plainswept

The ice sheathed the old car like a new skin. Shelves of it slid away when she opened the passenger door. The metal groaned and cried. The car rocked on cold, bald tires as Eleanor rolled out onto ground. The grass was yellow and spiky with frost, and crunched under her boots like sparrow bones. She stood in the cold dawn with her arms wrapped almost painfully around her upper body, her toes pointed inward, thighs pressed together beneath her too-thin skirt. What little warmth was left in her escaped with each breath, gently fogging her glasses.

Were it not for her circumstance, she might have enjoyed watching the sun rise. Rocking on the tired swing on her parents' front porch, sharing sleepy smiles over cocoa, her father's eyes soft behind the wrinkles her mother had saddled him with these years past. She enjoyed going home now. Ten years had drawn long and tight and she had never returned, not until the hour after her mother was laid to some sort of rest, and her father had held her against him, and said into her hair, "You can come home now, Ellie."

It was quite a sunrise, she thought, warmed a moment by that thought of home. And then the moment was gone, and it was just another sun climbing up another range of distant trees, and she was cold. She stomped in her boots until the grass around her was flattened and did not crunch any more.

Damn him. Damn him and his goddamned misfiring plans. In every direction the world was straw-colored and flat, unbroken by landmarks of any sort, aside from an occasional sycamore. She should be able to see the Karchman silo from here, she thought, but she couldn't. They were farther from any town than he had thought, then.

She circled the car and stood on the blacktop, slick and glossy like frosted glass. The cold back home was nothing like this; back home it was simply cold. Here the cold was something that cut you until you slid apart. Here if you survived it meant something.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tensed every muscle and clenched her teeth and listened hard. The frost cracked in whispers; the clouds roared overhead like trains. She willed God to say her name. He did not, and she climbed back into the car, where it was colder by far, and the rising sun fluoresced through the iced-over glass like a diver's lamp through seawater, and her teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. Fuck you, then, she thought bitterly, and she waited, but there was no retort. She had a thought that if she slept maybe she would not awaken; it was so cold. So she slept.