Her heart hitches when she sees the fortress of three fallen spruce trees and thick alder branches half-buried by windblown snow. Wintry air turns the tears on her cheeks into ice drops.
She breathes in the frozen shards of January air. Words come, ones she’s repeated for two years. “I haven’t stopped loving you.”
In her dreams, her fiancé answers back. Now, cold, empty silence greets her, the only heat a flame of anger that pushes forward. “Did you not care enough for me to play it safe? You knew it was a high-risk day to fly. You flew anyway.” The words punch out, echoing in the wind.
No response from her fiancé, not even an imagined one to cloak her with warmth, just thick gurgling anger rising from her gut. She grabs a branch from the fortress and whips it against the others. “Flying into a storm the day before our wedding? Why?” She slams the branch into the nearby birch trees, willing them to crash to earth as he had, and feels her shoulder wrench. She grabs another branch and hits harder, grief fire laced with anger raging through her.
When the branch breaks into pieces, she swings what’s left at an aspen trunk, smashing her knuckles. Her hands cramp, her tendons scream at her to stop, but she grabs a second branch and hits a birch trunk hard enough to knock her off her feet into a deep drift crusted with icy snow.
She raises her head, spits out a mouthful of snow and pushes out of the drift. Fresh snow falls where her fiancé and she had lain so often, the fortress now reduced in size. He had flown despite the risk.
She had known the risk of loving him.
Enough.
She stretches out her tongue and tastes a falling snowflake. Orange, pink, and crimson sunset flow across the sky like dragon’s breath.
A door in her heart unlocks. She walks through.
Subscribe to Writing from the Cabin
Type in your email and hit “Subscribe” to be notified of new Writing from the Cabin blog posts. If you’d like to also subscribe to the Lynnecurryauthor.com newsletter, please visit the Newsletter Subscribe page.