In the mountains, the cold will lick your bones clean. No matter how thick your coat or how warm your hearth, a stray wind will creep like a breath over the back of your neck. And each year, when the nights are at their darkest and the snow is at its deepest, when it seems spring may never come, our tales turn to monsters.
* * *
Blanche had heard all the monster stories. Some were told for weeks, some for a whole season, but in the end, the deep footprints and claw marks and missing roasts were always explained by bears or wolves or the mountain lions that had freely roamed in the winters of her youth.
Blanche’s story seemed to be the only one whispered around hearths year after unforgiving year.
That night, Blanche tended her hearth alone. She hadn’t trusted fire since the winter between girlhood and adulthood, when the cold reached inside her and reduced her to ribs and raw hunger. She had learned that flames were too fickle and easily extinguished to keep her safe and warm. She nudged the logs with her poker anyways.
It was the hardest part of winter, after the lights of the holidays but before any promise of spring. Snow fell like clockwork and each night, the town was blanketed in the hush, until the only sounds were the crackling of the logs and Blanche’s steady breathing. Beyond her window, streaked with fresh powder, the night seemed to still. She wondered if she was the last person alive in the world.
That’s when she heard a song through the storm.
Unease coiled tight in her stomach, like hearing her name on a stranger’s tongue. That song was hers. When she was a girl, her father would sing, “Nous n’irons plus au bois,” in his low, round French, and she’d echo it in her warbling child’s soprano.
That very same voice sang outside her door.
Blanche pulled her bearskin coat tighter around her shoulders. She’d worn it every day for the last forty-odd years, in the frigid winters and in the languid summers. She could never seem to get warm. Now, the fur was dull and matted and rank with human sweat. The old trappers whispered about it when she passed, but her ratty coat was the least of her sins.
Still, the voice of her childhood-self sang, “Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés.”
“The wind,” Blanche said to her empty house. “It must be the wind.”
The child’s voice sang even louder, as though in response, “La belle que voilà ira les ramasser.”
And something inside Blanche whispered, Wouldn’t it be lovely to be that young again? To be innocent as snow? Go out. Go out and sing like when you were a girl.
Blanche shook away the thought and reached into her pocket. Ever since that long-ago freeze, Blanche had kept a box of matches on hand—the promise of a little warmth wherever she went. She lit one, and watched the flame dance between her fingers.
“No,” Blanche answered the voice in her head.
No, she did not want to be that young again—not knowing what would come after.
* * *
The next morning, snow spilled into Blanche’s little house when she opened the door, and outside, it banked up to her knees. She squinted into the piercing white of it. Everything had taken on a glassy sheen: the bare branches of the ash tree, the roofs of her neighbors’ houses. Even the sky seemed to gleam a pale, wondrous blue. She started shoveling herself out, despite the burn in her creaking joints. Crows scattered from the white pines with every strike of shovel against crusted snow.
Once, this part of the mountain had been all but deserted. Trapper’s trails weaved through the trees, and the nearest sign of life was smoke rising from a cabin some miles off. But folks had started mining for iron down in the valley, and now clapboard houses peeked like crocuses in the snow. The trails had eventually been cleared of trees and trampled by wagons until a wide dirt road wound its way up the mountainside and through a right proper town. The old trapper families still knew everybody’s business, complaining about the new folks. But Blanche didn’t mind. She didn’t much talk to folks anyways.
But as she shoveled—body aching under the rhythm of stoop, lift, throw—she noticed a crowd gathering down the road. They held flasks and mis-matched homemade maps, with a look of worry on their brows.
Blanche could’ve kept shoveling. There were still miles of road left to clear if anyone hoped to make it out of town and to the mines. Instead, she set the shovel down and stretched her burning back as she tramped through the snow towards them.
“Has someone been lost?” she called.
The folks from the old trapper families—the children and grandchildren of those who’d hunted alongside her father—offered her only flinty stares.
Worst of all was Claude, who, for all his years, still stood straight and tall. The steel in his dark eyes cut even deeper, knowing that he’d once looked at her with something like love. Claude busied himself brushing snow off his long furs.
But the miners, in threadbare coats not suited for winter on the mountain, all nodded gravely.
