Frost Ferns and Fern
"Is it colder out there or in here?" Nils asked. Fern did not answer. She was curled in the wool basket by the stove, her spines tipped with mossy green, only her nose showing. Nils put one hand flat on the window and one near the warm stove pipe. The glass bit his fingers. The pipe hummed. He laughed, and his laugh left a grey coin of fog on the window. "Both," he said. "Different kinds of cold." He pulled on his boots, his red hat, his two mittens. Then he held the basket low, so Fern could decide for herself. She thought about it for a while. She climbed into his coat pocket.
The door opened and the cold came in to meet them. Snow had been falling all afternoon, and the lane had gone soft and quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone falls asleep in it. Lamps burned yellow in the windows. Nils's boots squeaked. The air pinched his cheeks and made the inside of his nose feel bright and new. Fern lifted her nose out of his pocket, sniffed once, and stayed. Nils bent his chin down toward her. "Cold out here, warm right here," he said. Fern pushed her face against his thumb. They walked to the woodshed together, past the sleeping goats.
The woodshed had one small window, and the window had grown a garden. Frost had crept across the glass in feathers. Ferns, hundreds of them, white and fine, branching from the corners like something drawn with a very thin brush. Nils stood still. Fern climbed out of his pocket and up to his collar, and he could feel her looking too. "They're yours," he whispered. "They have your name." He reached a mitten toward the glass and then stopped himself. Mittens are warm. Warm is the one thing frost cannot be near. He put his hand back down and just looked instead.
They stayed longer than he meant to. The colder it got, the more the glass grew. A new feather pushed out sideways while Nils watched, so slow he was not sure until it was there. Fern sat on his shoulder with her chin on his scarf. His toes went from warm to cold to a sort of faraway tingle. He wriggled them inside his boots and did not move. "Cold out here, warm right here," he said again, quieter, because the lane was quiet and it seemed right. Somewhere behind the shed, snow slid off a roof with a soft, heavy sound.
Then Nils leaned too close, and his breath touched the glass. A hole opened in the garden, round and clear, right through the middle of a fern. He felt it in his chest, that small sorry feeling. He turned his face to the side and breathed into his collar after that, so his warm air went up past his ear instead. The hole stayed. It did not grow back while he watched. Fern put one paw on his cheek, which was cold, and left it there anyway. Nils gathered an armful of firewood with his other arm and stood up slowly, careful not to bump the pane.
In the morning the sun would come over the roofs and find that window, and every feather would soften and run and be gone by noon. He knew that. He had seen it happen. So he said goodbye properly, the way you do when you mean it. "Goodbye, ferns," he said. "Thank you for growing." Fern's nose moved, breathing out small white clouds. The frost held still and shone. Nils carried the wood up the path with his chin on top of the logs, and the cold followed them to the door and then stopped, the way cold does.
Inside, his fingers hurt in the good way, pins and needles waking up one at a time. He fed two logs to the stove. Fern climbed down to the hearth rug and stretched out flat, which she only did when she was truly warm. Nils drank hot milk and watched his own window. The room cooled as the night came on. And there, low in the corner of his glass, the first thin white line appeared. Then another beside it. Then a small, familiar feather. "Oh," said Nils. "You're early." He breathed on the opposite corner, far away, so it could keep growing.
He put the lamp out and climbed under the blankets, and Fern came up after him, step by careful step. She settled in the warm dip beside his arm. Out on the glass the ferns went on growing in the dark, slow as anything, needing nobody to watch. Tomorrow the sun would take them, and tomorrow night the cold would give them back. "Cold out there, warm right here," Nils said. His eyes were already shut. He found Fern's small front paw with his fingers and held it, and she let him, and neither of them let go.
