The Window

The window had frosted over in the night, and the girl stood before it with a book held open against her chest, waiting for Nyra to look up from the ledger.

“A book does not hold the winter,” Nyra said, without lifting her pen. “It holds only the word for winter, and the word stays warm in any season.”

The girl pressed one palm flat to the cold glass, and where she pressed, a clear place opened in the frost, a small round eye onto the white garden beyond.

“Then what good is it,” the girl asked, “if it cannot keep the thing itself?” Nyra set down her pen at last. “The good of it,” she said, “is that you may carry the word to a warmer place the frost never reached, and set it down there, and let a stranger stand cold beside you.”

Outside, the garden lay under snow, patient and unwritten. Inside, the two of them bent together over the open page, and the frost closed slowly again across the glass, holding nothing, letting the light come through.