text: &nbsp; When I was 17 years old, I lived in an upper middle class neighborhood in Queens, NY. The lawns were kept neatly manicured, beautiful oak trees lined the sidewalks, and school buses dropped off kids after every school day. The neighborhood was a true melting pot, and every summer, the neighbors would pitch in for supplies and a permit to close down the street and have a neighborhood BBQ. The battle of the BBQ was a decade long tradition between a Korean family and a Black family. They would set up their smokers and grills at the end of the culdesac, and the grilloff would begin amid the sounds of music and children laughing and playing in a bouncy castle. The entire neighborhood would stop by for a plate of amazing food, and to vote on who had the best BBQ. The winner got bragging rights for a year and temporary ownership of a stained off-white apron with the single word GRILLMASTER emblazoned on the front in thick black letters. &nbsp; I was walking on the sidewalk, several blocks away from the battle of the BBQ, when I paused at a stop sign. Before I could turn around, a midnight black Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle roared by me going at least 100 mph and blowing through the stop sign as if it wasn't even there. Simultaneously, a white Oldsmobile sedan was crossing the intersection from left to right. The motorcycle, which was colloquially known as a crotch rocket, barely missed the car and sped by, deafening me with the high-pitched whine of a motorcycle engine being redlined. I watched as the driver of the car snapped his head to the left in surprise. At that exact moment, a second motorcycle, which I only saw as a flash of bright green, raced by me going even faster than the first. The second motorcycle slammed into the passenger's side of the car with a horrendously loud BANG. I had no idea car accidents were that loud until I witnessed one right in front of me. It sounded like a bomb had gone off. The motorcyclist flew through the air so fast that it looked like CGI from a bad movie. He wasn't wearing a helmet, and his head slammed into the concrete curb, killing him instantly with what might be described as gratuitous gore. I remember thinking dumbly, “Blood flows down the concrete gutters just like water.” &nbsp; There was a pause then. I looked back to the car, but I could no longer see the driver as the entire right side of the vehicle was a mass of shredded and crushed metal. Broken glass twinkled on the asphalt as I noticed that even the headlights were shattered. In the movies, a woman would scream, bystanders would rush to the aid of the injured, someone would frantically call 911, and sirens would be heard in the distance. None of that happened though. There was a loud bang, an audible crunch as the motorcyclist came to an abrupt stop, and then... nothing. I looked around to see if anyone had seen the collision, and if I'm being completely honest with myself, I looked because I desperately did not want to be the one to render aid. I didn't need to look in order to know that whoever had been in that car was probably mangled beyond recognition. Nobody else was around though. I focused on the motorcyclist again, and that's when I felt The Cold. &nbsp; It hit me with such intensity that I audibly gasped, and then I saw something that's difficult to describe. Have you ever seen that videography technique where there's a mountain in the background, water in the foreground, and the image is split in half horizontally, perfectly mirrored in the water below? Then the water ripples, and it's revealed that the top of the scene is the reflection, not the original, and the camera was upside down the whole time? Well, that ripple is what I saw. It looked like someone had thrown a tiny pebble into reality, and everything rippled like water on the surface of a still lake. The Cold lingered for a single terrifying heartbeat before disappearing as abruptly as it had appeared. A moment later, the ripple was gone too. I stood rooted to the spot for several long seconds before I remembered to call 911. &nbsp; That night, I thought long and hard about what I'd seen, ruminating and feeling guilty that I didn't feel worse about witnessing a human life snuffed out like a candle dropped into the ocean. The bang. The crunch. The Cold. The ripple. As I thought more about it, I recalled that there was a change in what Google assured me was barometric pressure. At the time, I could only relate it to the experience of being in a car when someone slammed the car door, or being in an airplane during takeoff. My ears didn't pop, but it felt like they could have. There was one thing in particular that kept me awake that night. I had seen something in the ripple. I held the memory in my mind, turning, studying, and polishing it. Whatever had happened was presumably connected to the death of the motorcyclist, and possibly because there was no one else around to see it. If The Cold and the ripple happened every time someone died, the world would surely know about it, so something unique had happened here. A little voice in the back of my head whispered that maybe I'm the only one that CAN see it. “I see dead people,” as the strange little boy once told Bruce Willis. By the time I fell asleep the following morning, I knew something about myself with a calm certainty. I was going to have to kill something and see if The Cold came back. &nbsp; As I write this, night is falling and the temperature is plunging even further below zero. I can feel The Cold forcing its way through the walls of the cabin, through the sleeping bag, and through 5 layers of clothing. It seems impossible. Utterly mad. The fire should keep The Cold at bay, but my fire now looks tiny and pitiful when compared to the unknowable and ancient vastness of The Cold outside. I am but a hairless monkey, toying with forces beyond my comprehension. I dare not risk burning my fire any hotter though. Running out of wood would mean certain death. I gently flex my muscles in groups, stretching and straining each part of my body in sequence and then again in reverse order. I'm careful not to overexert myself and break out into a momentary sweat, which would also likely mean death. As cold as it is, it's still not cold enough yet. The only sound I hear is the wind outside as it whispers quiet but earnest promises of death. Fuck you, wind. You want me? Come and get me. &nbsp; I awoke the morning after the accident with curiosity in my heart and murder on my mind. I knew instinctively that the murder part was going to be a problem. The last time I'd hurt an animal, I had been carrying groceries from Costco into the house. I was carrying a repurposed avocado box, stacked high with frozen meats, potatoes, and onions. I tried to set the heavy box on the counter, but