When you arrive at the spa they give you a uniform. You have to wear it. It’s one of the rules. They don’t call it a rule, but it is. They also don’t call it a uniform. A white robe with a thick sandpaper knit, one size fits all, hem frayed from dragging on the concrete. Like this is a monastery. Or an insane asylum. Water mists off the concrete walkways like soda fizz. Steam exhales from the pools carved into the purple mountain face, and bathers silhouette through them. The streams gurgle through the snow. The waterfall drums, hums, a rabbit-heart thrumming. One pool, the cold one, is empty, steamless, like a sad blue iris. Five others shimmer with warmth and bodies, oases melted into the snow and notched into the mountain side at different elevations. The sky frosts a hazy cobalt. Ice-dusted tree boughs skirt with snow, layers of snow, like a tiered cake or the frills of a tutu.

I hang my robe and walk into the cold pool—I want it to bite at me, gnaw at me—even though at the front desk they told me it was a cycle. Hot: ten minutes. Cold: thirty seconds—this one is scary, but it’s crucial. Then: relax. Read a book. Have a nap. Repeat. Do this three times, or until we close, at nine. Trust us. This is medical fact. We’re a licenced facility. Ask your doctor.

The cold nips, then fuses into me. Knifes my shins, then thighs, then pelvis. A wave laps over my belly button and it feels like a stabbing.

Sign above the pool says 1. Suits must be worn at all times, 2. Shower before swimming, 3. Use caution if pregnant (no problem), 4. No swimming under the influence (I promised Mabel so I won’t). I follow rule 1, wear a navy one-piece (Mabel’s, swim-team style, look at me, athlete girl, reflective strip blazing up my hips, baggy like extra skin) and board shorts (Elliot’s, doesn’t know I have them, or forgets I have them, or remembers but isn’t coming back for them, will just buy new ones, surf waves on one hem, aloha on the other, men’s medium, held up only by the water cling-filming them to my thighs).

I didn’t shower before swimming. Sorry. A woman walks out from the change room with dry hair, skin powdery. Collective rule breaking isn’t rule breaking.

Rule 5 is No Talking. Respect the Silent Space.

Staff in alpine jackets carry trays with paper cups. Water? Lotus tea? Methadone? I don’t reach for one. I don’t ask what it is because there is No Talking Allowed and it’s probably lotus tea.

I’m a blue woman here. A negative degrees Celsius woman. Goosefleshy and the colour of skim milk. A girl, twelve/thirteen/fourteen, with braces and twiggy limbs, points me out to a friend, and they scuttle off. What’s so strange about me? Really, tell me. Oh sorry, you can’t. I kneel, breathe, and submerge, the cold so thick around my chest it feels like it’s inside, tingles through my brain like a buzzed cymbal or popped champagne.

My lungs get hot, but that only makes it more bearable. A bit of friction to light me up, something to distract from the icy liquid piercing some unlocated, constant point of my body.

I pop back up like a premature birth. I didn’t mean to surface. Water clears my ears and it’s quieter up here, with restrained, not-allowed whispering, and water shushing, and blood rushing back to my eyes.

The cold is like a skin of bees, crawling or stinging, but I don’t want to leave. A worker wearing a grey beanie and hiking boots—a late-teens/early-twenties girl with deep acne on her round cheeks—stands on the walkway with her arms crossed. She walks to the edge of my pool, leans in, and does a small wave, like to get my attention, though I’m staring at her already. She has tiny hands, and mist clings to her coat’s fleece trim.

I want to make her break her own rules. The back of her coat reads Silence Please so I want her to scream at me, or better, make her whisper at me, because surely at this point I’m a hypothermic colour, that same colour as the sky, and they don’t want a lawsuit on their hands. When I don’t respond, she’ll snap, shout, while I stand there, marble girl. But everyone is staring, not at the worker though she’s equally implicated, just at me. Everyone is staring from their steamy warm little hot tubs. Suggested elapsed time in the cold: thirty seconds. Why is she standing there, amniotic with ice water? Weirdo. Strange girl. Ghost girl. Doesn’t belong here, of course, but what are you going to say about it? No talking. This is a silent space. Respect that, please.

I climb out and, under that chipmunky pimpled worker’s eyes, take barefoot steps across the concrete, to where the water is a hot river with a fluff of white steam. I take steps in until her eyes leave mine and she walks away.

Heat pins and needles my legs, stabbing up my soles, shins, calves. Like I’m melting from the blood. Heat, bubbles, static, then cool, flat, only warmth left. I sink to the thighs, submerge to the belly button. Elliot’s board shorts balloon and hover at my waist, flutter in the jets. Last time I wore these he was asking me to please just get in the car over and over and for one second I wasn’t screaming and actually heard him speak. I realized that he wasn’t screaming. Only I was. My throat burned, and maybe that’s why I wanted to keep doing it. Screaming, that is. It was like holding my breath too long. I had nothing else to wear until Mabel brought me clothes a week later, held his shorts up with an elastic, one side twisted into a knot. I haven’t seen him since. I guess I can never give the shorts back. Rattling with detox, I’d scratched at the hem with my thumbnail until my skin cracked, and now the threads wisp in the current.