“My husband, Ernest.” A woman stepped forward, her cheeks ruddy with cold. “Walked out into the storm last night. Didn’t say a word.”
“I’ll find him,” Blanche said flatly. She couldn’t have the miners running off into the woods—they’d be sure to lose more.
Claude cleared his throat, but Blanche was too old to care what subtle insult he was chewing on.
Ernest’s wife took Blanche’s gloved hands in her raw, chapped ones. “Thank you,” she whispered. She described Ernest, a broad man with curly red hair, and skin gone gray in the mines.
With that, Blanche walked into the dense line of trees.
* * *
The woods had a language all their own. She caught traces of her father’s French in the rustle of leaves, a sharp snap of English in a branch breaking under the weight of snow. Her father had taught her the language of the woods, just as he’d taught her his mother tongue, and the language of their neighbors.
The snow unfurled like fresh paper, and on it, Blanche could read the movement of the woods. There, the leaping footprints of a cottontail. There, the striding tracks of a deer. And there—Blanche frowned at a long furrow of snow in the distance.
And there, a man had stumbled and slid downhill before catching himself against a tree.
Blanche trailed the furrow and the staggering footprints that followed. Had Ernest been drunk? The prints lurched forward then doubled back, some circling as though he’d been dancing.
She recalled the nursery rhyme she thought she’d heard last night, and the rest of the words came back to her as easily as they had in childhood. “Entrez dans la danse, voyez comme on danse, sautez, dansez, embrassez qui vous voudrez.” At the end of each chorus, her father would tickle her cheeks with his whiskery kisses, and she’d laugh and squeal and try to keep singing. Those were the days before the trapper families’ accusing glares, before Blanche had ever known the cold.
There was no song in the woods today, only the soft scurry of creatures and slow and steady breathing. She spotted a patch of red against the snow.
Ernest lay curled in a snowdrift, the snow over his shoulders like a blanket, his hands folded beneath his cheek. Blanche expected to find him blue and chattering, but he slept peacefully, as comfortable as he might’ve been in his own home.
“Ernest”—she shook his shoulder—“Ernest.”
He stirred but did not wake.
More sound rose from the woods: men’s calls and trampling boots.
“Here! I found him! We’re over here,” Blanche called. She tried to dig him out, but Ernest burrowed further into the snow like a tired child holding onto the last wisps of sleep. With a huff of frustration, Blanche took off her bearskin coat and wrapped it around him, trying to rub warmth back into his limbs.
At this, Ernest’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped. He shoved her and threw her coat into the snow.
Blanche shook the snow off her matted furs, unfazed. Perhaps the coat’s odor was too strong. Perhaps the trappers had warned him that she was a monster. Either way, she stepped back from Ernest, her hands raised in apology.
The trappers and miners had arrived, crying his name in relief. They tried to bundle him up, as Blanche had, and offered him their whiskey flasks. “No—no—I’m fine,” Ernest insisted with growing irritation.
The men led him back up the hill despite his steady protests, and Blanche trailed quietly behind.
* * *
Blanche could already hear the cheering on the road before she emerged from the tree line. Dozens had gathered around Ernest, his red hair still dusted with snow. His wife pushed through them all and threw her arms around him. Blanche watched him from a distance, a sense of wrongness settling into her stomach.
Ernest stood like a startled deer. His whole body was stiff, every muscle taut with the desire to bolt. As people said his name over and over, his mouth twitched into a too-late smile, as though he hadn’t recognized it. He flinched at their touch, and, for a moment, Blanche thought he’d try to wriggle free from his wife’s embrace.
But Ernest sighed and finally patted her on the back, body deflating with resignation.
Blanche thought that was odd, but it wasn’t her place to speculate what went on between spouses anyways. So she retrieved her shovel and continued to dig out the road.
* * *
For the next few weeks, before Blanche checked her traps for those hearty creatures that didn’t hibernate through the winter—hares, racoons, or a now-rare mountain lion—she’d walk through the miners’ town, searching for Ernest or his wife. The snow turned to an ashen gray the farther she went from the woods, and rock dust hung in the air like snowflakes.
Blanche finally saw her one day, stacking firewood by the door of her clapboard house. “How is Ernest?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s fine, he’s fine.” His wife rubbed her purpling hands together. “Except he insists on keeping the house so cold.”
