The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.

Snowflakes and naked babies tumbled through her nights.

She seemed to him both powerful and delicate, like a wild thing that thrives in its place but withers when stolen away.

In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.

She was in love. Eight years she’d lived here, and at last the land had taken hold of her, and she could comprehend some small part of Faina’s wildness.

the stars everywhere in the broad, deep night, broken only by the jagged horizon of the mountain range. Illumination behind the peaks shot up into shards of light, blue-green like a dying fire, rippled and twisted, then spun circles into ribbons of purple that stretched up and over Mabel’s head until she heard an electric crackle like the sparks from a wool blanket in a dry cabin at night. She looked directly up into the northern lights and wondered if those cold-burning specters might not draw her breath, her very soul, out of her chest and into the stars.