SYNOPSIS:

In the middle of a snowy field, a seemingly-dead woman suddenly gasps and lurches awake. Naked, shivering, freezing, and confused, Alice struggles to regain enough bodily control until she can get to her feet and stagger off. Each heartbeat brings her closer to a frozen death, but nevertheless she pushes on and through the pain and despair. Piece by piece, she discovers artifacts, things that she finds resonating with some ephemeral warm happy life. A crashed car, a coat, a key. These things trigger memory flashes, but not enough to satisfy her need to understand who and where she is. Eventually, she finds a cabin. She repeatedly tries to break in, but despite her best efforts, she cannot make herself heard. Dimly through the walls, she hears voices, including the voice of a man she thinks is her husband, and the voice of a woman she is sure belongs to her husband's lover. No wonder he is ignoring her! In a nearby shack, she finds boxes, and in one, a wedding album. The wedding is hers and her husband's. She weeps as she reviews the pictures, but her tears blur her vision and her emotional and physical state blur her memory. At the end of her rope, in horror, she hurls the wedding album at the side of the house, and all the windows shatter. With care, she picks her way through the back door, and discovers the body of her husband on the floor. Next to him lies the body of his lover. And next to them lies her own body. All three dead by her very own hand. At that point, her final memories flood back, and she realizes that the woman on the floor is his real wife, and it is she who is simply the lover. She recalls confronting them both and in the fight, all three murders happened in a regretful burst of seconds. In shock and revelation, she staggers to the front door, realizing that she is a shade, a trapped soul. Before her in the snow, a pair of footprints lead away, lifting from the surface. She understands that this must be her fate as well, and in this burst of hope and joy, she forgets that all of this mayhem was of her own doing. She steps out, reaching to join her "husband," but then she falls, flat on her face into the snow. She is lying again in the same place she woke up, with no real memory of where she just came from. Alice is doomed to repeat this sequence until she understands and accepts her role in the deaths of all three of them.

BONE COLD