I hadn't lifted it high enough. I lifted the box again in an effort to clear the counter and took a half step back, directly onto my dog's paw. Max, my German Shepard, yelped pitifully as I was unable to redirect my momentum and my full weight plus the weight of the heavy groceries crushed his paw beneath the heel of my shoe. He cowered behind me submissively, tail tucked between his legs with his head held low. He only understood that he had gotten too close to the food, and had been severely punished for it. He lowered his ears abjectly, begging for forgiveness, and my heart nearly broke in two. I felt like an absolute monster, and I hugged him for a long time while apologizing profusely. Clearly, I was not cut out to be the next Dexter. &nbsp; Nevertheless, my plan for animal homicide had already grown and sprouted dark fruit, and less than an hour after waking, I found myself standing near the side of my house, staring at a snail with a sense of growing foreboding and deepening unease. The snail was sliming its way up a stack of red stone pavers. Each paver was about two feet long and two inches thick, and there was a stack of them 10 high. I'd like to say that I took a long moment to contemplate what I was about to do, that I had a final crisis of conscience before playing God, but the truth is, I had decided to kill before I even got out of bed that morning. I plucked the snail from the side of the stack, lifted up the top paver, set the snail down, and let the paver fall on it, crushing it instantly with a wet crunch. I stood there silently for a long moment, hoping desperately that I would feel The Cold, see the ripple, or at least experience something other than bemused disappointment. “Well shit,” I thought to myself. I guess I need to try something else. Snails are like, 1,000 times smaller than a person, so I'd need to kill a thousand of them to even have a chance at recreating what I'd seen. I didn't have a thousand snails handy, but I'm an American, not an American't god dammit, so I gathered the snails I could find in an old pickle jar while pondering the most efficient means of committing simultaneous gastropod genocide. &nbsp; I was keenly aware that torturing and killing animals was a glaringly obvious indicator of future homicidal tendencies. I tried to rationalize it by convincing myself that, if I didn't really enjoy it, it didn't really count. After all, this was more science than cruelty, right? Efforts at trying to delude myself proved unsuccessful, and after a morning spent gathering snails, I counted that I had 23 of them in my pickle jar. I stared at their curious little eye stalks for a long time, watching as their eyes would bounce into the glass, recoil, and then tentatively reach out into the world again. I paradoxically considered letting them all go while at the same time contemplating how best to kill them all contemporaneously. Thoughts of genocide led me to musings on poisoned gas, and ultimately, I decided on fire. I set the jar down carefully on the concrete along the side of the house and retrieved the plastic gas can we used for the lawn mower. I poured a finger's worth of gasoline into the jar, lit a match, and dropped it in. The response was an immediate FWOOSH as the gasoline ignited, burning all the snails in an instant. I hoped they hadn't suffered too much. My hopes seem to have done fuckall for them though. They all burned for a brief moment and fell to the bottom of the pickle jar with sad little clinks as their hard, and now toasty, shells impacted the glass. Once again, The Cold did not come. When the glass cooled, I buried the burnt pickle jar in the bottom of the trash bin in the garage and asked myself how much further I was willing to go in my hunt for The Cold. &nbsp; Insects weren't going to cut it I decided. I needed something bigger, like a cat or a dog. I doubted I'd be able to go through with it though. Just thinking about killing a dog made me sick to my stomach. Something else weighed on my mind too. I had never experienced The Cold before, but whatever it was that I had seen in the ripple, I had seen before. It felt like I had seen an actor in a TV show, and I knew I'd seen them in something else, but I couldn't recall exactly where. The question itched at me, grating my nerves with the knowledge that I could be on the verge of uncovering the greatest mystery in human history if only I could remember where I'd seen the ripple. I racked my brain, and the only conclusive fact I settled on was that I had seen whatever it was in real life and not in a book or a movie. The conundrum was amplified by the fact that I was absolutely certain I'd never seen anyone die before yesterday too. &nbsp; My dad kept a loaded gun in his safe, and the fact that I was even considering using it made me recoil in innate horror. There had to be another way. Like most liberal-minded people, I was aware that every time I ate meat, I was partially responsible for the death of an animal. As the vegans like to remind us, meat is murder. I dealt with this unpleasant fact the same way most people do. I tried not to think about it because thinking about it made me feel icky, and I really like tacos. I tried to rationalize that eating a steak wasn't so different from murdering a cow, and if I could kill a cow, I could surely kill a smaller mammal. For better or worse, I was unable to backdoor my way into misanthropy and psychopathy, and I spent the rest of the day feeling shitty about my escargot a la gasoline. &nbsp; I exhausted myself in the following days brainstorming possible options. My parents thought I was despondent because I'd seen a violent death up close and personal. It seemed prudent to let them believe that instead of admitting I was trying to work up the nerve to kill a medium sized animal in an ill-conceived plan to experience The Cold and whatever the fuck it was that had made reality ripple. No matter how I tried though, I just couldn't talk myself into it. The closest I'd gotten was acknowledging that I'd be willing to kill an animal in self defense if there were no other options available. It seemed that my plan to experience the supernatural a second time had hit a major stumbling block in the form of me being a little bitch. I found myself drawn repeatedly to the scene of the accident, where I'd sit on the sidewalk in a manner that totally wasn't creepy and stare at the wreath and flowers that had been tied to the stop sign. It was during one of these preternatural musings that I realized, if I couldn't kill a cat or a dog myself, I'd need to find someone that would. The answer that sprung forth was elegant in its simplicity. I needed to get a job at a veterinarian's office. They euthanize animals all the time! &nbsp; Update from the cabin: There's something outside.