Weekly Writing – January 20 2024

Heaving gasps of steam and swaying over the snow, but in no danger of falling more than those few inches, and alive. Still alive, still moving, crawling towards the mouth of the cave.
The angle of its mouth meant it wouldn’t swallow any of the wind, and that was all she still wanted in the world. Still air a few degrees warmer than death. She dragged herself from furrowing snow to the rasp and gouge of bare stone, and didn’t feel at all how it might have cut into her knees.
Didn’t feel anything anymore, except the soft, warm drowse of incipient hypothermia wrapping itself around her. Out in the snow, that would have been death. In the cave, it still might be, but if so, any wayward traveller would say she had tried.
She had fought it as long and hard as anyone could have been expected to. She let her arms splay out from under her, settling onto her stomach in that universal softness only the dying might have known. Did the world only feel so kind to those who were about to leave it?
If so, that seemed crueller than being cruel until the end. She closed her eyes, and it made no difference to what she couldn’t see. The night’s relentless, reflected light didn’t reach that far into the cave.
Though something else did, deeper still. A sound thrumming through the softness and floor, through her forehead, faint as everything was at that point. She tried to roll her head, rest her ear against the floor, frown, care at all about what a sound in the frozen night and windless cave could be, but kindness or death or sleep settled over her before she could, bearing her down into itself as the sound beat on.