“Here.” Blanche took off her fur-lined gloves and pressed them into the woman’s hands. She started to protest but Blanche shook her head. “I insist.”
The gloves fit the woman perfectly. They had the same big hands, knuckles swollen with work. Up close, Blanche realized the woman was probably a third of her age, almost a child, aged by suffering. The lines on her tired face were creased with dust.
“I’m Blanche,” she found herself saying. Her own name was stiff on her tongue from lack of use. Folks had a way of making introductions for her—none of them pleasant.
Ernest’s wife introduced herself as Mary and smiled so kindly, all Blanche could do was hike up her tattered coat to hide her flustered blush.
“Let me know if you ever need anything. I’m the cabin over yonder, last one before the trees swallow everything up.”
Before Mary could thank her, Blanche stalked toward the woods.
* * *
The miners never went into the woods. They had pushed it back until there was a clean, straight line of trees—a line that they rarely crossed. She thought of her song, “Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés.”
We’ll go to the woods no more, the laurels have been cut.
During her childhood, the woods were everywhere, a sprawling, living mass that Blanche and her father had quietly inhabited. They knew their place in it, not outside it. In truth, Blanche still struggled to find her place outside the woods. But here, in the little-disturbed snow, she understood how she fit into the order of things.
Blanche stood above where she’d found Ernest: a patch of brown grass stuck up from where he’d lain, the snow pocked with Blanche’s digging and the men’s footprints. She couldn’t explain why she felt something had happened to Ernest that day. It was as though he’d lost a piece of his mind, and she thought perhaps she’d find it in the woods.
Blanche followed Ernest’s tracks until she reached the place where he’d slid down the hill. Nothing. She doubled back, heading toward the spot where he’d been found.
This time, she noticed something. In one of those circling, drunken patterns, two sets of footprints faced each other. It looked as though, for a moment, someone had stood toe-to-toe with Ernest.
One set of footsteps headed toward the snowy bank where Blanche had found him. But behind the other pair, the fresh powder wrinkled and puckered, like something had skated across its surface.
Blanche followed the wrinkles downhill. Snow spilled into her boots as she waded deeper and deeper.
There, shattered against the base of a tree were large shards of ice. Cold dread shuddered all the way down her back, her trembling legs, and her wet, freezing feet. She picked up the largest fragment, a misshapen sphere, and held it up to the piercing sunlight.
The imprint of Ernest’s head, frozen in ice, screamed back at her.
His eyes were squeezed shut, lips curled back in a wide-open wail. The ice captured every line of panic that had been etched in his skin.
Blanche shrieked and hurled it as far as she could. The severed, icy head arched through the air and rolled into the frosted underbrush. Other shards still lay scattered at the base of the tree: a leg, an arm, a clenched fist.
Bile rose in her throat, and she turned away from Ernest’s fragmented remains. Her mind raced—why and who and how all floating through her head as she marched back up the hill. She couldn’t explain it, and even if she could, no one would choose to believe a monster.
So Blanche went straight home before any accusing voices blamed her.
* * *
A week passed. Every time Blanche gathered the courage to leave her cabin, the sound of ice shattering split her head. She didn’t care about the traps anymore—one of the other trappers would have no problem taking what was rightfully hers. All she cared about was staying warm and trying to shake the image of the ice sculpture of Ernest’s head.
Until one day, there was a knock on the door.
Blanche lifted her head from beneath her blankets. The last time someone had knocked, her father had still been around to answer. It couldn’t be anything good, that was for certain.
So she burrowed under her blankets again, until a tentative voice called, “Blanche? Are you in there?” Mary.
Blanche leapt from bed with such speed, she knew she’d be aching later. Outside stood Mary, an earthenware crock clutched in her gloved hands. Another young woman stood beside her, auburn curls peeking out beneath a hat. She rubbed the cold from her hands, a Claddagh ring glinting in the winter sun.
“Oh good!” Mary exclaimed. “I hadn’t seen you in a while and thought you were under the weather. I brought you some soup.” She passed the crock to Blanche, who clutched the warm stone pot against her belly. It had been so long since anyone had tried to take care of her that Blanche couldn’t find the words in any of her languages to thank Mary.
