someone has made the same choice we did. It’s hard, the uphill scramble back towards life, hard like running through rotten snow.

“Where am I?” asks the brown-eyed woman, and then she starts to sob.

· ✶ · ─ ·⏾· ─ · ✶ ·

Her name is Anya. We sit with her on a log in the clearing, like any chance-met hikers sharing a snack on a sunny day, except we’re not eating. Anya doesn’t say how she died, or who she left behind. Maybe she’ll realize the truth sometime: you can’t remember them either, once you’ve made sure they can’t remember you.

People have probably told Anya she’s good in a crisis. When she’s done sobbing she stares up at the bare trees like she’s never seen them before, and her face settles into a soft, wondering smile. We tell her why we were looking for the feral dead, and she just nods and says, Well, I guess I can do that too. We tell her about Dan and Chuck, and how we don’t know if she’ll melt with the real spring or stay awake until the next winter freezes us all.

Anya gets up and walks into the woods without another word.

She doesn’t look back.

Eliza and I lean against each other, alone in the clearing, as if we’re tired from hiking up the trail. I remember how she asked me a real question, before; maybe that’s what gives me the courage to voice a real doubt now.

“I’ve never wondered if we did the right thing,” I tell her. “Before this. When we left them dead. I kind of wonder if we did the right thing with Anya, though.”

“Really?” Eliza asks. “I always thought they were going to choose to live, when we gave the feral ones a choice. I wanted them to. It’s sad that Anya was the first. There could have been more of us.”

We’re quiet for a while. Above us, chickadees call to each other through the clear air.

“I’m still sorry,” I say. Usually I say this in the spring, when we’re sitting on the fresh grass. “I’m always going to be sorry.”

“I’m still angry at you,” she replies: her traditional response. “But I won’t be angry forever.”

We look at each other solemnly, marking the ritual. My lovely Eliza: pumpkin-colored hair in a long wet braid, freckles that will never get darker. Gray eyes that haven’t aged at all, except on the inside.

Then my lovely Eliza says something new.

“Let’s leave the mountains, before it gets cold again.”

The whole world is the mountains. I haven’t thought about the roads and valleys in a long time. Well, I know they exist, but they’re not exactly real to me.

“I mean it,” she says. “Let Dan and Chuck take the winter up here, and Anya take the summer or thaw or whatever the seasons do to her. She’ll figure it out, just like we did.”

I start laughing.

“What would we even do?” I ask. But it’s the delight of discovery, of wrapping an arm around her shoulder and naming a comet for her. “Rent an apartment? Hitchhike out west? Get summer jobs?”

“Uh,” she says, and there’s that quicksilver smile. “Maybe just the hitchhiking part. I don’t know. I just thought of it.” 

“Seems like the winters are getting warmer,” I say. “People won’t stay frozen for so long. Dan and Chuck and Anya will have their work cut out for them.”

“Then they’ll make more of us,” she says. “Come on, Bess. Maybe we’ll wake up here in a year, no matter what we do. Let’s go cut out our own work somewhere else for a while.”

“All right,” I say, and laugh again. It’s sunny, the snow’s melting anyway, and I’d do just about anything to get Eliza to smile like that again. “I’ll even get a new phone, and keep it charged.”

She shakes her head, and her mouth settles into a rueful twist.

“You know something?” she says. “I could have come after you, that night. My ankle and my knee were messed up, but I could have made myself walk on them. At first. Even if it made them worse later. But I was mad at you, and I wanted you to have to come back and see how hurt I was. I wanted to make you help me.”

I take this in, remembering it: Eliza in pain, on the trail, in the dark. It’s tough to believe what she’s just said. Our deaths were my fault, my mistake. But her chin is jutted stubbornly. She’s always been so hard on herself.

“Let’s hitchhike until we see some red smoke really far from here,” I say. “Then we’ll either make new friends or break their necks.”

Eliza keeps shaking her head, looking at me like she doesn’t know what to make of me at all. That’s fine, as long as she keeps looking at me.

“All right, I lied,” she says. “Maybe I’m always going to be a little angry with you.”

I take both her cold hands.

“Do you promise, honey?” I ask. “Always?”

She snorts, and now her smile is a bare grin like she’s playing at being feral. There’s no mercy in it. She’s still herself, my Eliza. She’s only become more so.

“You bet,” she says, and her fingers squeeze mine.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

Hannah Colbert lives in Maine. She has worked in state parks and trail crews, but presently writes and teaches high school. She is from a normal place and has done normal things in the woods.