The door shrieks whenever it opens. It is startling, even after weeks of hearing it. Once in the morning and once in the evening it screams open, then closed. A pair of boots tramps out in the morning and drags in at night. The man with the trembling hands has one long loaf of bread under an arm and a heavy sack slung over the other shoulder. He approaches the crumbling fireplace and drops into the chair before it like a puppet with cut strings. He is coated in darkness, a black fog so thick she cannot see his face.

She lies in the fireplace, curled up in the ashes and the last few embers, sluggish with cold. There is barely enough heat to last her the day in his absence. Every night he returns with a loaf of bread for himself and the sack of coal for her. He sets the loaf on the hearth and reaches into the sack, withdrawing two or three lumps at a time and placing them just inside the fireplace, careful not to touch her. When he has emptied a quarter of the bag next to her, he closes the sack and leans back in the chair.

At the speed of crystalized honey, she coalesces a limb. A single tendril forms, faintly orange but much too clear from the cold, and reaches for the coals. She feels his attention on her as she reaches. She wonders what he thinks. Is he upset by her slowness? Is he concerned? Is he angry? He barely speaks. He has told her nothing of himself from the day he found her, a nearly solid lump of clear glass in his fireplace. Not even his name.

And yet, he brings her coal. She finally grasps one lump, igniting it with what little heat she has left. Black to orange in an instant, it pulses in the center. Taking care with the fragile flame that erupts from the surface, she draws the heat back into herself. Magnifying it on the intake, she expels it again—a little brighter and a little hotter—back into the coal. By the next intake, she moves a little swifter to gather the next coal. By the third coal she is fluid enough to reach out and draw the rest of the coals up against her body. They ignite all at once in a blaze whose warmth she consumes in an instant.

In. Out. In. Out.

She revels, for a moment, in the looseness and vibrancy of each particle in her being. For a moment, there is no such thing as cold. There is no winter outside. She lives in a world where there is so much heat, she never slows down enough to be still and clear and unmoving.

“Remara?”

His voice is slow, like the cold lives in his throat and won’t let go of the words. She turns her attention to him. His body hunches forward, arms resting on the knees.

“Remara, tell me a story?” The plea comes through the swirling black cloud that clings to him, muffling every word.

The bread lies untouched on the hearth. She draws closer to it, sending a little warmth back out. Heat is always stronger going back out, like a shout, so she restrains it like a whisper. She watches the bread carefully, until it changes color ever so slightly. Then she pulls back.

“A story?” he asks again.

She sends her words out end-to-end. “Your bread is warm and you should eat it before it gets cold and hard again please eat something and then I promise I will tell you more but when I tell you the stories before you eat then you forget the bread and if you forget bread for many days then all your steps are heavier when you come in and you cannot even stay awake for the stories so please eat the bread first.”

He sighs with his whole body, then reaches out and takes the bread. Breaking off the end seems to cost him everything. He brings the heel of the loaf up to the fog that surrounds his face, where the bread vanishes a little bit at a time.

The coals crack apart under her. The bread tears every few minutes. It is a long, silent wait. When he reaches the middle of the long loaf, he sets the rest in his lap and leans forward once again. The plea is repeated in his posture.

She is formless, a large lump of molten glass with no discernible features. From out of this mass, she shapes a body he can recognize. The first thing she forms is a head, round like his, but with a long swath hanging down off the back. She has seen some humans have longer bits hanging down from their heads like that and she always liked the look of it. She makes rough eyes, a nose, and a mouth for herself so that she can face him in a way he understands.

She rises, drawing together an upper body with two long tendrils below the head, like arms. She concentrates, trying to remember that the two arms of a human have limitations. They can only bend and twist at a few points, and then there are five tendrils at the end of each arm that each have their own rules on how to bend.

She does not make legs. She is not going anywhere until the outside world is warm again.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“One day a long time ago I made a friend who looks like a man and like a tree at the same time and he has short frizzy moss growing out of his head and the moss has tiny blossoms throughout it and his name is Naeed his skin looks like a very old tree trunk but his shape is like a human man and his eyes are human eyes so brown they are almost black and when I met him he seemed to know who I was but I did not know who he was.”

There is something inside a human that forces them to pause in their speech. This is not something Remara has. She thinks she could mimic the pauses if she studied speech, but she believes it is more important that she learns how to make a proper face.

