Jack Frost

Like age, the numbness crept up on his blindside and entered unannounced. He was somewhere else as it happened, but there all the same. The set changers scurried around, unseen and unheard, and there wasn’t even a curtain to hide their ministrations.

He sat quietly at his screen, but the energy of his slight movements spoke of action and brought a noise along with them anyway. Tapping at the keys, the outline of words appeared upon the virgin snow of the page, the heat of them holding the fresh fall at bay.

Intent silence surrounded him as he brought forth a creation from the depths. A curious robin hopped out of the bushes and alighted on a snow topped stone globe that looked for all the world like an anaemic Christmas pudding. The blood on the little bird’s chest pulsed gently with every heartbeat as it observed the writer and awaited his attention. Patiently it awaited the inevitable, but this time it did not happen and so the bold garden guard swooped from its perch to land at the man’s feet. From this position, it looked up at the giant, although seeming larger than its tiny size, for it wore its bravery well and there was nothing here to match the bold robin.

The writer could not help but look down at the only dash of colour in the entire garden. The snow had swallowed everything else up and made the place it’s own. The only two living creatures in this frozen world shared a moment. One observing a courageous beauty, the other hiding its thoughts behind intense, dark, inscrutable eyes. 

When the robin eventually tired of its place in this tableau, the writer expected it to return to one of its sentry spots. He prepared to observe this eventuality and a take moment’s respite from his work. A snowflake of happiness in taking in the simplest of acts. A shared experience of toil and the worthwhile effort of living.

But today, the robin had different ideas. Today, it seemed that the robin had made arrangements and taken some time off from the fierce protection of its territory. As it took flight, the angle at which it propelled itself was made inscrutable by the expanse of white surrounding it. The writer’s heart skipped a beat as he at last understood that for once, the bird was not flying away from him, but towards him. He did not flinch as the fearless robin came within inches of his face. There was a message here and the man felt inadequate in his failure to translate it, but when the robin perched upon the edge of his laptop screen, that barely mattered because the writer understood that he was witnessing a miracle in a place made heavenly by the shroud of white snow.

The man nodded. It was time for a break, a long time past the requirement to rest a while and allow himself some respite from the exhausting process of making something from nothing. Like the cold, the exhaustion seeped in, but the writer never once felt like he’d earnt the need for rest, instead he felt guilty, weak and lazy for not lasting the course. There was more to come and he resented stopping. He constantly feared never being able to start again. The anxiety of the loss of that life blood of words was a shadow that constantly hid the light of a Summer’s day from him.

The robin brought more than distraction with it this day. The robin had breached the writer’s world, entered his bubble without bursting it, and now that bubble expanded, accommodating the both of them. 

The writer gazed upon his new friend and the robin indulged him for a few long minutes, then it turned its head towards the scene outside the open globe within which the man always ensconced himself to write. The bird was deliberate in this movement, telegraphing its intent; follow me. The man could not help but follow suit and look out at what the robin was now paying attention to.

Blowing out a long sighing cloud of breath, the mist of which giving the garden a momentary ethereal quality, the writer did what he did best. He allowed his eyes to adjust and then he bathed them in the vision before him. Seeing, like listening was a skill that required time, effort and attention. The bird bade him look closely and take note. This he did, but even as he attended to the task assigned to him, he felt that perhaps he was missing the mark. That there was a point here that he had yet to discover.

More. Always the potential for more. To see more. To hear more. To write more. To be more.

The snow lay upon the branches of the trees and shrubs, and it bore down upon them with a casual cold that did not seem to bother them. The writer imagined those limbs running with blood and how that blood would cool until it slowed in the veins, the grim chill thumping forward in staccato drumbeats, edging closer and closer to the heart of the plant, intent on piercing the very centre of the living being with daggers of ice. Once the king’s chamber had been breached the fortifications would split and fall apart. A long time from now, well after the thaw had driven the forces of the cold away, fungus would sprout from the fallen trees. Dryad’s saddle would be a new throne for a reign that lasted for as long as the weather remained fair. Then the cold would return yet again, breaking the last of the fortress down. The earth below biding its time, certain of the meal to come. 

Everything would go back to the earth in the end. 

Was this cold a force of order or of chaos though? 

As the man mulled this further, considering the notions of good and evil at play within the cycle of nature, the robin ruffled its feathers and made itself bigger and yet less fearsome. There was something comical about this sight, and yet the little bird was broadcasting its consternation. It was not here for the author’s flights of fancy. There was business to be done here, and there were more important matters to attend to.

The writer smiled at that phrase; flights of fancy. The flying creature, fancy with its red chest.

“How do you keep warm in this icescape,” he said as quietly as he could.

Was that why the robin had alighted on his computer and chosen to commune with this human being? Was it simply asking him to consider how tough things were for a small creature as the darkness fell and the temperature dropped even lower as the lacklustre sun abandoned the world? 

Where did the robin go? Was its nest sufficiently insulated against this ice and the incessantly biting wind? Did it have someone to go home to?

