The Wound

Your scar knows winter before the air does. A word falls, and the wound tightens, thread pulled taut beneath skin, before your mind names what it heard. Recognition. From the ridge, someone drops a blanket downhill. Your scar has already begun the descent. Your boots punch through crust as the wind sharpens. Ice gathers on your lashes. By the time you reach them, the cold is yours too.

The Path

You kneel. Your hands hover, empty of anything that might fix this. The reflex fires: fix it, name it, hand them something they can hold. Each word would put you back on the ridge. So you say nothing. Your hands come down in the snow beside theirs. Their breath is shallow; yours slows to meet it. The cold is in your lungs now. Minutes pass. Their shoulders drop. Yours follow. Between you, the snow has melted.

The Shadow

Not everyone crosses the snow. Some build walls of distance; others bury themselves in closeness. The Considerate feels the cold in her chest. She descended once, years ago, into someone else's winter. The cold entered her lungs and stayed for months. She learnt that proximity has a price the body remembers. Now she kneels at arm's length and narrates their condition back to them – diagnosing from the ridge, voice warm, lungs untouched. She offers a map to a hell she never visited. The one who was freezing feels colder than before. ❖ The Warm arrives before he looks – too fast, too warm – flooding the space before he knows who's there. His hand is on their shoulder before he looks. I know exactly how this feels, he says. Before they can finish a sentence, he has finished it for them. He is telling his story now. He does not notice when they stop speaking. A new frost settles on the one who was already cold: even their suffering can be taken from them.

The Cut