Overnight the fog and mist had been met with sudden chill, and every surface, twig and branch, and all the remaining leaves were covered in their contours by a sheet of ice.
– The world is glass, she thought; and she thought: How fragile it seems, as if a clap of thunder would bring it down. But beautiful as it is fragile…
She reached out to a glazed, late-season rose, whose heavy head bowed from the neighbor’s garden, drooping over the fence. She touched it: cold. Is that the look of death, beautifully wrapped in ice?
Yet, curious as a child is curious, she held her finger there, though it burned her slightly to do so; the false ice turned to water and dropped from the petal like a tear. Steeling herself, she wrapped the whole blossom in her hand, trading the heat of her palm for the chill that was there. It hurt, then it didn’t hurt, water threaded through her fingers, the slick surface turned fleshy, and the petals responded, life for life. When she opened her hand the flower lifted its head as if unburdened.
– Ah!, she looked around at the bracken and trees in their skin of ice. There’s your medicine, Glass World.
As she spoke, her breath puffed out in clouds of steam.
“Frost”
by hal-2006
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