Blue balloons of piercing air poured and dropped from each white-speckled tree twig. Lace handkerchief snow fell in soft waves upon the waiting world—so silent and breathless, it was hard for the hiker not to gasp in awe as a redbird sailed overhead, red as sorrow, red as a bleeding broken heart. Shimmering air was as clean as soap on her tight, numb cheeks.

She had stumbled outdoors to the woods despite a wind chill warning red on the weather- forecast. Fifteen below zero. What did she care? Her gloves were outgrown, her coat zipper broken, her boots falling apart. Twelve inches had come in the night and eight more on the way. Still…determined as an icicle, she went outside, stumbling like a crushed lotus against the bright, steely wind. Too many nights, she’d stayed warm and snug inside her house, her body pressed hard against the hot radiator until it burned her. Too many nights, she’d watched snowfall from her bedroom windows, longing only to waltz outside and feel it on her skin.

She walked across the snowy field, her heavy bootprints sinking deeper and deeper. It was impossible to endure this wind. She would find herself snapping to pieces like a frozen bit of mackerel. “Oh, I am so cold, so cold, so cold,” her heart cried. Yet she had come too far to give up on what she must do. Escape. The wind brushed the top layer of snow, soft as rabbit’s fur, over her embedded footprints. So she looked back on lonely drifts, and it was as though she’d never been walking. Who was she, then, this mysterious, ethereal, lonely girl, walking on a lunatic-drifting snow field? She didn’t know. She didn’t know.

Finally, she crossed the bridge with its icy railing, and she slid down to stand on the frozen creek, her boots packed deep with snow. Surely the water was frozen. Rock could not be harder. It was blurred gray, indistinct, with bits of kidnapped rocks and twigs still suspended in their act of rushing by to join the ocean. Time ran far below that creek. She knew. She pressed her ear to the creek and heard it, lub-dub, lub-dub, a heartbeat. A heartbeat.

She gazed into the sky and looked for her anthem there. Birds and wind had an anthem. Why not she? But the sky only shook its quivering waves of cold at her face. She could not feel a tear leaking from her eyes, even though they smarted painfully with cold. It was complicated. Someone at home had said something to her that pierced her like a dagger. He had wounded her to her core. But even now, she could not feel its impact. Her heart was as frozen as though it were an Antarctic fossil. Her heart was so frozen…how could she tell it was still there? Did she have a heart?

She dug deep into the snow for pieces of broken rock to throw. Oh, to throw herself under the freezing waves. Escape. One, two, rocks hit the creek with a dull clang, like a banging soup-can. Oh, she wished she had ice skates and soul sail down that creek like a swan. Instead, she threw rocks at nothing. She must throw. She would break her own heart and make it feel. Three, four, rocks scattered and shivered. Five. Six. Seven.

Her twelfth rock freed itself from her gravity-defying hand, and freezing water rushed up from the creek under its shattering weight. Little bits of water froze and crusted into ice on her face. She stood knee-deep in snow, laughing, laughing, laughing, as it sunk below the creek and disappeared. So she had broken something. Deep inside, she felt her longing and pain open like a red flower to the winter sunlight.