Under the Weight of Snow

The winding mountain road narrowed as the cabin’s silhouette appeared through the foggy gloom. The opaque night sky blended with the snow, the cabin jutted out from the expanse like a blotch of ill-placed ink. By the time she pulled over in the cabin’s driveaway, her hands were cramped on the steering wheel, knuckles pale as the drifts leaning against the windows.

She turned the key.

The engine stuttered, then fell away.

Silence, at first a sense of somberness, then slowly, the void thickened into a blanket of relief. She could hear the flakes of snow caressing the ground, and the pounding of her heart was louder still.

She did not move, the wheel stuck, adamantly resistant

With effort, she pryed her fingers free, and her hand instinctively drifted towards her right pocket, toward her phone. The icy cold of the tablet shocked her trembling hands, but warmth washed over her as the picture of her wedding day flashed across her Home Screen: faces held in unguarded laughter, her own white dress glimmering with a gallant white unlike the sterile blankness in front of her. And John, oh her John, she could never resist his endearing gaze.

The afterglow from that ethereal day moved through her. Just for a second, she let it linger, burning like a campfire.

Then, she pushed it down, letting the piercing cold take over once more. Clenching her phone, taking a deep breath, she stepped out of the car.

The cold stung a rude awakening, washing away the last flicker of warmth from the photo. Yet it felt right, comfortable even, upon her burning, sinful skin. She stood there and let it engulf her, feeling every icy touch of a snowflake, every piercing breeze.

She opened her phone once more, staring again at that picture. The phone suddenly felt like a piece of hot coal within her palm, and she felt a surge of adrenaline as she chucked it across the sheet of white, watching it stumble into the impenetrable gloom.

She hesitated for merely a second, turned around, and strolled to the cabin. She considered whether chucking it down the mountain was a better idea.

The words looked wrong even as she wrote them: “rustic charm,” “naivety.” They felt too polished, remnants of the language she once weaponized for attention. She scratched out the line, leaving a gray scar on the paper. She vowed never to put such deliberate care into her work again. Even if it was just a letter to her husband.

Outside, the wind shifted pitch, rattling the half‑loose shutters. A faint gurgle followed, dull and constant. She put down her pen and strained her ears.

She was told of a small stream running not far away from the cabin, but it seemed unreasonably active in the dead of winter.

That first night, she fell asleep to the peaceful crackling of the hearth, the gentle fall of snowflakes, and the satisfying bubbling of water. Yet her slumber was plagued by the same grip that held her in a cold vice throughout the day.

In her dreams, the crackling of the hearth turned into raging fires cascading across a building, the fall of the snowflakes became deafening booms, and the soft bubbling became blood-curdling screams.

She woke up in a fit of cold sweat.

She set off early in the morning, as the sun had just commenced her masterful strokes of orange, yellow, and pink across the snow. She missed a kind of warmth the hearth could not give; she needed the photos; she needed her husband; she sought her phone.

Wrapped head to toe, she stumbled across the winter tundra, one crunching step at a time, towards where she thought she had thrown it the night before.

She weaved through the snow in a curving and oscillating pattern, keeping her eye strained for a small glint of black amongst the white. Crunch…Crunch…Crunch. She walked until the monotonous rhythm of her steps became almost numbing. Crunch…Crunch…Crunch. There was another sound, a whisper of trickling, splashing, and bubbling, that soothed her ears. Crunch…Crunch…Crunch…CRACK! She yelped as her foot sank, piercing cold shooting up through her legs, and she stumbled, barely catching and balancing herself on her one responsive leg.

She gingerly lifted her foot and sat down in the snow, waiting for even the slightest remnants of warmth to return to it. She started at the hole her foot had made in the crust, and it revealed that beneath a thin membrane of ice and packed snow, water flowed.

The stream was but an infant, just a foot across and a thin layer of water barely reaching the top of her winter boots. Yet, the flow was strong and purposeful, ignoring the cold and stillness of the world around it. She stared, momentarily forgetting about her soaked boot, mesmerized by the quiet charisma of the moving water, entranced by the whisper of tiny stones trembling under the passing current.

A gush of wind shocked her back to her senses. She could not linger; her foot ached desperately for warmth.

She burst into tears, and the droplets fell graciously onto the page, coating the words in beautiful little bubbles. She could not help but miss him. She wished she had fallen into that stream, and it had floated and carried her back to his gentle embrace. She wiped the tears from her face and the page, spreading the fresh ink in a perfect arch across the paper. Frustrated at her own inconsideration, she crumpled and chucked the letter, unfinished, into the hearth.

She watched through the blurring tears as her words crumbled into black ash, and was again reminded of the raging flames from her nightmares. She could not go back; she had no right to return to that world.

From then on, she began every day with a trek to the stream. What started as a search became a habit, and the habit became a routine she not only thoroughly enjoyed but could no longer do without. She brought a little blanket that she rested upon, feeling the wetness of the snow slowly cut through the fabric, yet she sat there still. Some days, she sipped on a bottle of hot cocoa, and on others, she would immerse herself in a book. The stream was a companion, its soft gurgle soothing her, enriching the taste of the chocolate on her tongue, and softening the words that sometimes jumped at her like knives.

