"Winter", by E. R. Mills
Katie-Anne was a January baby; white hair, pale paper skin, and eyes the color of a pond frozen over with
ice. Her parents would often complain that had she
only been born a week earlier, they could have listed
her as a tax deduction for the pervious year. But
Katie-Anne was a January baby, and she was very, very
smart. Her baby babble turned into words like "cold"
and "snow" and "brrrr", preceding "mama" and "daddy"
by a good two months. She was fully literate by the
time she was four.
When she was three months old, the middle of the
coldest March on record, her parents packed her into
their little Chevy Nova for a trip to visit the
grandmother who lived in Florida. Perhaps they
thought the child should have some warm weather before
she began to believe that the world was only the
scarce, wind-swept plains of the upper Midwest.
As the first day on the road stretched on into night,
Katie-Anne gazed out the frosty window at the
landscape rushing passed. The chilly moonlight cast
the low, rolling hills in a silvery-blue, much like
the color of her eyes. She pressed her hands, teeming
with blood warmth, against the glass and found that
they burned their own image into the frost.
The car following a curve in the road, and her father
did not see the black ice on the pavement there. Soon
the world outside was a spinning blur to Katie-Anne,
who set her face into a crinkle as she laughed
gleefully, the panic of the situation lost on her.
This was her first clear memory: the dizzy car crash,
the moonlit earth and the strange sounds of metal
twisting. Katie-Anne looked up from her drawing. The
moisture that had built up in her eyes had splashed
onto the pearl-white paper where an illustration of a
far-off memory of snow and prairie was sketched. The
salty water had blurred the lines. Her grandmother
turned her deep-set gray eyes on the girl who sat
beside her on the couch.
"You'd like to go back?"
Katie-Anne blinked and shook her head slightly. A
strand of blonde hair broke free and tumbled over her
face. The grandmother lifted a wrinkled hand and
brushed it aside.
"It's so far away."
That wasn't why she didn't want to go. The desire was
there, yes, but she knew better. So much had changed
since then. She had changed.
Some things were better off, safer, staying in one
place. She was probably one of them.