The Winter

   Helena worked in one of the many factories located along the river, a fast-flowing stream filled with waterfalls and whirlpools. Every single worker of the factories and the people from the town knew that it was very dangerous to play or stand near the river. But Helena always did, just right before work and just after it. She loved to see the big chunks of ice go down the river, fast, as if they had a rush to get the waterfalls lying only some kilometers further ahead.

What she loved about the river was that she felt strangely alive when looking at it. For her, it was almost as looking a group of children play ball or a market filled with buyers and sellers. Anyway, not much happened in town so when winter came and the river started its battle against the low temperatures, it was always entraining to see which one of the two won the match.

Helena’s post inside the factory was just next to one of the big windows. She had to stitch together two pieces of fabric in order to make underwear, which would be sold in many stores around the world. At least that was what they told all the women working there and, as most of them would have never had the money to pay for such nice clothes, they had no idea if they got only to the next town or a fancy store in Japan, or something.

Through the window next to her, Helena saw the river trying not to lose its power, its grace and insistence. People around her never understood her fascination with it but she had no need to tell them. After all, it was her thing and no one else’s so, she kept this particular enjoyment to herself.

One winter in particular, it was clear that the river would lose the battle. Helena lived upstream and many sections there were already frozen. It did look beautiful, she thought, but it was better when it was liquid and it could do everything, even if it got dangerous and often devastating. By the factory, some waterfalls had frozen over too and it was clear the river wasn’t going to hold much longer which was particularly bad for town.

The electric energy provided to the houses, the factories and so on, were generated by a dam upstream but if they reservoir froze over the electricity would stop arriving. And that’s exactly what happened on the third week of January, when the hum of electricity coming from various machines suddenly stop. The heating system in the factory failed too and they were told by their bosses to get to back home. If they received a call, it meant they wouldn’t need to come to work the next day. Helena knew there would be no call.

She walked home but first stopped by the baker.  It was clear he was having problems to as they were trying, with his son, to turn on a generator that worked on gasoline. Not that gasoline wasn’t expensive but the baker couldn’t afford to lose the job of one day. So they turned the machine on and Helena took home a baguette and a couple chocolate croissants. She ate one as she walked towards home to make her heart feel warmer.

When she entered her small cottage, she looked through the window and saw how the river was almost entirely frozen. Only a small stream of water passed through the ice and it wasn’t enough to make the dam work; that was obvious. Helena left her bread in the kitchen and went up to change off her work clothes. She put on a thick sweater and loose pants, the kind you use to exercise. She went down to the kitchen and checked the time on a clock hanging over the oven: it was one o’clock.

Realizing they had really been let go rather early and wondering if this time the call would be real, she decided to make herself a proper lunch. She normally ate something like a sandwich in the factory’s cafeteria but the bread there was normally stale and the meat seemed to have seen better days. Helena decided she would take this chance to make herself something delicious to eat. So she checked the cupboards and the fridge, which wasn’t working anymore, and decided to make a nice fish on herbs and roasted potatoes to go with it.

She checked her oven and it did work. Thankfully, it worked on gas and not with electricity so she could cook her dinner there. In an hour, she was seating down to a small table by a window, the one from which she could see the frozen river. She started eating the fish, enjoying herself despite the cold. Then, for a moment, she stared again at the river but her expression was now pensive, almost sad. She seemed to scare the thoughts out of her head, in order to continue eating. But when she finished she was again looking at the window.

Several minutes passed until she stood up, washed the dishes and went to her room. Somehow, she didn’t really feel cold or tired. She just wanted to lie down and think. From her room, the river could be seen to but she deliberately lay with her back against the window. She didn’t want to look at it, at the water, anymore. She had tried hard to have a nice relationship with it but sometimes it got hard. It was as if winter made it harder on purpose, in order to make her remember.

 It had happened in winter too, so maybe that was why. One day, Helena had been walking upstream with her, holding hands, looking at every animal remaining in the cold and at every plant that looked as if they were also fighting the winter, just like the river. They had stared at the beautiful shapes of a frozen waterfall and the silent and peaceful sound of the remaining water, sometimes underneath the thick layer of ice.

The next day, she woke up suddenly, like scared or as if her body was warning her of an incoming danger. And it did: she looked through the window just in time to see how her only daughter, age five, was taking a first step into the frozen water. She ran as fast as she could, in her pajamas, almost falling to the ground, getting mud and frost all over. But as she drew near she heard that horrible sound, the sound that she would never forget.