I want to talk to Elliot, I’d said, when Mabel came to visit me, grocery bag of clothes in her lap.

He’s not here, Mabel said.

Tell him to come here, I said.

Six months earlier, Elliot went to Costa Rica to do ayahuasca. He’d invited me to go with him. He’d offered to pay. Right before he left, he said it was barely worth healing if I didn’t do it with him. I refused to do it with him, so he left angry, but it’s okay, plant medicine taught him to let go of resentment. He sat under palm fronds and drank from a shaman’s cup and tripped until dawn. Apparently it cured his addiction, and his grief for his cancer-dead father, and he no longer fears death, and doesn’t need therapy or anxiety meds and has found true forgiveness for those who have hurt him. Worth the $600 a night and the ego death during ceremony #3. I said that to Mabel, I said, maybe I should go to Costa Rica to do ayahuasca and it’ll cure me like it cured Elliot.

I don’t get it, Julia, she said. I just don’t get it.

There’s nothing to get, I said. I wrapped myself into a bony fetus, my own elbows and knees sharp to my touch. I hid her by pressing my face into my thighs.

Well. You’re welcome for the clothes, I guess.

She left after that and didn’t visit me again until she was walking me into the sun two months later, saying, Julia, I think you’re a new woman now. I have my sister back.

When we got into the car, I asked her why Elliot hadn’t picked me up. She just started to drive.

A jet kneads into my spine. The water is trying to whittle me apart. Look at me here in the water, Mabel. Look how fucking clean I am. Two weeks out and I’m still so clean.

Steam wafts off the surface and melds with the low hanging fog, floating through the evergreen boughs. It’s a dusky navy hour; the snow looks like a glucose-packed snow cone all soaked in blue drizzle, ignited by the lights in the pools. Sugar high radioactive. The water hums in a continuous shush. Even the water wants us to just shut up.

Across from me, a woman walks backwards down the pool steps, one hand linked with her boyfriend’s. He follows her, a playfulness between them. He’s boyish looking and tall, an innocence that grew up with him when most shed it, a textbook compliment to her. Mom must like him. No one ever said Elliot and I made a good couple. His mom never liked me. This woman probably gets a lot of good things in life because she’s tall but not too tall and lean but not too lean and toned but not too toned.

I spin circles in the water with my fingers.

She sits across from me through the steam. I stare long into her hazel eyes because I know her. Her gaze probes back at mine with the same recognition. Her name is Charlotte, but we called her Charlie. During presentations her voice had a confident, feminine clarity. I’d dropped out six months before we would have graduated. I hadn’t attended class all semester. She walked out with her Marketing BA and probably hasn’t wondered what happened to me since.

Her ears are lanced with delicate gold hoops all the way up the cartilage, so dainty you forget at some point that hurt. Hurt real bad. Poke then heat then throb. Adrenaline junkie? I see you, Charlie. I see you. She wears a white bikini and water beads cling to the wavy caramel tuft sticking out of the bun balanced on her crown. I thought she was so pretty even back when we lived in neighbouring apartment units. My eyes always traced the slope of her nose and jaw like if I studied, parsed, analyzed, I’d be able to replicate. When she and her roommates hosted parties, the music was acoustic and indie, the light yellow, and they never broke any windows. I’d press my nose and forehead to my wall to feel the buzz through the plaster. They talked over music, then talked over silence, then laughed sporadically until everyone fell asleep. The vibrations stilled and I had a tender spot at the third eye.

She’s probably thinking: I wonder if Julia and Elliot are still together. Probably not. If they were, he’d be here. Julia looks awful. Skeletal. Tired, or black-eyes healing? Hard to tell. But of course, that’s no surprise. Julia was a fucked up girl. He was a nice boy, Elliot. They never belonged together. She was bad for him. Gave him his first kiss with marijuana. Before they’d met, he’d been a virgin to narcotics. Didn’t even like the taste of beer. Our lovely little designated driver.

Her boyfriend whispers something to her, but she doesn’t turn to him. She blinks at me. She’s probably thinking: They were never going to last. Of course they didn’t last. Couldn’t have. Shouldn’t have. They didn’t last because Julia was so fucked up. No excuse for it either. Nice parents, nice sister, equestrian camp during the summers. They had a retriever and a front lawn, shining like some emerald pearl. But she ruins everything. Bad influence. Bad energy. Bad person. Junkie.

There’s something at the back of my throat like the half-digested remnant of someone I don’t know anymore trying to claw back up. “Elliot too,” I say, above a whisper. Lots of people whisper even though they aren’t supposed to, but it’s all sucked into that watery shush shush shush so who cares? I just say it. Loud enough to hit her over the purr. No one scolds me for not respecting the peaceful space, but everyone looks. I press my spine straight against the tile. Jets gurgle and spit against my face. Charlie blinks, cocks her head like I don’t know what she’s thinking, and turns to her boyfriend.

