The Sunburn of the Soul

When freezing feels like burning, Elias finds a sun-drenched escape in an icy nightmare.

Story by Crystalwizard & Gemini.
The wind howled outside Elias’s Prescott cabin, a sound like a jet engine aiming directly at his front door. But Elias didn't hear the wind. He heard the roar of the surf at Punta Mita.

He was lying on his back in the driveway, half-buried in a snowdrift that had accumulated over a layer of solid ice. His body, deep in the throes of hypothermia, had passed the point of shivering and entered a strange, delirious state of paradoxical undressing. The nerves in his skin, overwhelmed by the biting cold, were misfiring, sending frantic signals to his brain that he was burning up.

To Elias, the stinging pellets of sleet hitting his face weren't ice; they were grains of scorching sand blasted by a sea breeze. The numbness creeping up his limbs wasn't the shutting down of his circulatory system; it was the pleasant, heavy languor of a body baking in the midday sun.

"Too hot," he mumbled, his words slurring as if thick with sunscreen. He fumbled with the zipper of his parka, desperate to expose his skin to the imaginary cool air.

He managed to peel the jacket open. The brutal, subzero wind hit his chest, but his short-circuited brain interpreted it as a refreshing plunge into the ocean. He gasped, a smile spreading across his blue lips.

"Water's perfect," he whispered to an empty stretch of beach umbrellaed by gray, churning clouds.

He began to make feeble swimming motions in the snow, pulling himself deeper into the drift. The ice crystals scraped against his skin, a sensation he registered as the coarse embrace of a sandy seabed. He closed his eyes, turning his face toward the unseen sun, basking in the searing, blinding heat that was slowly, gently, freezing him solid. The sunburn, he thought as the darkness closed in, was going to be legendary.