“You don’t look well. Is it the flu?” the other woman asked.
“Cara, hush,” Mary scolded. “Ignore my friend, she—”
“It’s not the flu, but I’m sure I look like shit,” Blanche blurted. Heat flushed to her cheeks. How long had it been since anyone even feigned politeness for her? And here she was, swearing at her new neighbors.
But Cara only grinned. “Eh, your hair just needs a good brushing is all.”
They chatted like that, the words and gestures feeling foreign to Blanche’s body. When the women took their leave, Blanche managed to ask one more question, one that had been bothering her since that day in the woods.
“Does Ernest still want the house cold?”
Mary sighed, her whole body rattling with it. “I fought him and fought him. It’s not good for my little girl, freezing all the time. But if I build a fire, he throws snow on it. Man’s lost his mind.”
“If you—if you need—you’re welcome to stay with me.” The words were out before Blanche knew what she was saying. “Spring is still a long way off.”
And Mary smiled. “That’s good of you. Thank you.”
* * *
That afternoon, Blanche heard the suffocating hush of the snowfall before the first flakes fell. It interrupted the clockwork rhythm of the storms that swept through each night, and that they shoveled out each morning. It was too early in the day for snow, the clouds chasing away the gentle blue of the sky.
And Blanche knew, down in her aching bones, this was the kind of storm that would blow and blow and blow.
For three days and nights, it snowed.
Each night, the singer roved in front of Blanche’s cabin singing the same song in the same childish soprano. “Entrez dans la danse, voyez comme on danse, sautez, dansez, embrassez qui vous voudrez.”
The song reminded her of her father, and sweet cakes, and a time before she’d ever known hunger. She peeked out the window and thought she saw a girl with a dress made of frost dancing in front of her house. But in another gust, she was gone.
“The damn wind,” Blanched muttered, burying herself under her blankets.
Once, she blinked to find herself with her hand on the door, ready to let the singer in. But she remembered the cold like she remembered her own name, and so she crawled back to bed.
* * *
When the snow stopped on the morning of the fourth day, the banks reached up to Blanche’s window.
After she finally squeezed her knobby body through its frame, her first thought wasn’t to dig out a path to her door; instead, she thought of Mary and Cara. It caught her off guard, this concern for others and knowing that others were concerned for her in return. She strapped on her snowshoes and set off down the long dirt road into the miners’ town.
By the time she arrived, it seemed everyone from the mountain had too. A crowd had gathered around something, though with the sun’s glare, it was impossible to tell what.
As she drew closer, her breath caught. At the center of the crowd, a house had been completely encased in ice. Men with pick axes were working at the doors and windows, trying to get inside.
“Oh, Blanche, thank the Mother.” Mary grabbed her arm. A little girl shivered behind her skirts. “It’s Cara.”
Blanche sensed the people around her stiffen as Mary hung onto her. Mary didn’t seem to notice, but Blanche was sure they’d tell her as soon as she left. Feral. Wild. Strange.
Hungry.
They’d all say that something wasn’t quite right with Blanche and that it’d be best for Mary to stay away. If she only had a few minutes of her good favor left, Blanche wasn’t going to waste it.
She pushed through the crowd with their pick axes and their desperate calls to the family inside. She struck one of her matches and held it to the ice on the doors’ hinges.
The crowd fell silent, and Blanche didn’t say a word as the ice steadily dripped away. She lit another match, and another, running them along the seam of the door where it had frozen shut. Sharp cracks punctuated the silence, followed by a satisfying swoosh as the ice fell away from the door in a single sheet. Blanche flicked the matches into the snow, where they hissed in a puff of steam.
She pushed open the door.
Winter covered every surface of the house. Frost sparkled on the bed. Icicles hung from the ceiling. The floor was littered with strangely shaped shards.
Cara stirred a pot of water over a flameless hearth. Her husband and a young son sat silently at a table laden with powdered snow.
“Cara?” Blanche asked.
But the others had forced their way in behind her. Blanche stumbled and slipped on the icy floor as the men rushed to Cara’s husband.
The man blinked up at the others, as though nothing was out of place. “I’m sorry, do you need something?”
