Page 115 of Let It Snow
SNOW
One year ago
The day I learn the first stage of influencing upcoming events feels just like any other.
Nothing hints at a change. I’m sitting on the patio, playing a lazy tune on my harmonica, watching my brothers gather for our dad’s sixty-first birthday.
No one pays me any attention; I’m just the quiet background of this family, and my music is part of that backdrop, familiar but ignored. For them, this is a simple get-together on the patio, eating the cake Dad and Jordan made. Everyone chatters, trading opinions.
I have seven brothers, but only six are still part of my life. The oldest, River, ran away as a teenager and now lives far from the family with his husband.
Next in line is Winter, my only beta brother, and then there’s me, the oldest alpha and the only single one among them. Theo doesn’t count, of course. Nor does Dennis. They were never mine to begin with. So single it is.
Storm cracks jokes as usual, and his husband, Tom, isn’t far behind, doing his best to be the star of the party. He tells ‘funny’stories from the modeling world, snidely commenting on his colleagues’ behavior or even their looks, which feels nastier than funny.
But the picture visible to everyone else here isn’t what I see.
My world is completely different from theirs, and I can compare it because I’ve seen the photos and videos that show the version of reality everyone else sees. To me, it’s plain, empty, unmoving, almost frightening in its one-dimensionality.
I suspect the way I see things is some kind of echo of how our alien ancestors once saw the world. Living submerged in deep oceans, they evolved extra senses to perceive energy, electric fields, and magnetic currents. In me, mixed with human genes, it shows up as what the doctors call synesthesia.
My senses are woven together, colors have their own sounds, sounds have their own scents, and emotions pulse and ripple around people like flashes of light. All of it exists in another layer, a dimension I’ve perceived since I was a child but never knew how to handle or interpret. For years I’ve struggled to make sense of what I see, of what comes and goes. Everything that’s about to happen looks to me like waves rolling toward me, like folds of energy in the surrounding time-space continuum.
At first, they appear at the far edges of my sight, like distant hills on the horizon, hazy and impossible to read. They’re just the first hints of what’s coming.
Then, slowly, they rise taller, curving and swelling into real waves that move toward me, gliding past, sometimes brushing me, sometimes brushing the people I care about.
This pulsing landscape has been part of my reality since childhood. For years it confused and isolated me. It was hard to talk to someone when I saw a trembling sea of energy around them, waves like quantum probabilities cresting, breaking, and manifesting into real events in the here and now.
How was I ever supposed to explain that, to tell them that behind every emotion there was a tiny wave born from some past event? How did I tell them something was coming toward them, but I didn’t know whether to say that it was light or dark, gentle or heavy? They wouldn’t have understood.
So I stayed silent, and some of them thought I was slow or stunted. The truth is, I was overloaded, drowning in information I couldn’t process.
But today, something inside me shifts as I sit at Dad’s birthday gathering…
…my eyes settle on my middle brother, Rain.
For the first time, I notice a kind of coherence in what I see around him. He’s freshly divorced from his husband, and his whole aura looks like a twisted black jellyfish, membranes fluttering, collapsed inward, his aura unhappy and sunken in depression.
I know one of the dark waves has caught him, broken over him, weighing him down with its heavy energy, swirling around him like storm water around a reef.
Not far away, my brother Storm sits with his annoying husband, Tom.
At first glance, the energy around Storm looks fine, but at the very edge of my perception I see it: a dark, rising ridge of a wave. Heavy. Grim. Inevitable.
A shiver runs through me because…
A few months ago, it looked similar around Rain!
Darkness is moving toward Storm, about to engulf his life. His husband seems to drag a piece of that energy with him, almost like he’s pulling a dark hood over my brother’s head.
I narrow my eyes, watching him. How could I tell Storm about this? How could I warn him? No idea.
I’m already the family freak.
But I keep analyzing the energy around my brothers, taking advantage of the fact that everything feels sharper today.
So I turn my gaze to my brother Skye, sitting with his boyfriend Martin, and I see almost the same thing: a swelling dark wave behind him.
