Walking Into the Cold

The deadbolt clicked into the strike plate before I reached the sidewalk.

Behind the curtain, the yellow light held them together around the table. My mother’s voice still rang in my ears, telling me to stop being selfish on his night, as if my birth had happened on some other day. Through the sheer fabric, the sixteen little flames still burned over the blue frosting, bright enough to cast his grin across the glass.

I turned south past the mailbox.

The wind hit my collarbones through the thin cotton of my shirt. Frost was already silvering the roofs of the parked sedans, and the asphalt bit through the soles of my sneakers. Within three blocks, the skin over my knuckles had pulled tight and red.

I clamped my left arm over my ribs and jammed the phone under my armpit.

No porch light clicked on behind me. No tires crunched over the gravel.

The street lamps flickered out one by one as the subdivision opened toward the county road. Ditch water and rotting cornstalks drifted off the dark fields, carried by gusts that pushed straight through the denim at my knees. A chain rattled behind a fence; a dog barked twice and gave up.

My breath came in short, white plumes that broke against my chin. I had to focus on bending each ankle to keep moving. Stopping meant letting the frost settle into my clothes, but the cold kept sinking lower, into my chest and the hollows of my hips, until my jaw clicked with every step.

A pickup truck rushed past, throwing my long shadow across the weeds before leaving the road black again. The smell of burning oil lingered in the cold air.

My thumb slipped on the glass when I finally pulled out the phone.

The screen glowed white in the ditch. The clock read eight forty-seven. No banners, no notifications, no missed alerts broke the gray lock screen. The battery icon hovered at eleven percent, a sliver of red against the edge of the panel.

An hour had passed since the deadbolt turned. They had already divided the cake between them.

My fingers were too numb to grip the plastic casing properly, and my teeth hit together so hard my head ached. I could not walk the remaining miles out to the bypass without shelter, not with the wind rising off the open ditch.

I unlocked the screen with shaking fingers, scrolled down the short list to the single letter L, and pressed the green icon.

The dial tone hummed in my ear, flat and steady in the dark.