The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

Fear of the gray, not just in the strands of her hair and her wilting cheeks, but the gray that ran deeper, to the bone, so that she thought she might turn into a fine dust and simply sift away in the wind.

Beneath the covers, they fumbled with each other’s bodies, arms and legs, backbones and hip bones, until they found the familiar, tender lines like the creases in an old map that has been folded and refolded over the years.

Then he remembered Esther, helping him naked into a horse trough of hot water. Pain burned a hole through the center of his back and radiated up through his chest, and he sobbed. He stuffed a fist into his mouth to stifle it, and he sobbed and sobbed. Self-pity. That’s what this was. It wasn’t the searing nerves and muscle spasms that tore him apart. It was his life reduced to useless burden.

That is where he would have dug the grave, in the ground his family had farmed for generations. She crawled between the trees, her knees and palms scraped. When she found nothing, she stood and felt a painful tingling in her breasts and suddenly milk trickled down her front, wet her nightgown, dribbled onto her belly, spilled uselessly to the ground. I cannot survive this grief, she had thought.