It was the ice cracking beneath the feet of her daughter. In that moment, she screamed, calling her. Nowadays, she wished she hadn’t. The little girls, got even more scared because of this and decided to walk back to shore but then the sound coming from the ice became louder and Helena saw how her daughter was engulfed by frozen water. When she got to the spot where her daughter had been, she realized the river was only superficially frozen. Underneath, water still moved fast.

She ran downstream, screaming for help and then falling mute, as she saw her daughter’s body floating face down underneath a thin layer of ice. She broke it with her fists, dragged the girl from the water and held her in her arms as people gathered around and saw what had happened. Her daughter was dead, in the blink of an eye. From that day on she respected the river but she hated it too because it had taken her life from her.

Her daughter, a bright young girl, was going to be such a better person that she had ever been. She was going to be someone amazing and outstanding, fearless and strong. Helena was going to help her do whatever she wanted to be the best of all. She would have the courage to leave town and really live the life she wanted for herself. And Helena would have been proud and happy for her, because her life dream would have come true.

But the river ended that. She ended that. She blamed herself, even if it was worthless to do it. During winter, she remembered her daughter almost every day and tried to be strong enough to keep living but sometimes it got extremely difficult, because Helena realized she was truly alone in the world. She fell asleep crying in silence, in her bed.

But the following morning she went, as usual, to work. The dam was still no working but they had to work anyway. She stopped by the river on her way to work and looked at it for a couple of minutes, paying her respects. She got hold a beautiful surviving twig, with some leaves on it, and threw it in the water. Then she moved on, to work and to the rest of her life.

Adele and the Island

  Adele exhilarated but undoubtedly happy and eager to see and learn more. She was diving, not very deep but had been doing it now for about three hours and she had no intention to stop. So many beautiful creatures were there, so much natural magic that she had no intention of leaving, no matter what happened.

But at lunchtime, the rest of the team was famished and in need of food. Adele had to concede that she too was hungry and they all came back to port to have a nice dinner of shellfish and recently caught sea bass. It was delicious although it seemed weird to be eating a creature she had just seen swimming free in the ocean.

Adele was, in no way, a vegetarian or a vegan. She had no intention to be either. The woman knew that humans need to feed and it was natural to do it, as long as the resources were not depleted. In here, this small island just a few kilometers from the mainland, the consumption of fish and all other animals was controlled and they were very careful not to risk the environment, which actually gave them the money to keep their island pristine and beautiful.

The woman, aged 35 or so, had come here for good. She had visited the island several times with family, friends and past boyfriends and had decided she was meant to live there. She looked up for jobs in the island or near it and had found that the harbor restaurant needed a waitress and also someone who knew numbers to properly run the place. And Adele was just right for both jobs.

At first, Ron thought she was bluffing. He had established the restaurant twenty years ago and was very careful when hiring people to work there. He looked for people that not only worked but also loved the sea and respected the food. He had interviewed at least a dozen people, two dozens for both jobs and no one had caught her interest, until Adele came by.

She confessed she needed to get way from it all. The woman didn’t say her reasons for that but assured Ron that she knew how to make people feel welcome. Adele handled the owner of the restaurant her resume and told him she had worked with money before and had always been entrusted by her employers. As a matter of fact, she had never been laid off. She had always just moved on because, as she put it, she needed to keep on rolling.

Ron decided to hire her for both jobs but warned Adele that he needed both jobs taken care of very specially and that he wouldn’t be very happy if she left one for the other or left one of them unattended for long. He was sure she wasn’t going to be able to cope with both positions at the same time. It was simply too difficult.

But surprisingly, she managed to do it just fine. Adele was a dedicated person and, once she put her mind into something, she was unstoppable. She had decided to work the numbers when the orders got slow and even asked Ron if she could stay one more hour a day to leave everything in order. She rapidly picked up a nice pace in the establishment and was soon the preferred waitress of visitors and residents alike.

As she didn’t work the weekends, Adele spent them diving with the local enthusiasts that numbered around a dozen. They would leave in a rather small boat to a spot near the island, filled with fish and other creatures, thanks to the presence of a beautiful, unspoiled coral reef. For Adele, it was the best. She felt relaxed in the water. Besides, she also felt like an explorer, entering a new world each time.

What made her a great waitress too was the fact that she shared all of her diving stories with the people that came in the restaurant. Every dish they asked for was a short story told by Adele about a certain kind of fish or an interesting anecdote about diving. And people, most of them at least, really enjoyed her stories and even came back for more.