Blanche steadied herself on the windowsill, pulling herself up on wobbly legs, already feeling a bruise bloom on her hip. There, below the sill, one of the shards caught her eye. Blanche reached for it with a shaking hand and held it up to the light.
The ice was shaped like a long, sturdy finger. And at its base was a Claddagh ring.
This was Cara’s ring. And this—Blanche knew, the same way she’d known cold and hunger—this was Cara’s finger. And if this was Cara’s finger, then the person standing over the cold hearth was not Cara.
Blanche had been too startled when she found the frozen shell of Ernest’s face and reacted with quick, sharp panic. But holding Cara’s finger was different. This was the kind of fear that froze Blanche’s feet to the ground, slowly inching up her spine until she shivered despite her matted coat.
Blanche understood the dangers of the woods. She understood teeth and claws and desperation. But this? She’d never heard tell of this, not in the language of her father or her neighbors or the trees. But it sure as hell wasn’t good.
Her trembling hands wrapped around the matchbox in her pocket. She would burn the place down. Even if it took all of her matches. Even if it smoked like hell with the wet, cold wood. They’d call her a monster, but they already did. She had to do it. No one else knew what she knew, and no one would believe her anyways. But Blanche knew that, whatever this was, it needed to stop here or it would spread like a pestilence through town. First Ernest, now Cara and her family. Something was transforming people into icy husks and taking over their bodies. And something like that couldn’t be allowed to live.
But then Mary came in, throwing herself around Cara’s shoulders. Shock and irritation registered on the face that looked like Cara’s but belonged to something else entirely. It offered an awkwardly rigid pat on Mary’s head.
“Thank you,” Mary said to Blanche, as she held the thing she thought was her friend.
Blanche managed only to nod before she fled that godforsaken house. Her matchbox was crushed in her clammy palm.
* * *
It snowed again. The sky resumed its steady rhythm of sunlight, nightfall, snow.
This time, Blanche was ready.
She sat in front of her window, shrouded in her bearskin coat and armed with her matches, a candle, and a knife. The fire roared in the hearth. She sweated through her night shirt.
Behind the clouds, the moon was full, and it reflected off the snow like a beacon. She watched. And watched. And watched.
By the time the moon had reached its peak, her dry eyes burned and her lids had grown heavy.
But that was when she saw it.
A wind gusted from the valley, the air thick with ash and dust. The snow began to dance, blown by the gale. They tangled together, a streak of gray twisting alongside a strand of white. It spun in circles, tighter and tighter, until it was a solid mass—until it was a moving body.
The creature made of snow and ash hunched forward, too-long arms dragging on the ground. Sleet rolled down its back like tangled hair. Its eyes gleamed with the metallic shine of iron ore. It took one staggering step, then another. Blanche’s knife clattered to the floor as the creature raised a single, claw-like finger to the sky.
In a flash of moonlight, the creature divided into hundreds of parts, each of them familiar to Blanche. It had become icy replicas of her neighbors—there Mary, there Mary’s daughter, there Claude. They moved toward town.
All except one, who danced in the opposite direction of the group, toward the last house on the edge of the woods.
Blanche’s house.
Blanche pulled her coat tighter as a girl made of ice and dust began to sing. “Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés. La belle que voilà ira les ramasser.”
Despite the fire, despite the bearskin, Blanche’s body ran cold. She thought of the long-ago winter, the one that had ruined her, and shivered harder still.
Blanche pressed her face to the window, watching the girl—identical to her at sixteen—spin in the snow outside of her house. The girl had Blanche’s braided hair, gapped-tooth smile, and the pert nose she’d inherited from her father. She wore the same heavy fur coat that Blanche wore now, only it was new. The fur shone sleek and fresh in the moonlight. It had been a Christmas gift from her father.
A few weeks later, he went to check his traps and didn’t return. Blanche had gone to look for him. If she’d known what would happen, she wouldn’t have dared.
The girl’s song was sad and eerie, the way Blanche had sung it to steady herself when she was sixteen, alone in the woods. Those were the last moments before Blanche had known the true meaning of cold. Before the other trappers branded her as an outcast, calling her untrustworthy and unnatural.
The window fogged with Blanche’s breath. She rubbed it with her sleeve to clear it.
The girl’s icy face was pressed to the other side.
