The pane between you and the cold
You are the only warmth this window has left.
Outside, it has been snowing since the light went. A cabin stands in the field with a fire still going, a thread of smoke off the chimney, the window the colour of a lit match. You cannot see any of it. Six hours of cold have grown a skin of fern-frost across the glass, and the fog on top of that is thick enough to write your name in.
So write. Drag a hand across the pane and the mist smears clear; press and linger and the crystals give up their grip, melting from the middle of your fingertip outward. The scene arrives through the streak you made — never the whole thing, only what you reached. Then you lift your hand away, and the cold takes it all back: the fog settles first, the ferns crystallise after, threading in from the edges of your smear until the window is a blank sheet again, waiting to be earned a second time.
The fog
The soft breath-layer. It clears at a touch and returns within seconds — a mist that never quite commits, always creeping back over the parts of you that stopped moving.
The ferns
The crystal beneath. Frost grows in dendrites, sixty degrees to a branch, the way real ice does on real glass. It resists the fog's ease — you have to dwell to melt it, and it recrystallises slower, from the rim inward.
The hearth
What you are clearing all of this to reach. One warm window in a blue field, flickering where the fire moves. It never comes to you. You go to it, one wipe at a time.
Cold keeps the window. You keep the hand that opens it.
Frost — a reading for late January