It was worrying, though, when she had no stories to tell or when she felt somehow “not there”. It happened rarely but Ron noticed it always happened towards the end of the month, the exact time when the mail boat would come into the island to deliver packages and letters. Any person living in the island that wanted a faster service could get a personal mailbox in the city in the mainland, at least sixty kilometers away.

When Ron asked Adele about why she seemed sad or simply away, she answered she would never put her two jobs aside. And so she did. Adele never let the work pile up, even in her “strange days”. She was a very responsible person. Anyway, Ron wasn’t asking her how she felt because of work but because he was worried about her. Both him and his wife had become very close to Adele and it hurt them that she had decided to be so private with her life, not telling them anything about it.

Eventually, they stopped asking him what went on with her mood at the end of each month. And it didn’t happen because they didn’t care but because they knew she would never say anything. So they just stopped and she didn’t even noticed. She kept on working and telling her stories and diving and being sad for no apparent reason.

That was until a letter came, almost one exact year after she had arrived to the island. Her many friends on the island, practically all the inhabitants of the small piece of land, were preparing her a party to celebrate her first year as an islander. The party was to feature the ocean, seafood and a case of beer specially brought from the mainland.

But that last letter changed that. The day of the party, she didn’t go to work. She wasn’t in the house in which she had been living in for the last few months and wasn’t diving anywhere near the island. Many people had seen her read the letter right in the harbor but, after that, no one really knew where she had gone.

Many said she had boarded the mail boat, arguing with the man that drove it but finally negotiating with money. Others were sure she had gone to the Big Tree, the only so called park the island had on it. It was really a small square of grass with, in the middle, a huge tree giving shadow to a couple of houses. It was a popular spot for lovers or people that wanted a peaceful place to think. Others said she had resumed working or gone to her house, but they were proven wrong very fast.

So, for many days, no one knew anything about Adele. Ron was especially upset, as she had left her two jobs hanging, for which he didn’t look for a replacement. He told his wife that he was sure Adele was going to come back, eventually. But as the time passed, that thought began to dissolve in time.

A young woman named Arisha replaced Adele as a waitress and Ron decided to take over the accounting duties. Anyway, the restaurant was fairly easy to handle and it was only during the holiday season that he really needed a lot of help to keep the place running properly. Anyway, Arisha was a very dedicated young lady and, although she wasn’t really experienced and didn’t tell any stories, she did the job right and was sure she could do better.

It was during the holiday season, in a really hot day, when the mail boat arrived and a letter addressed to Ron arrived to the restaurant. He was busy cooking some burgers so he only opened it at night, when he had done everything to make the holiday visitors happy. Walking home, he realized the letter was from Adele and quickly opened it, reading it outside his house.

In not so many words, Adele told him she was ashamed of herself and the way she had left the island, to the extent of leaving everything she had owned in the small house she had inhabited in. She told Ron that the reason why she had left had been simple: she couldn’t bear staying in one place too long. She had never liked that, even if she felt at peace and she certainly did in the island. Anyway, the real reason was that a former lover, a man she was going to marry once, would write her every month to tell her he still loved her deeply. She avoided him, even if she felt still guilty, until the last letter came in.

The man who loved her had suffered an accident and was in critical condition. Adele left everything to be with him but was not able to get there in time. He had died. She stayed, even if she wanted to live, to see him being buried and to see her family again. But that was just another signal to leave.

She wrote Ron from a ski resort and told him she would love to see him and all her other friends soon, in due time, once she felt she was strong enough.

-       “To be honest, I will never be strong enough for anything. I had no idea what I had around until I lost it because of fear and insecurities. Anyway I hope I see you again, wherever, whenever”.

Ron shared the letter with his wife and kept it in a drawer, waiting for the day he could see Adele again to talk and tell her it was ok to stop running, as no one had never been chasing her.

Why, Cynthia? Why?

Yeah, you could call her that. She was a "gym freak", no doubt about it. Cynthia would expend several hours a day in the gym, exercising in various ways. She did it for two hours in the morning, then she would work, at midday have a balanced meal, work again until 4 and then four more hours at the gym. She arrived home at 8:30, had a salad or something light to eat and then bed, at around 11.

And that was every single day. On weekends? Well, instead of four hours, she would spend all the afternoon there. Cynthia's favorite exercise was pilates but she also joined dancing classes, spinning, swimming, running, biking, weightlifting and various others. It was as if her energy was eternal.

Her diet was also fully controlled. Everything in small portions, no red meat and no flours based products such as bread or even desserts. To be honest, she didn't ate too many sweets. Only from time to time she would treat herself to a low fat yogurt with fruit or a sugarless dessert. She preferred eating a fruit.

