Calla

The snow was stained a beautiful scarlet. I dropped to my knees, pulling off damp gloves to pack it tightly in little moulds meant to resemble snowmen. Though with their crimson-crusted tops they looked more like a patch of mushrooms, gleefully presenting their stunning colours and inciting others to take a sample of their sweet, deadly poison. Somewhere—ever so dimly registered in the dreamscape of my subconsciousness—forlorn notes of a piano rang, drowsy notes that melted into one another like sleepy cats. In this soft, empty moment, where everything took on a strange, surreal quality, my mind is completely calm—calm like it hadn’t been for an unimaginably long time, a time long enough to have made me wonder if I would ever experience calm again. Only later will I remember my deeds, later, when I must leave behind this blissful ignorance and face the frozen dagger of reality. Later.

 

The snow fell quickly now, on the verge of turning into a miniature blizzard; where scattered footprints once stood is now nothing but an endless expanse of layered white. Vaguely, I recalled that the snow had not always been this colour, had not been sometime in the near past, but what it was instead I couldn’t remember. It’s a curious thing—has my memory always been so poor? I wished I could deny it for certain. Or am I deluding myself that the snow hadn’t always been white so I could feel less like a lost storm-tossed ship? That the world hadn’t always consisted only of an impenetrable whiteness? That I wasn’t all alone in it?

 

—

 

Oh.

 

I remember now.

 

I really wish I didn’t.

 

Oh, skies.

 

What have I done? What was I thinking?

 

Take it back.

 

Take it back.

 

Please, gods, if you ever existed, take it back.

 

But who am I kidding? If any of the gods had ever existed, why would they help me?

 

Me, who killed my sister?

 

—

 

Darkness quickly settled over the gloomy landscape. Had this city been as populated as it used to be, a constellation of lights would now be winking awake in the bodies of towering high-rises. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw such a sight. Nobody wanted to stay here after the pandemic; it was too sad, too full of memories that were better off lost. Now, the skyscrapers are nothing more than shadows of their former glittering selves, black against an equally black sky. This ghost city and its few occupants were condemned to stand vigil in the longest night of the year alone. It was a depressing thought. The last place I wanted to be was isolated in parts of my mind I would rather not explore; the last emotion I wanted to feel was regret. 

 

Bone-crushing, mind-numbing, lung-twisting regret. 

 

In the end, though, I could do little to prevent it. Dragging my body into the shelter of an old office building with stiff, pained steps, all the events of the previous day (week? Month, even? My sense of time had become so warped it was difficult to tell) rushed simultaneously to the forefront of my mind. The result was a confusing combination of emotions that drowned out all else, where the lines that defined individual thoughts were distorted and blurred, resembling more a flood of indescribable feelings than any coherent word or sentence.

 

Sweet Calla. How I miss you. I wondered, yet again, what could have possibly possessed me to do it. Poison you, like the little red snow-mushrooms now buried beneath a new layer of ice with your body, tainted with your blood. What even made me do it? Anger? Jealousy? Both things, once so insurmountably powerful, now shrivelled in comparison to this tide of remorse that tortured me mercilessly, ceaselessly, more than anything else ever could, not even her death itself. No; it was not the physical act of fratricide that weighed on my conscience—not exactly. It shamed me to admit it, but what I regretted most was in truth the loneliness, the disconcertion, the moral implications that her death brought. 

 

I remember, now, that the snow wasn’t really red. Of course, my vision viewed it as so, but that did not necessarily entail its certitude. Calla died too long ago, and her way of death had been bloodless. The redness had been nothing but a figment of hallucinations that had plagued me frequently of late, redness that glistened in an imitation of blood everywhere I looked: painting the snow, tinting the sky, dripping on my trembling hands. It seemed I was sentenced forever to this inescapable nightmare.

 

It was silly to plead to nonexistent gods. If a death could be reversed so easily, so without concern, then why would murder be such an unforgivable sin? 

 

Unexpectedly, my thoughts turned in a different direction. By then, I was little more than a raft led by the current, helpless and unable to do anything but drift along the mental path I was forcibly pulled along. Suddenly, I was seeing flashes of early memories, ones that had been completely forgotten until that moment, all viewed through a filter of hazy sepia. Calla and I, fighting over a wooden toy pony. Calla, beating me in a dance competition, grinning widely and showing off a shiny gold medal while I threw my silver one away through tear-blurred eyes. Calla, comforting me on a bad test result while her perfect score lay on the desk for all to see, while I cried and yelled at her to leave me alone. 

 

The memories brought back a twinge of old childish hate that was almost immediately replaced with an unbearable grief, staggering in its intensity. Had the cold been less muscle-locking I would have sobbed, but whatever tears that might’ve fallen gathered instead on the walls of my trachea and robbed me of breath. I had barely time to release a choking gasp before a new tide of memories smothered the sound. These were different, gentle in their nostalgia. Viewing the frames almost like a movie—Calla and I tumbling on the sofa, squishing our cheeks together in a sweet hug, singing at the top of our lungs—regret once again seized me. It would have been an understatement to call it a pang; rather, the magnitude of its raw emotion was unable to be adequately expressed in mere words.

 

Even so, I had only the capabilities of mere words to express it.

 

Calla.

 

I’m so sorry.

 

 

Writer – Romi Feng
Editor – Daniella Bremner
Artist – Tammy Ding

–August 2026–