Weekly Writing – January 13 2024

Her breath piled in white steam until a critical mass of it almost seemed to make the moon. Or maybe she had just been walking with her head down for much longer than she’d realized, and it had risen in the meantime – a hazy pearl half-submerged in the lavender snow-light.
She shook unstoppably, but the important thing was still not to stop. Keep walking – step after step. She was close enough to the cliffs now to see how snow folded against their craggy base and climbed them in white seams. A welcoming abundance of handholds, and a cave maybe ten metres above that looked deep enough to offer shelter. If she died in its dark, frozen to the stone, she would at least be able to say she’d done everything she possibly could to survive.
Or, well. She wouldn’t say anything at all, in that case. It wouldn’t matter that anyone who came across her body would know, from her fingers swollen and torn purple but not bleeding, ripped open by the first handhold she fumbled but too cold to bleed, that she had tried.
But she had to. Still had to. She tried to keep most of her weight on her legs, which she could still feel, rather than her fingers, which didn’t hurt despite the bloodless, gaping seams in the skin. She pulled herself as little and pushed as much as she could up the cliffside, too late to absorb any warmth it might have collected and then radiated from the weak winter sun.
Ten metres might have been the whole length of the valley again, for how long it felt. For how little she could let herself think about it if she didn’t want to fall. When she hauled herself onto the sparse snowy ledge in front of the cave, it was on hands and knees.