Anyhow, Cynthia met Jamie and they fell in love right away. Jamie was an accountant in the same company Cynthia worked on and they had bonded right away. Whatever free time she had to spend, she would spend it with Jamie: watching movies, going shopping, traveling to nice little towns,...

Luckily enough, Jamie also liked to exercise. He had a perfect body, or so she thought. Jamie would join Cynthia on weekends at the gym, were they would run against each other or help one another doing advanced exercises.

To sum it up, everything seemed fine with Cynthia. But that was exactly it. It only seemed.

Unknown to many, she had stopped talking to her siblings, only calling her parents once a month to let them know she was fine. They would never visit as she had been clear to them she wasn't keen on surprise guests. Her brother and sister were fine not talking to her. To them, Cynthia had been too pampered by their parents; everything she wanted, she got it. And it had been like that ever since she was a baby.

They knew what she really was like and they were not really interested in having anything to do with someone that would rather spend time with others or climbing positions, instead of joining them for Christmas dinners or birthdays. Cynthia always sent her gifts to her parents, never getting there and hug or kiss them. It was as if they were distant, annoying relatives.

Her sister in particular, knew a side of her many of her "closest friends" didn't know. Cynthia was violent, easily becoming enraged if people didn't allow her to do as she wanted. Her sister had once not allowed her to use a new lipstick she had been given as a gift, so Cynthia went crazy, throwing things all around and, finally, breaking the new expensive lipstick into pieces.

None of them knew about Jamie and if they had known, it wouldn't have been too different. She had had boyfriends before, all as shallow and obsessed with beauty and power like her. Some were jocks, others more of the responsable type, but it didn't mattered. They all finally met the real Cynthia and ran away scared.

But her relationship with Jamie turned two years old and everything was as good as the first day. Soon, they married and moved in together. Her parents and siblings only knew about it through a friend, in a most uncomfortable conversation.

Her mom and dad decided to go to the city were she lived and stayed in a hotel. They contacted her from there and arranged a meeting. Long story short, Cynthia lost contact with her parents. They had allowed too much to happen, to many indulgences, too many things and details. But this, had been the last drop.

Jamie proved himself an empty human being. To Cynthia's father, he was one of the shallowest persons he had ever met. The guy was only interested in money and in looking good. That was fine, but people normally had more to go with that. No, not Jamie. He was empty, like a vase with no flowers. Cynthia's dad asked him about his hobbies, his passions but the answers were always the same.

Cynthia's mom, however, was not that bothered by the simple mindedness of her new son in law. She was more shocked to know how Cynthia appeared to have changed, a turn for the worst in her opinion. Her daughter talked about maybe adopting, as she did not wish to ruin her body for a baby. She said she had it all figured it out, including nannies, education, sports,... Her mother was horrified; not only Cynthia lived away and ashamed of them (they were meeting in a café, not even a restaurant) but her future life contemplated raising a child to be like them, or maybe even even worse. It was too much.

They left to their home were they crumbled in tears, realizing how bad they had raised their daughter, as they felt it was their fault that she had grown up to be such a shallow woman. It wasn't the gym thing or even the diets. It was the fact that she was obsessed to be perfect, not accepting who she really was. She never discussed her past with people that met her and decided not to have friends, rather acquaintances. She only trusted herself in order to make her life perfect by buying and doing and pretending. And if it wasn't, she had no problem pretending.

Cynthia never knew she had nephews, from both of her siblings. She never knew her parents had won a trip to Europe or that the home were she had grew up had been destroyed by a massive flooding. And all that happened in only ten years, during which she had no contact with her relatives.

Many hoped, without telling others, that she would someday change as having children changed people, as did marriage. Well, she divorced Jamie, who tried to get custody of the child they had adopted, with no success. He was an idiot but he proved to have a heart. Cynthia did not have one. The divorce, the life of her child, they did not change her. She was as focused and cold, as always.

Maybe that is why the kid, a girl called Camilla, ran away from home at age 15. She escaped with the help of a friend and Cynthia's rage was more than it had ever been. But that was it: no guilt, no sadness, no pain. Only rage.

Camilla, after a long search, got her grandparents address and visited them. They were seniors now and she cried as she felt time had been stolen from her. Her grandma kissed and hugged her and cried with her.