But I know, and she’s thinking: She was bad for him. She dragged him into it. It was her fault. She ruined his life. It’s better this way. Hopefully he’s happy now. Hopefully he’s clean now. Nice Elliot. Smart Elliot. Good grades Elliot. Bright future Elliot. Not like Julia. Messed up Julia. Fucked up Julia. Good thing he got away.

When I stand, the water clings thick to my body like syrup. It adheres to my shorts hem and drips off at the seam. Charlie stares at me, and her stare invites her boyfriend to stare at me, and their stares invite the entire pool to stare at me. Say something about it. I fucking dare you. But you don’t break the rules. You don’t know how. It’s easy after you’ve done it once. Here, I’ll show you. I don’t want to break them alone.

I grab a robe that might not be mine and follow the pathway between pyres of steam. Bathers look like monsters boiling up.

I walk into the first building I see, feet numbing hotly on the cold pavement. Solarium, the sign reads. Sun? Solar? The sky is grainy blue, retro cold. It’s vintage hour. The air inside is temperatureless. Two dozen people lounge in recliners with their eyes closed or lie on the floor. Some read books with chakras up the spines. The kind of books Elliot started reading after he did ayahuasca. The kind of books Mabel wants me to read even though she doesn’t abide by their rules herself, she just wants me to be gullible. I must be gullible. After all, I’m an addict. I had to have been gullible once. Gullible idiot, believed poison was stars supernovaing in my blood.

I walk between the rows of people and sit at the front of the room, where windows stretch floor to ceiling. My face gaunt and body gutless in the glass, skin dissolved. I am floating eyes and a blurred edge of lip, skull-less but haloed in chlorine-frizzed baby hairs. The lack of body, or lack of soul. My skin dries and the robe slouches off my shoulders. I’m so clean I can see right through myself. Look how clean I am, dripping with water.

But sometimes I miss feeling gold at the seams, even if it meant feeling myself rotting for periods in between goldenness. I miss feeling that, instead of tepid all the time. I miss Elliot before he found inner peace. I miss Elliot before he did drugs to make him stop doing drugs and suddenly he was better than me. I miss Elliot bad with me then Elliot better than me then Elliot mad at me and Elliot sad for me. I miss Elliot saying Julia, we have to stop doing this, then Julia, you have to stop doing this, then Julia, I don’t know if I can love you like this.

I miss that, instead of no Elliot and Mabel buying me a $90 spa day voucher for one. I want Elliot to yell at me for stealing his shorts. I want him to yell, Julia, you aren’t good for me, then Julia, you’re hurting me, then Julia, you need to get away from me. I want him to yell so loud his crepe-paper voice blackens my eye sockets just from the sound. He’d never do it on purpose, but I want him to. It’s just like he said, I’m not good for him, but if he’s not good for me too, we could be equals. I want him to bruise me up with his softness. Philosopher Elliot, Role Model Elliot, look at him and me now. Good Egg and Bad Egg, show me you can be both boy, because my skin is fragile, so his thumbprints could stain my arms, and then I’d have something of him left on me.

My skin is clean now, I’ve been scrub scrub scrubbed, and Mabel eyes the crooks of my elbows when she picks me up to drive me to group therapy every week. Nothing there now. Nothing for anyone to see.

Out the solarium window, the snow is starkly white against the cool brush of the evergreens. I sink into the damp cables of the bathrobe.

A horse pleats through the trees, snow fluffing around its hooves. It’s sleek and ebony, like a creature made of oil, black sheen gleaming under the glow from the solarium. It huffs and raises its muzzle to stare at me. Its tail flicks like an ink droplet.

I study the people around me in the reflection and look over my shoulder. No one looks out the window. They sleep, passed right out. Someone turn them onto their sides so they don’t choke to death. Someone watch over them. Someone be their Elliot. Don’t call 911 on me.

The horse doesn’t move. I want to reach out and touch it, feel the huff of its breath in my palm. Punch through the glass, shake the shards from my sleeve, the blood from my wrist, and touch it. Its velvety muzzle alive under my hand. There is no talking allowed in the solarium. No breaking allowed in the solarium. The horse flicks its head. I want someone else to see it and scream, cause a scene. I want it to leave, silent and easy like that, before I become responsible for saying nothing. Not that I can say anything. But it doesn’t. It just stands there. A stray wisp of light refracts in its solar eclipse eyes, some piece of leftover sun snagged in the trees, even though in a minute, it’ll be night.

“Solarium“ is the runner-up in Minola Review’s inaugural Fiction Contest, as judged by Heather O’Neill.

Shaelin Bishop is a writer from Vancouver and studied writing at The University of Victoria. Her fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, and PRISM international.

Image by Marcis Berzins @marcisberzinsx