Blanche jerked back. The sudden motion snuffed out the candle. Moonlight shone through the girl’s translucent body, as though she was lit from within.
This close, Blanche saw the tips of the girl’s eyelashes flecked with frost and the streaks of ash mottling her icy cheeks. “What do you want?” she demanded, though her heart rabbited in her chest.
But still the girl sang, reaching the chorus. “Entrez dans la danse, voyez comme on danse, sautez, dansez, embrassez qui vous voudrez.”
Blanche felt the song pulling at her, urging her towards the door. Let her in, her traitorous thoughts whispered. Let her in, and you’ll never feel cold again.
She wanted to be this girl. She wanted to go back to before. Before the cold. Before the hunger. Before the guilt and the shame.
The girl kept singing, and Blanche heard her father’s voice, his French, low and soft, imagined his face smiling. She remembered him warm, and laughing, and alive.
And then, unbidden, she remembered him the way she’d found him in the cave, silent and purpling. The snow had been falling and falling, his tracks nearly impossible to find. By the time she reached the cave, she’d been wandering the woods for days. The cold and the hunger had gnawed away everything that had made Blanche herself, leaving only a hollow ache that needed to be filled. And her father wouldn’t have wanted her to die—she knew that—she still knew that.
Blanche gasped, pulling herself from her thoughts like a swimmer breaking the surface of a pond. She pounded her fist on the window. “I will not apologize for living.”
The icy girl cocked her head, song dying in her mouth. A crack split along the side of her neck, up and around her chin, until it shone down the center of the girl’s face.
And it crumbled away.
The shell of the girl’s face—of Blanche’s face decades ago—lay shattered in the fresh powder. The face that was left was all teeth and sharp edges, gnashing at the glass.
Blanche screamed and the creature screamed, until there wasn’t any world beyond the noise, beyond the cold, beyond the raw nerve of fear. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only howl into the dark like a cornered animal. She was a cornered animal.
The creature’s long teeth scraped against the window, its jaw hanging unnaturally low. Blanche saw right down its throat, into the pit of ash and ore within. Steam spilled from its mouth. And she understood.
It wanted a body that would not melt.
Anger simmered inside her chest, burning from her cries. After all she’d done to save this tired body of hers, that thing thought it could take it?
She fumbled in her pockets for her matchbox, struck one, and held it up to the window. She wondered what she looked like to this creature, her face refracted through the frosted glass. She hoped she looked like a monster herself, one born of flame and heat. “Go,” she demanded.
Still the creature clawed and snapped. The glass held, the door latch held.
“Go.”
Blanche lit match after match as the moon descended slowly, and at daybreak, the monster vanished with a gust of wind, nothing more than powdered snow and ash.
* * *
Blanche woke to thunder. She’d fallen asleep on the floor, her cheek resting on the windowsill. As she came to, she couldn’t tell which part of her body hurt. She was one single ache. The thunder roared on, until she realized it wasn’t thunder at all. It was someone pounding on her front door.
Blanche straightened as best she could, despite the knots in her shoulders and neck and the cricks in her legs and back.
She pulled her coat tight and felt for the matches in her pocket.
Claude stood on the other side of the door. “Blanche.”
She startled. It’d been so long since he’d spoken her name to her. They were children again, traipsing through the woods, unaware of cold or hunger. They were on the edge of adulthood, their hands searching each other’s skin.
But he shifted in the doorway, and Blanche saw the crowd of folks behind him: trapper families and miners alike.
“Is someone else missing?” she murmured.
“We found a girl next to where we found Ernest.”
“And she’s…” Blanche couldn’t find the words.
“Don’t recognize her parents. Screaming, crying, carrying on that it’s too hot.” He looked her up and down. “So—how are you doing it?”
The sound of ice shattering filled Blanche’s head. “Doing it? You think I—you think I—”
Shouts went up from the crowd, strangers calling her a monster.
She pushed past Claude to face them. “And tell me what I’ve done exactly.”
The answers came back in a blur of white noise. Claude held up a hand to silence them. “You terrorize us with strange sounds in the night, make folks not right in the head, and create all this snow.” He spoke evenly, and the crowd cheered their assent.
Blanche tilted her face toward the ice-blue sky. She felt the wind rising with the rattle in her bones. It would snow again at nightfall. “No human could do those things.”
