Sublime

hoarfrost

its hazard lights bleating carmine auras into the morning mist.

It was past 4 p.m. now, the time of a winter afternoon when Hampstead had a light of its own, silver and mauve; the colour of bags under the eyes of someone you loved and made tired. It came up from the ponds and hung about Downshire Hill and Flask Walk making the beautiful homes more cruelly beautiful.

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

In the winter, we like to look out of the window and see snow, pure and white, making our experience of deadly cold air meaningful. If it must be cold, could we at least have snow? If I must shiver, might I at least look good in wool and argyle? If I must live in hell, I'll look for anything to convince me I'm alive. But in the winter, I'm not sure