My first breath brought water into my lungs. I found myself among some cold things- anchors, shipwrecks, and poles, all fanning out into rusted iron and weeds.

As I floated upwards, green touch of algae still pressed into my skin, the opaque blue of the depths grew thinner. From here, the taste of fresh air wafted into my mouth. The sun, like always, gaped open like the yawn of a cat. It was getting bright, so I blinked.

A face, colder than glass, pressed against my cheek.

Frozen veins and fractures, left by the sharpened blades of ice-skates and pickaxes, scratched against my skin. They branched out in vagrant threads, starting and stopping a web that started and ended nowhere. Yes, all craters have edges, somewhere, but not here.

The shadows of shoe-bottoms dragged along the ice, their edges bleeding like inkspots into translucence. They're only half as dark as they ought to be. It’s the girl- she's on her way to the iceberg again. The laces of her brogues were undone, and they dragged against the ice, like the forked tail of a mermaid on land.

I threw the ice sheet another glance before exhaling. And down I went.

To where anchors and shipwrecks and poles disentangled themselves, sultrily, like uncoiling hair. There was an invisible dynamo somewhere, spinning, spinning until they formed a wall, stretched thinner than coverslips. The water pushed me against it, and a hole like a slit navel sewed me in.

The girl felt her seat shudder and rattle like a train cabin beating against rails peppered with pebbles. A gothic steeple in school colours zipped above the peak- her final ascent for the day.

I sank down stairs, black shelled, pruned into Penrose triangles- a sharp corner bit into my back as I skid against them. It traced the crest of my spine like a sharpened nail, as if hungry for a rib. It was soon the only fragment left of the external as I sank so far down that the triangle of muted light above seemed like a conjured scent fled from a daydream.

On the other side, a flock of doves crashed into the train windows, carrying bullets in their beaks and starry, speckled blood on their wings, battering their heads to the beat of a drowned jukebox as the glass began to splinter into isosceles and scalene-

Concentrate.

Someone perched on the peak of an iceberg called.

I pushed my tongue against the back of my gapped teeth. Light chipped through the walls in herringbone cut-outs. In heartbeats, the water bled out, into a basin of sediment drier than a leather bag. I stuck my head into the gap, stepping over the powdered ruins of stairs- there was a large vale, some sort of moat with eroded lines, ending in nothing but primeval vents haloed in smoked-up clouds, where sponges have pores like eyes and contemplate over how corals have gotten so white and why bouquets of browned worms wriggle in the mouths of anemones. I knew I couldn't cross. I can't see the bottom, or the outlines- I can just feel the air they displace. It had the same consistency as tar. I tried to move back.

The wind shook off snow from the girl's shoulders as she smiled with a smile half as wide, and spoke with a voice twice as faint. The whitewashed walls beneath the gothic steeple, where her acquainted flitted around like fireflies in school colours, cradled her hunched shadow as she let her rucksack fall to the floor. The teacher handed out papers row by row. Your time starts now.

The tar began to thin into molten glass. Then syrup.

Two paragraphs left. Thirty minutes-

It thinned into scarves of water, slipping through me-

Fifteen-

The air scrunched, terrified, and wove like yarn into my hair. The black ground beneath my feet rolled back like a carpet. It was only then that I realised the walls have shifted again- I was in a tube, like a hexagonal straw, which propelled me out the other end like a spitball, with the husks of anemones strewn over my legs, still squirming.

I splat and folded against the walls of a classroom half drained of water. The walls were haloed with the upwards billow of paperweight curtains, white against whitewash. The girl sat near the back, and tensed up- she could hear me, but not see me. But sometimes, I float up, and let a wisp of her breath diffuses over my cheek as she writes, reads, or loses herself in pages of the real yet imaginary. But not today, for I've brought some undead things with me.

Five-

The anemone latched onto her neck, before slowly prying open her mouth and breathing in volcanic fumes- and just like that, a fuse older than nations or tribes ignited. Her hand pulsed in bouts of rigor mortis and still alive, her chicken-scratch letters now missing crosses on their 't's and looping into tangled lines-

Time's up.

Her legs were ready to kick out, for there were bears, sabretooths, men with spears somewhere underneath her desk-

Please leave quietly.

She smiled at her friends on the other side of the room, limp, shaking their arms in hope of shaking out their cramps. A simple hello and a wave warmed her heart, as it no longer needed to beat so erratically to fan away those sulfuric fumes. She drew me back in with a good, long breath. I let myself curl up there, where the walls radiated life in vivid red. Words and exclamations bubbled around me, grey, typewriter-print- I took each one and breathed into them. I let some rise up like high flying kites, painting them in shades softer than buttercups and livelier than leopard print, while I bestowed others with the curse of gravity, and they fell, like lead, back into our crater lake. I crowned others with bubbling wreaths of exclamations and laughs, and watched as their hugs and congratulations folded around her in flocks of cranes- their wings beat so fervently that her feet were soon separated from the ground, and she was still weightless as she tapped on the car door.

The chambers of her heart shook like a train cabin as father and mother asked her how the exam went. Anemones started to blossom in ghostly polyps, and the red thinned into pink. She told them the truth- it wasn't great, but it's all over now. They both chuckled and said that the rest isn't within her control. So no need to worry.

The car halted, and they entered. Their house was as warm as always- the oven glowed with the heat of roasting pork, the bulbs washed the rooms like sheets of celandines, and the soft edges of her armchair held out its plush arms, ready to catch her in a snug embrace.

Her breathing slowed into a regular, soporific cadence, like the soft notes of a lullaby. The air in here was like a cashmere coat. I yawned, and let the valves, ebbs, and flows of her heart carry me back. I closed my eyes, and let myself fall limp.

When I opened my eyes again, I found myself facing the sky.