Sometimes I imagine you return. You put your nose in my hair and you lie to me. “I love you,” you say.

I knew something odd was going on. I noticed legs of men on both sides of my body, but I had no body. I was an invisible being, floating, with simply my capability to observe.

The legs were covered with dark clothing. I could smell the fragrance of cow shit on their wooden shoes. In the distance I saw a slice of the sky. Fog filled the view.

It was a snowy day but I felt no snowflakes touching me. There was no me. I noticed snow falling on a small sandy road beneath me.

The men guiding me led me further, and then I noticed a hill of yellow earth. I came closer to that hill, closer. Fright began to fill me up. I wanted to stop going into the direction of that hill. Then I seemed to smash together with it. The hill of yellow sand sprinkled above me, exploded in the sky, cascaded, and covered me.

Things went black.

I opened my eyes with a blast. The first thing I saw was the digital alarm clock. Something inside me felt arctic. A cold stone toppled from my brain towards my stomach. I couldn’t recall if it was fear or lust that overtook me. I felt the urge to beg my husband to place himself on top of me. “Just look me in the eye all the time and bring me back to life,” I would whisper.

I gazed at the figures on the alarm. 6:10 AM. I spoke out loud: “Someone just died…”

My husband replied with a voice compressed with sleep. ”Who died?”

”I don’t know. Someone died just now. I’m sure it wasn’t a dream. Please, it is 6:10 AM now. I want you to remember that.”

My man, he rose a little from the airless bed and leaned on one of his elbows and shot me a confused glance. He shook his head.

”What do you mean?”

“Well, I dreamed, but it wasn’t a dream. There was a funeral and I was buried. In yellow sand. But it wasn’t me. I was a sort of remains.”

”Oh my God,” my husband said, “someone died but no one died cause someone dreamed. Now let’s get some sleep.”

He fell back onto the pillow and closed his eyes.

I left the bed. I gazed outside the window of our bedroom. I opened it and inhaled the frozen air. It attacked the inside of my body. It shredded my lungs for a second. It congealed my lips and face. It touched my DNA and stirred my blood.

I undressed myself.

My husband had fallen asleep again. I began to peel off the blankets from his naked body. I began to make love to him. I probably raped him. I kept my eyes open and gazed at the gardens. I wanted to see the frozen world when I committed a crime. ‘Alpha woman rapes husband.’ Snow rose from clouds to the planet.

What I loved about that November was the frost, although it killed a lot of birds. One of the coldest Novembers we ever had. Thick ice layers covered trees and gardens. Houses and streets looked puffy and children with toboggans transformed into statues of snow. Ice cones clung onto windowpanes, onto branches and onto wings of birds. The birds were miraculous. Often they were crippled. I could pick them up from the streets like ripe feathery fruits that had fallen from trees. I filled baskets with starving birds. I took them home. I turned the baskets upside down in our bedroom and I studied their yellow beaks, their purple claws, their suffering toes and I noticed fear of death living in their eyes. I fed them spiders, cockroaches or shiny lumps of fish. Sometimes I fed them my breasts or lips. If they were too cold to live I rolled up my body with a lot of dying birds in the nest I created between my belly and breasts and thighs.

I raped my husband. I was a part of this world. I was a part of wild nature. I was dying rude, like everything living.

Decayed leaves in gutters were captured in lumps of ice and resembled fossils in white solid sperm. Ice made the waters silvery. The dream of the funeral began to sink into my stomach. My cheeks felt pink. My nipples were frozen. My husband shivered and wouldn’t remember my presence.

I covered his body with the blankets. In my mind’s eye I saw two motionless horses standing in endless white meadows. White horses that couldn’t move anymore because they had died, standing in a world of nitrogen.

Birds, black and restless, propelled through empty spaces on the other side of a wall.

I left the room and went downstairs to seek for something that would pulverize feelings.

The phone rang. Outside our house a blizzard danced and blinded the view. I had to answer the phone now. Someone was calling. I ran towards the moment.

The woman on the other side… her voice sounded familiar, but she was distant. She gave me the impression I wasn’t there. I imagined she phoned me from a gap in the wintry earth.

”Your father died this morning,” she said with a voice resembling the voice of a teacher. “I thought you probably would like to know it.”

“What time did he die?”

”The official papers say, let me see… 6:10 AM.”

I could taste the power in her voice. Maybe she enjoyed this phone call. Who knows how many times she had repeated the tune of the words.

“I loved him,” I said, and for a moment I feared my voice sounded like my mother’s voice.