Emmeline (2026)

Blink. Breathe. Taste the metal in my mouth. Cry. Scream. Taste the metal in my mouth. No escape. Too real. I want to die. Why can’t I die? Hold my breath. Count till my vision goes blurry. Gasp for air. Why can’t I die? It won’t let me die. The brain won’t let me die. Let me die! I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here. My eyes don’t match. The cold touch of my skin doesn’t match. I shy away from the others. The others shy away from me. They are warm. Their hair, their skin, their eyes, their breath. Warm. Warm. Warm. Warm. They are angels. They are silver and clean and pure. I am dirty and cold. I am hate. I am disgust. I am unwanted. I don’t want it anymore. I used to want it. I used to want the affection and the smiles and the fake compliments. But it got old. It has always been old.

Reality says that I need to live. I woke up to the realization of what I tried to do the night before. The empty Ziploc bag with a film of white powder on the inside awakens my brain. The dead blade stained with crimson death startles my soul. I shouldn’t be doing this. I remind myself to live. I get up, put my cold feet on the warm floor and try to absorb the warmth. Try to be warm. I can’t. I won’t. I move on. I dress like an angel. I talk like an angel. I charge myself up with warmth, but just enough to get me through today.
 

Dasha (3000)

I am warmth. I am the epitome of warmth. I am looked up to. I am the prize cherub. But I am cold. No one needs to know. No one should know. My white, tulle, angel sleeves hide the cold that hovers below the surface of my wrists. My eyes hold mock warmth. My heart holds pure ice. My mind is a frozen hell, unable to be melted by the warmth that I fake. Maybe if I play the part they will never know. But the ice is cracking. My skin is cracking. My warmth is fading. It doesn’t last as long as it used to. I fear the worst. I fear that they know. That they know I am an imitation. So far so good. So far I have succeeded. But the plastic, orange cylinders filled with my addiction call my name. Scream my name. Groan. Moan. Lust for the warm touch of my tongue to dissolve them so they can dash away every molecule of fire in my body. So they can surround my mind and heart with another layer of ice. My skin, warm to the touch but cold just below, insists that I bring cold metal to its delicate surface. Tear, rip it apart. Let the cold seep out. Let the pain come. Metal on my skin. Metal in my mouth.  

Karine (3067)

I am invisible. I let the cold show. I don’t try to be warm. I know I won’t succeed. I know it will show through anyways. I let the cold show on my skin, show in the smoke that I blow through my pursed, cracked lips. I let it show in the way that I walk and talk and the way my eyes sag and hollow. I am not afraid of the cold. It has become my friend. It has enveloped my body. It has become my warmth late at night and early in the morning. I watch the angels float by me every day, watch their warmth radiate from their bodies. But they are not warm. I used to be an angel. I used to be silver and chrome and everything beautiful and pure. The cold caught up to me. The cold clouded over my eyes, made me see the world as it really is. It showed me that everyone is fighting away the cold and no one is warm. The warmth is a thing of the past. A past where flowers and smiles and friends and family existed and thrived and weren’t forced through emotion. The warmth used to exist. That I know to be true. But not today. Years, decades, centuries, have passed since the cold first overcame us. People started to succumb to the icy touch of reality and yet they still hung onto the ghost of a warm past and hoped for a warm future. People still do. They are the angels of today. The ones that try and believe and hope and yet still at the end of the day they fall. And they freeze and give into their blizzard and become the blizzard. They become the ice and the snow and the below-freezing temperatures that hold them down. But when they wake up to the warmth of day and place themselves into the society of bogus heat and passion, they find that they must become that as well. No one knows that the person they adore and hold dearest is the same one whose body is cold and bondaged under the cover of night. No one knows that the metal in their mouth is the same metal that everyone else’s taste buds are coated with as well.
 

You (2015)

You live in this past. You live where the warmth still thrives. You can touch and taste warmth and know what it feels like. Angels really exist where you do. The cold hasn’t come yet. It comes to some and it takes them under its faux-warm wings and tells them that they need to be afraid and mad and upset. It lies to them and gives them addictions. But it hasn’t become your society yet. Escape it while you can. Escape and fight it off while you are able, before it starts to coat your heart in ice. Before it’s too late for you or for anyone else. Because once it takes you, then the warmth only exists as a memory. It only exists as twinges in your stomach when you fall in love or in the sunlight when it hits your bare, frozen skin. Once the cold touches your tongue with liquid iron and your arm with numb, metallic pain, the warmth that you show is fake and there’s no return. There is no vacation from the cold. There is only a generic warmth that wears off at the end of the day when the familiar taste of metal returns. Metal on your skin. And metal in your mouth.