By the start of the second month, like the stream, she began to grow resistant to the cold; her excursions became longer, and she brought pen and paper, not to write, but to draw. She wanted nothing more than to capture the attraction and elegance of the scene in front of her, to do her little stream justice for his fortitude. Yet she could not be worse at it; she always had a way with words, but drawing did not seem to be one of her talents. She would finish a piece, put it out in front of her, and chuckle at its childlike innocence. She sometimes thought she heard the stream gurgling a little louder, in a slightly higher pitch, as her own laughter cut through the gloom. She enjoyed those moments of imagination; in them, she found a haven from her solitude.

She began to notice these moments become more frequent, every morning, as she approached her usual spot, an indentation in the white that now had little pieces of dry grass poking through, the stream seemed to grow quicker, sending little splashes and droplets onto the bank, and whistling at a higher pitch. When, during her quiet moments of introspection, tears began to drip from her eyes, the sound of the stream retreated, as though giving space, yet reassuring her of his presence. In these vulnerable moments, she found herself reaching a hand into the water, feeling the sharp, cold running through her fingers, yet a subtle warmth running through her body. She watched as droplets of her tears fell into the stream, joining him in his journey through the dunes.

She told herself this was the architecture of grief: the mind building meaning out of coincidence. She had done it with words her whole career. Of course, she was doing it now.

She could not bear to continue; she neatly folded the letter, and tucked it gingerly at the very back of her journal. She stared out the window; it seemed the sky was falling towards the Earth. Sheets and sheets of snow cascading down from the stars. She watched in awe as the crackling fire from her hearth bounced light off the glass, adding an ethereal glow to the dimming sky and flakes of snow. She was jolted by the thought of the well-being of her stream; how could he possibly endure this freezing downpour? She could not bear the idea that she was the one who had put a hole in the ice protecting him. She tumbled around within her sheets, unable to put her body and mind at rest. She fell in and out of her nightmares; at times it was the familiar fire, and at other times it was the torrent of snow drowning out her stream, finally overcoming his unbendable will to keep going. She shot up in a fit of cold sweat and gently lifted herself out from under the weighted blanket. She once again sat down at her desk, pulling out her pen and paper

Him? She stared at the word, and her hands trembled. She scratched it out, replaced it, read the sentence, and forced herself to put the pen down. Looking away, pulling herself from the desk, she did not sleep again.

She was out the door before the light had fully settled. The snow from the night before had buried everything: the familiar path of her footsteps, the indentation in the bank where she always sat, the dry tufts of grass she had come to use as a landmark. The world had been smoothed over once more. The ground tried to swallow her, the snow covering her knees and pulling her backward. She waded through anyway.

She did not rest until she heard him once more: the same quiet murmur, the same dull and constant gurgle, threading through the silence and the endless expanse of snow. She jumped up and down in uncontrollable glee, using her gloved hands to brush aside piles and piles of snow, until she could see the layer of ice. She smiled down past her own blurry reflection. She drew an ice pick from her bag and struck a hole in the ice, and sat down, sinking into the snow, without bothering to put a blanket down.

She began to talk

Not the version she had halfheartedly written in her journal, the real thing, the story she had never written down because she could not bear to see it made permanent in her own hand. She told him about the article. About the facts she had known were spongy and had hardened with her own obstinacy, because the story was better that way, because she had been so hungry for something she could no longer even name. She told him about the people it had hurt, about the fire, about the screams. About the morning she had read the news and understood, with a clarity that had not left her since, exactly what her words had done. About John's face when she had given a hurried, incoherent explanation, and how she had not been able to finish a sentence with her trembling voice, and how she had written a note that pronounced a single damning word instead: Goodbye. She was a coward who had always been more comfortable with words on a page than words coming from her mouth.

She talked until her voice went rough and she choked with tears, until the cold had seeped through every bundled layer she had wrapped around her. Until there was nothing left to say, all the words that were left stuck in her throat, and the ones that struggled against her iron-clad fingertips.

Finally, she stopped and simply waited.

No shift in current. No change in pitch. No subtle rise or quickening that she could hold onto. Just water, moving over stones, doing what it had always done, indifferent to the bloodied confession she had laid out like her guts at his banks.

She let out a strained, wheezing laugh.

She had taken three steps when her boot struck something hard beneath the snow. She stopped. Reached down, brushed the surface away with her gloved hand, and closed her fingers around the cold, flat shape of her phone.

The phone pressed like a block of ice through the glove, lifeless. The screen didn’t flash on, yet she saw clearly as day the wedding photo cutting through the cold. She stared at the blank screen for a long time, and this time she did not push her sensations down. She let it move through her, the warmth, the grief, and the inevitability.

She looked back at the stream, the water slipping steadily beneath its shell of ice, tireless under the weight of snow. It did not stop for the snow that buried it, nor for the stones that bruised its current. It carried everything forward: fallen branches, fragments of ice, even the salt of her tears.

“Thank you,” She whispered.

The stream gargled contentedly. She did not know whether it was a figment of her imagination, but that was of little consequence.