Summary:

Time was doing that thing again. The medics should be here by now. The rubber band was pulling back, everything in slow motion, everything but Shane and Ilya. Ilya, whose brusque, lofty demeanor could occupy a whole room, who was so still and not lofty now, whose head was bleeding onto Shane's lap. I needed whump & hospitals so I wrote it Shane had seen bodies before. Not like, mid-emergency-situation, but suited up and made up and already in caskets. Just two. Not people he really knew. His grandmother, when he was 8. He'd only met her a couple of times. Her glossy red-oak coffin had been mounted on a wheeled table and someone had lifted him up to look at her. He vaguely remembered the soft, cotton-candy tufts of hair puffed up around her bland face; how pale she was, how old-looking. He hadn't formed a clear enough memory of her alive to know whether or not she looked like herself going into the ground. What he remembered most about that funeral was his mother crying very quietly against his father's shoulder. His mom never cried. In eighth grade, his art teacher, Renee, died suddenly. He was already on his way to giving up on art, as hockey took center-stage in his life, but he hadn't told her yet. She was well-loved. Kind of an odd woman, freer with her feelings and affection than Shane expected people to be, easy to amuse and always light on her feet. He guessed her family was the same way, because her daughters held an open-casket funeral right there in the school auditorium and invited anyone who wanted to come. Shane couldn't imagine inviting a whole school to look at his dead mom. Shane's parents took him. He hadn't known what he would feel; of course he was sad that she was gone--they'd had a rapport, and she really liked Shane, even though he wasn't all that good at art. But he didn't know her. His father stayed in line with him for the viewing while his mother made the rounds, socializing and offering condolences and sharing memories. It had seemed strange to get in line for something like this. To say goodbye. But that was what people were doing, and Shane Hollander went with the flow. He remembered this funeral because he hated it. Everything leading up to the viewing was fine. A little sad. Nothing unexpected. Students hung their art on a corkboard and a few people spoke. Her daughters spoke. Shane thought about how it would feel if it was his mom. That made him sad. But the viewing wasn't exactly sad. He didn't know what the word for it was. It was...uncanny, maybe. He hated it. Renee still had her long, light hair, blonde struck through with coarse silver. She was dressed in an outfit that she would have worn to school. Patterned dress, layers, heeled boots with laces, a yellow scarf around her neck. Her nails were painted a glossy red. They shone where her hands were crossed over her stomach. Shane heard someone behind him say, they did a wonderful job. She could just be sleeping. But Shane didn't agree. Renee was not sleeping. Renee was not even Renee. She looked like a puppet of herself. The light was gone out of her. The color of her skin was wrong in a way Shane couldn't quite identify. Her hands were stiff, forced together, and he couldn't believe they were the same hands that he'd seen at the pottery wheel in class, shaping soggy lumps of clay into trinket trays. It was the first time in his life that Shane had gotten a glimpse of what death actually meant. That a person could truly stop existing. His teacher had been there one day, a whirl of life and energy and laughter, and now her body was still here, but she was gone from it. It had made him feel sick. The only saving grace was that her eyes were closed. He didn't think he could stand to see her eyes. He dreamed of her dead eyes opening for a week afterward, of a glazed stare with nothing behind it. The dreams weren't about Renee, exactly, but more about death in general; the absence of life; the fragility of physicality. It wasn't a dramatically life-altering experience. There was no epiphany, no sudden surge of energy that propelled Shane into pouring all his energy into hockey, into living, into embodying his physical form for as short a time as he might have it. It was just a moment in time. A subtle shift in worldview. One of the many maturities a person accumulates as they grow up. Everyone confronts death for the first time some time. The only thing was, Shane didn't expect to be doing it again so soon. He was twenty-four. He hadn't thought of his grandmother or Renee in years. Had no reason to. But he was thinking of them now, while he stared at Ilya lying prone on the ice. Hockey wasn't the most dangerous team sport--that honor probably went to football, or maybe rugby, Shane honestly didn't know--but it wasn't easy on a person, either. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had at least been disabled by an on-ice accident. And there were the horror stories, the rare deaths, the skate-slashing and head-banging and high-speed collisions. Two bodies slamming into each other at 25 MPH was not a pretty sight. Ilya's body. It occurred to Shane that he hadn't moved in some time. It couldn't have been very long-- there hadn't been a surge of movement from the crowd yet, no follow-up to the hushed gasp that Ilya's collapse had warranted. But it felt, suddenly, like time had caramelized, and Shane was stuck in it. He was looking at Ilya, whose eyes were closed, and around whom Harris was flitting frantically, and around whose head a dark puddle had begun to form, oozing out from the place Ilya's helmet had been knocked off, and he was telling himself to move, to go across the rink and check on him, but time would not let him. Until it did. The universe snapped back like a rubber band. It had slowed only long enough for Shane to set his sights on his target, the way the world slowed when he was about to take a shot, and as soon as it let him go, he was catapulting across the ice, probably dangerously fast, but he didn't care. He was in the zone. Stray players who had only just begun to realize what happened, who were slowly turning around to look at Ilya and then at Shane, were obstacles he easily avoided. The path lit up before him like magic. It had always been this way with hockey, with skating, and now it was this way with Ilya, too. He made it before anyone else did. Except Harris, of course, who had hit Ilya, accidentally. Harris was bent at the waist, hands on his knees, wheezing from the impact and trying to say Rozanov. "Get out of the way," Shane snapped, and didn't look around to see Harris comply. He knelt beside Ilya. His eyes went first to his hands. It wasn't a choice. He wanted to look at Ilya's face, to see if his eyes were open. But he couldn't do it yet. It was too scary. Hands first. Rozanov's hands were crossed over his stomach, and an image of Renee's superimposed itself over them, glossy red fingernails, plastic-y dead skin. Shane's breath left him. But Ilya's hands were clenched and twitching. Holding himself. Not dead. Not still. Not yet. That made it safe enough to look higher. His eyes were closed, his helmet half-off. He'd been taking it off when Harris slammed into him.