The man looked about him and imagined what it would be like if his surrounds were ten times larger. Then he looked at his companion and wondered whether it would remain friendly if he shrank to a size comparable to the fearsome warrior bird. He glanced down at his own red jumper and stifled a chuckle. Mistaken for a fellow robin, he’d have no chance. The little soldier protected its territory to the death. Right now, it considered the lumbering man not to be a threat, and the man hoped that this was a compliment and not a withering insult. 

The freezing Winter light was fading, but the garden remained alight with the snow and ice it had been decorated with. From the guttering, hung icicles, created that very morning when the sun had broken through the clouds and attempted to melt the previous fall of snow. Rows of prisms robbed of the light that they would willingly make into rainbows. Protected from the self-same light that would dissolve them and dash them on the ground.

Water. He was examining water suspended in a state that was merely the potential for so much damp. The writer would take today’s weather any day of the week. The prospect of damp during the winter months thoroughly depressed him. Days on end where the sun was held at bay and everything was gloomy and moist. On days like that, he felt the moisture soaking into his very soul and the shine went from him. From November to March he gradually rusted and seized up and suspected that he might not see it out until the Spring got on with the overdue rebirth of all life.

This downward turn in his thoughts sobered the man and only now did he feel the numbness of the cold. He had stayed out too long, but there was nothing to go home to. Not this Winter. 

“I should go in,” he said to the little robin.

The robin nodded.

The man’s heart leapt. His fluttering heart rose in his chest like a young stag and dizzied him so surprisingly that he clutched the edge of the table and awaited his end, mistaking the unfamiliar sensation for a heart attack. When that eventuality did not unfold, he eyed the bird curiously.

“It couldn’t be,” he said to himself.

His companion nodded again.

He shook his head and smiled. It was exactly the kind of thing that she would do. As this thought crossed his mind, other thoughts fluttered down to join it. Mournfully, he looked at his empty mug of tea, then he turned to gaze out at the virgin snow with eyes glowing with the promise of tears. By rights, there should be a circular set of foot prints in that snow and a streaming mug sat next to his laptop. Millie never walked back over her footprints when she delivered his last mug of tea and gave him a half hour warning to come back indoors and help her make their dinner and attend to all the other chores and rituals that were as much a part of them as they were their evenings.

His chin crumpled as he thought about the emptiness in that home beyond the uncorrupted white blanket, and he thought of the mirror of that home’s emptiness within him. To add insult to injury, the robin took flight and broke the spell they had shared this very evening. He watched it fly to the back door of the house and land carefully on the back door step. The author’s mouth dropped open and he made the most comical of croaking noises as the robin hopped painstakingly along the blanket of snow in an arc that was heading back towards where he sat in a state of something like disbelief and yet hope. 

The man watched the determined little robin’s approach in wonder and he wanted to laugh when it stopped in front of him, cocking its head as though to say do you get it now you silly nincompoop?!  He wanted to laugh, but in the stead of laughter, he sobbed, and for the first time since Millie passed, he began to cry. Bending double and leaning out of the globe, he dropped warm, salty droplets of grief onto the snow. 

He cried and he cried until it hurt, and then he cried some more. His eyes were misted with tears as he pushed himself to standing and gathered his laptop and mug. He could barely see as he walked across the snow topped lawn to the back door of his house, but he knew the way all too well. Outside the door he kicked most of the snow off his boots before stepping inside. As he did, he felt a presence and froze. He joined the garden for a moment in that statuary pose, not daring to hope, but doing so all the same.

Slowly he turned around. Still holding hope in his heart. Holding something dear and precious besides. Remembering. Remembering her. Standing in the doorway of the home they had shared for what seemed like all of his life. This was all he had ever known. Everything before it was just waiting for her to come into his life. Which made this bit without her make no sense at all to him. He made no sense without her, they were two parts of the whole of his life.

There was no sense until he saw that little robin standing in the midst of its garden, staring intently up at him. Standing boldly in the middle of the white carpeted lawn and at the very centre of the shape it had painstakingly drawn with its tiny feet. 

A heart.

He smiled at the robin and nodded, then he chuckled. For cutting through the heart shape was a ragged line. A line that he’d drawn with his numb and weary feet. He’d broken that heart in two, but it was there all the same and there was a joy to be found right now and the writer vowed that there always would be. 

He nodded once more, “we’re well met you and I,” he saluted the robin and closed the door.

A few minutes later he returned to the garden with two dishes. One contained bacon fat and seeds, he’d buy dried worms tomorrow, and plenty of them. The other was filled with warm water. She, Millie, landed on the rim of that dish before he’d put it down.

“Sorry for not recognising you,” he said as he watched her drink, sheepishly he added, “I even thought you were a he…”

She paused from her drink and gave him her patented look. The one she reserved for him and him only. The look said, you silly man, but it was loving and indulgent and there was always an immense warmth within it.

“You should have led with that, Millie,” he chuckled, “you should have led with that.”

Suddenly, the garden wasn’t cold anymore and Winter no longer held any of its dread. Man and bird were at home and the warmth of home returned for the man, bringing with it a beauty that he would never again forget or deny.