The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were able before it slipped like water between your fingers.

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.

“We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”

Life doesn’t go the way we plan or hope, but we don’t have to be so angry, do we?”

She had thought often of Ada’s words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.

I wish to be the mother you are to me, she said so softly Mabel doubted her own ears. But those were the words she spoke, and Mabel took them into her heart and held them there forever.

The days became fragile and new to Mabel, as if she had only just recovered from a long illness and stumbled outside to discover summer had passed to winter while she slept. It was like the time she had followed Faina into the mountains, when the world seemed just cracked open and everything sparkled and shone with the inexplicable wonder of snow crystals and an eternity of births and deaths.

It was a shuddering, quaking anguish, and she only knew that she would survive because she had once before.

It happened like this, the grief. Years wore away the cutting edges, but sometimes it still took him by surprise.