The freeze had come hard and fast, stilling the world like a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps under the sudden glare of the sun. It turned the trees and ponds and the last of the golden grass to frosted glass, and every sound to a distant, lonely echo. No one stepped out into that glass world if they could marvel cozily at it through the window instead – she wouldn’t have seen what lay in her pond at all, perhaps not until spring, if she hadn’t worried about the ducks that had still been dallying in its shallows the day before.

She had found one frozen and dead in the mud two years ago, and the pitiful look on its face, like sleeping in pain, had haunted her at the start of each winter since. So she wrapped her housecoat as tightly as she could, stomped her feet into their stiff boots, still musty from storage, and trudged out to make sure no poor creature would be lying in pain while she drank her morning coffee.

The cold was pinching her earlobes and numbing her nose by the time she reached the pond. But with her first glimpse of what lay curled in its perfect glassy depths, she forgot all about the pain of standing and gaping in the snow.

No duck at all, no, nor an unlucky fish. Was it? The tail was certainly fish-like, but enormously long and thick, and attached to an upper half she would have told herself she was seeing wrong if the ice hadn’t been so clear. A very human upper half, with arms wrapped around its own tail as if it had been trying to keep itself warm even as the ice had closed over it.

It was- whatever it was- it was surely dead, wasn’t it? Its skin wasn’t the colour of a living thing, and if it was breathing at all, she couldn’t tell even through the clear ice. The gills that ran like long necklaces along its collarbone didn’t flutter or swell like a living fish’s.

What if this was how it was meant to spend the winter? Or what if it was just clinging to life, cooling in the ice, and someone who moved quickly enough could still save it? She couldn’t go back to her coffee and slippers and just leave it there, not knowing whether it might die alone while she was reading the paper.

She stomped back towards her porch, trying to scrub the cold from her fingers and think of where she had left the spade. Some boiling water to loosen the edges of the ice – or maybe just use the coffee – and whatever it was, she would cut it free and just pray that she really was saving its life.