But Claude cut her a look that she knew all too well. He didn’t think she was human. He hadn’t thought that for a very long time.
Blanche didn’t shrug away when Claude grabbed her arm. Whatever he had planned for her, she’d accept it. Because she was a monster, wasn’t she? Claude thought it. These strangers thought it.
And, in her darkest, loneliest moments, Blanche thought it too.
* * *
A group of men led her into the woods. The quiet was welcome after the constant buzz of the crowd. A branch snapped behind them, and Blanche whirled before the men even thought to look.
Mary stood, ruddy-faced, gloved hands balled into fists. “Please, let her go. You know this has nothing to do with her.”
Claude smiled, slow and satisfied, like a hunter about to kill.
“Please—please don’t,” Blanche whispered.
“Oh, because you know her so well,” Claude goaded.
At this Mary stiffened. Her eyes shifted over to Blanche, and in them, Blanche saw her calculating just how much she knew.
Blanche took hold of Claude’s arm. “You’ve made your point,” she hissed.
But he wouldn’t budge. “Do you know what happened when her father went missing one winter, and Blanche went looking for him?” His voice filled the woods. The miners in the group leaned in, this gossip new to them, not a ghost story passed down year after year, like it had been among the trappers.
“Please, go. I’ll be fine,” Blanche told Mary, voice pinched with panic. She just wanted her to leave, to run before she had to hear the end of the tale.
“We found them in a cave when the snow started to melt in the spring. Blanche was alive and well-fed. Her father—” he paused for dramatic effect. He’d told this story hundreds of times, Blanche realized, and perfected the art of it. The thought made bile churn in her stomach. “From the neck down, all that was left of her father were clean, picked bones.”
Mary gasped. Her sweet face was first wide open with shock, then curled in disgust. In the lines on her face, Blanche read the end of everything. Mary knew the truth, and in that knowing, Blanche lost the first and last friend she’d made in decades.
Because Mary knew, but there was no way she could’ve understood: how the snow froze over the cave mouth, how deep the tunnels went, how for weeks, Blanche listened to the muted howl of the wind and her own screaming heart.
Mary couldn’t have understood the cold and the hunger, how they reduced Blanche to only one purpose: making them stop. How, when Blanche could count every rib and notch of her spine, and feel her eyes sinking into her skull, she covered her father’s long-dead face and made the first cut. How underneath it all, he was muscle and fat, like any other animal she’d killed.
Mary couldn’t have understood the grief, when the trappers finally broke them free of the ice. Blanche had thought she was saved. She’d survived the winter. First she saw the men, and then she saw Claude—her Claude, whose hot breath had whispered promises of forever when they snuck beneath each other’s blankets in the hunting camp.
But grown men retched when they saw her father’s bones. And Claude, who once looked at her with such warmth, it could melt the snow around them, had looked at her like she was a monster.
And so she was.
“Come on,” Blanche tugged on Claude’s arm. He still had that self-satisfied smile slashed across his face. “Weren’t you about to abandon me in the woods? Let’s get on with it.”
Blanche couldn’t bear another glance at Mary, so she led herself deeper into the woods, the shocked miners and smug trappers following.
* * *
They blindfolded Blanche and turned her in circles until she stumbled. They needn’t have bothered. Dizzy or not, Blanche knew exactly where she was anyways. The stream rippled sluggishly nearby, trapped beneath its frozen surface. From the sound alone, Blanche could envision the woods. She felt it growing colder—darker—and wondered at what point the men would realize they needed to return home if they had any hope of beating the sunset and snow back to town.
At last they did, sitting her in the snow and tying her to a tree. They jeered and cursed her, hot phlegm landing on her cheeks. Then, one by one, their footsteps crunched away, until a lone man remained.
“Go home, Claude,” Blanche said flatly.
A gloved hand stroked her cheek, wiping away the spit. His breath burned on her lips, and her heart ached for all that could have been. After all this time, would he still taste of smoke and blackberries?
“If only you hadn’t done it,” Claude whispered.
Blanche swallowed hard. “Then you would’ve found two dead bodies instead of one. Is that what you would’ve preferred?”