It is hard to practice a proper face for this man. She cannot study him long because his face is obscured, so she knows that the face she makes is more like a picture of a face. Still, she moves the flat mouth along with the words, though the words resound out of her whole body alongside heat and light, and she makes sure that her eyes open and close a few times.

“My friend Naeed told me that once upon a time I was a whole person that was broken apart into little bits and he was so very sad when he told me this story but I could not understand at the time because I had not felt sadness before but I think that I was able to help him feel less sad and now I understand a little better what he was feeling because I wished that he could stay with me but he never stays in the same place for very long but not for the same reasons as me so he wished me well and hoped to meet me again and I wanted to hug him but I cannot touch him ever because I would hurt him very badly if I touched him and when I realized that it was my first time being sad.”

Drip. Drip. Drip.

As she speaks, black fog begins to drip from the man’s body. Like water sliding down the length of an icicle, drops of darkness travel from the top of his head to the ends of his hands, dangling from atop his knees, or down to the black puddle rapidly forming at his feet.

Drip. Drip.

“Naeed left me behind and I do not remember where he was going or where I went next but I remember a beautiful place that I saw where the landscape looked like glass but stronger and thicker and all the ground is clear and it pushes up in lovely shapes and I flowed over and around and through the shapes—”

And here she begins to change. In the telling, she forgets the human arms she has been moving, puppet-like, to underline parts of the story. She forgets to move her mouth. She forgets to open and shut her eyes. She stretches out like a ribbon, unbounded by bones and joints, flowing up and down and around in ecstasy as she recalls the freedom of exploring that first land. She flings tendrils of herself up and around, twisting back and looping herself in graceful arcs to mimic traveling around jutting pillars of crystal and hills of polished quartz in a land that reflected the sun like a million glittering gemstones. The words swiftly melt away into a silvery sound that wells up from deep within her, a gentle chiming in a dozen tones that shivers the rotting logs of the shack and causes the fireplace to rain dust.

By the time she remembers herself, dim light creeps under the door and through the shutters. Sunlight falls on the man’s face, now clearly visible. His eyes are pine-needle green and they glitter and water drips from them. There are deep lines everywhere, on his forehead, in his cheeks, around his mouth. Every part of his face is pulled down. His hair is black and white and travels down both sides of his head to meet at the bottom of his face, circling his mouth. Half a loaf of bread sits untouched on his lap and there is a large pool of darkness under his chair. Not a shadow is left on his body.

She stops in the middle of her chimes. Pulling herself back into a recognizable form, she bows her head. “Apologies I have continued all night once again please sleep or finish your bread and be strong I do not wish to harm you.”

His mouth opens, then closes. He shakes his head, wiping his sleeve across his face. His jacket is green like his eyes and makes him look much bigger than he is. He lifts the bread to his mouth and takes a bite. Now that she can see his face, she studies it carefully. She notes the way each individual hair on his eyelids curls up and out. She sees how the eyes move in tiny jerks. She watches how many times he needs to blink and that there is no rhythm to the blinking. His eyes remain, for the most part, fixed on her, as she shifts the parts of her that form eyes to better reflect the tiny details and behaviors in a human eye.

The light is leaving-time bright and the bread is all gone. He stands, dusting his hands off on patchwork pants, and bends down to grab the sack. Carefully, he spills the rest of the coals along the hearth. She knows not to take them all at once, for it will be dark again before he returns with more. Tonight when he comes, she will make him eat all the bread first and she will remember not to tell such a long story because he must sleep sometime.

He needs food. He needs sleep. But he also needs the stories. She doesn’t understand why, but it is important to him. He wants the stories more than food or sleep, but they are all important and she has to make sure he gets all three.

He throws the empty sack over his shoulder and stumbles toward the door. She has so many questions.

Why do you come back every day covered in darkness?

What do you do out there?

What is this land like?

What is your name?

What will happen to you when it gets warm outside and I have to go?

She has stopped asking these questions out loud. She never receives an answer. She watches him with a strange ache in the core of herself for this sad human and wishes she could make him warm in the place that is always cold.

The door screams open. It shrieks shut. His footsteps fade away.

Remara pulls one coal close and watches it turn orange. She thinks about what story she will tell him tonight.