They sent an email to Cynthia, where Camilla confessed she would rather stay with her grandparents than with her. That was the only time Cynthia shed a tear. The following day, she sent all of Camilla's belongings the her parents house and forgot about her. She then increased her exercise hours, becoming more and more trapped in herself until, one day, she fainted on a treadmill and died.

She won't come back

Laura wanted so much more of life. She was a nice person, dedicated, humble and worked hard when things had to be done.

But things had not gone her way. The world required to much effort, unrewarded work and suffering that made no sense. When she came back from work, she always thought it wasn't what she  had dreamt to do in life. She couldn't be thankful for the money as the pay was not very good.

To make things worst, she did not considered herself a typical post college girl. She wasn't eager for anything in particular anymore. Her dreams and old drive had died rapidly after she had attempted, for years, to find a job. And she finally got one, she realized how empty everything was.

She did not make friends with anyone at work. It made no sense talking to people that she didn't care in meeting. Chatting and making friends with everyone made no sense to her, as she thought that as a human, she had every right not to like someone or something.

Most of the others, if not all, were her exact opposite: they loved to go to every party the company made, they wore costumes in Halloween and played secret valentine and gave meaningless presents in Christmas.

Laura tried to be "sick" at home all those days. She hated people being a bit more fake than any other day. It was unnerving for her.

And that happened for almost three years. Work and work and work and then some holidays when Laura visited her family. She felt as if the past had come back after her. Everything reminded her of, what she once thought, were good times. They weren't. It was just a bit easier back then but also nightmarish in different ways.

She was happy sometimes but not often and always because of the little things that no one really payed attention to.

It wasn't surprising when, the following march, Laura was found dead in her apartment. She had taken a lot of different pills at once and then waited for the end. Her mother and brother (her father had died years ago from a heart attack) came to pick up her remains. She was cremated and then the ashes were scattered on a lake they all used to visit as a family. It was one of those really happy places for her and had always wanted to go back to.

Her mother was affected by her death in many ways, specially because she lived alone. At first, she felt guilty because she felt the relationship she had with Laura had not been the best. She never bothered in really knowing her, what she liked or disliked.

It was up to Ellen, Laura's mom, to go to her daughter's place and clean it up, pick the things that she wanted to keep and throw away the rest. She had a whole day and had asked her son to join her but he was now a busy doctor and couldn't afford to leave his patients.

The woman arrived early and brought with her a few boxes. She couldn't help it: Ellen cried when she entered Laura's room. It hit her, again, hard. She knew her daughter would never come back and she would never again hear her voice.

By midday, she had already finished. Laura did not have much to pack or sort. Mostly work related stuff and books and so on. Ellen decided to keep only two things: a dress she had always looked beautiful in and Laura's computer. She wanted to check it out before disposing of it or giving it away to some one who may need it.

The rest of her things was donated or thrown away. The week after Laura's death, Ellen received a letter from the company. She threw it to the garbage without seeing it. It was such an impersonal and stupid thing to do. "What do they care", she thought.

Days passed until she finally decided to call a technician to help her look up her daughter's computer. They help her break the password and then gave her a card, if she needed help selling the item.

Laura loved clothes or so it seemed by the sites she visited. Furthermore, Ellen found various drawings she had apparently done with some sort of program on the computer. They were really beautiful, all in a folder called "Four Seasons", probably because of the various colors and styles.

Ellen also found some porn sites (which she decided no to go through), cooking blogs and then she got to her email accounts. They were all filled with work related stuff. Laura got, at least, six emails from her boss and then there were more form other people working around. Ellen could see they demanded a lot from her.

The last thing she found was a blog. It was poetry or so it seemed. Laura did not write very often. Ellen read some pages of it and realized how frustrated her daughter was. It was impossible not to cry over it, not to feel sorry for someone she loved so much and had no chance of really knowing.

To be honest, Ellen thought parents were there not to be friends but rather like tutors. She probably needed to have done a bit of both to make her daughter com closer and confide in her.

But it was too late, and now the woman was crying over her dead daughter's computer. She was dead an no one could change that or the fact Ellen thought she had failed in many ways.

The next day, she called the technician again and asked him to take the computer. Just like that, no money, no transactions, nothing.

Months later, Ellen pressured Ronald, her son, to come for Christmas to her home. He brought his soon-to-be wife, who happened to be pregnant. Ellen knew about it, but was surprised when she saw the young woman enter her house.

The day after their arrival, they all went to the lake and left a few flowers on the edge. Ellen cried in silence and asked Laura for help and peace. On the way back home, she told Ronald to be the best father he could be, as she didn't wanted him to feel as destroyed as she felt right then.