The Draught

The cold came in under the door before the light did. Nyra felt it cross the floor of the cottage and settle around her feet while she was still deciding whether to rise. A thin current moved along the boards, steady as a held note, and it carried the smell of the garden in winter into the room where she kept her books.

She rose and went to the shelves. The draught had reached them too. It passed between the spines and lifted the loose edge of a page she had meant to mend, and for a moment the paper breathed as though the book were trying to speak without words. Nyra laid her hand flat against the shelf and let the cold run over her fingers.

A book could hold the shape of a winter. It could hold the word for cold and the word for the thin line of air beneath a door. But the draught itself, the actual moving of the actual air, belonged only to the room and the hour. No page could keep it. The thought did not sadden her. It seemed instead like a kind of mercy, that some things stayed outside the covers and remained only themselves.

She found the gap at last. The window above the garden had settled in its frame over the years, and the wood no longer met the stone as closely as it once had. Through that narrow opening the whole garden was pouring its winter into the house, patient and without end. Nyra took a strip of cloth from her basket and pressed it along the sill.

When the cloth was in place the current eased. The books grew still upon their shelves, and the room held its own small warmth again. Nyra stood a while at the quiet window and watched the garden keep the season that no book of hers would ever truly hold. Then she turned back to the page she had meant to mend, and she began.