But he didn’t need to answer. She knew it was—a dead sweetheart was a tragedy, a cannibal sweetheart was something else entirely.
“Go home, Claude,” she said again.
And this time, he listened, the stomp of heavy boots fading into the distance.
After he’d gone, Blanche shifted against the rough bark of the tree until her blindfold fell over the bridge of her nose and the rope loosened around her chest. She stood, shaking the snow from her bedraggled coat.
Sure enough, there was the creek. She could’ve headed home—probably beaten the men back. But what good would it do her, when Mary’s face had crumbled with the horror of what Blanche had done all those years ago?
Instead, she waited: monster baiting monster.
* * *
As the moon began its lonely climb, the snow clouds rolled in. The woods turned a muted gray. Blanche heard the hush before she felt the rippling cold.
Her voice shattered the silence. “If you want me, I am here,” she demanded of the snow, and of the thing that lived in it.
Wind gusted from the valley, bringing with it the ash and dust of the mines. She stood her ground as the air whipped around her. Streaks of white and gray danced like it had last night.
The creature took shape. Teeth and arms and sleet-hair and ore eyes. This close, and without the warmth of her house, the temperature plunged until her eyelashes were heavy with frost. That night, the creature didn’t point its finger at the sky and divide into hundreds of parts.
Instead, it pointed at Blanche.
It shifted, its snowy body changing into Blanche’s at different points of her life: as a child, as an old woman, as a young woman, as a starving animal on the brink of the unthinkable. It sang as it slunk through the snow, closer, ever closer, “Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupé.” And then on and on through one chorus and then another, “Entrez dans la danse, voyez comme on danse, sautez, dansez, embrassez qui vous voudrez.”
Blanche reached for the match in her pockets, but her joints popped and froze.
The creature inched closer, steam spilling from an icy mouth that looked like her own.
Why did she think she was deserving of warmth?
Here, before this hungry cold, she’d face the fate that she should’ve accepted in that godforsaken cave. Wouldn’t it have been better to die there than to die here, after a lifetime of loneliness and suspicion, if the outcome would be the same anyways?
No, that was the cold talking.
Blanche fought back, wresting her mind free from the song’s hypnotizing melody. “I will not apologize for living,” she murmured over and over, until it became a song in its own right.
They stood across from each other, the creature an icy mirror to herself. It stood, its hand in the pocket of a coat made of snow. Every line around her eyes was carved into the ice. And Blanche hadn’t realized, until she stared down this monster made in her image, that she looked so tired.
Blanche lowered her hands and stopped her singing.
The creature reached for her mouth. She knew then that this was how the others were taken: Ernest, Clara and her family, the little girl they found this morning. She felt the warmth leaving her body, cold moving into the places her breath used to be. The snow and ash would slip down her throat and wake in her body—a stranger living in Blanche’s skin.
She watched the monster’s face. The sculpture of Ernest had been frozen in a scream. But here, the monster’s face mirrored only quiet pity. They watched each other, two lonely creatures.
And Blanche pulled it to her.
The creature fought against her warmth. But Blanche held fast, her arms tight around her icy doppelganger’s shoulders. “I am here. I am here,” she said again and again, to the creature, to the storm, to the woods.
The creature melted in her arms, the glassy sheen dripping, soaking into her coat. Blanche held on, even as the creature thrashed and cried a sound like shattering ice. It grew smaller, dripping to a puddle at Blanche’s feet until it was a size and shape she’d been as a little girl.
Blanche knelt with her, arms still locked tight. “Didn’t you know,” Blanche whispered, “it will be spring soon?”
And with that, the little girl reached up and touched Blanche’s cheek, her hand not icy, but warm and wet. She wavered and then collapsed, like a pail of gray water spilt across the ground.
As fast as the storm had come on, it stopped. The wind didn’t howl. The snow didn’t hush. The sounds of the night animals returned.
Blanche straightened and wiped away the water beading on her coat.
Then she took it off, casting the old, smelly thing into the snow where the creature had been only moments before. She didn’t need it anyways.
For the first time in a long time, Blanche felt warm.
* * *
In the mountains, the cold will eat you alive if you let it. Don your coat, strike your match, and steel your heart for spring. Every living thing will choose warmth in the end.
Especially the hungry ones.
Especially the monsters.