Beside me, he wrings his hands, and I want to tell him to stop.


It makes my skin crawl to feel his nervous energy seep through the cab of the jeep, spilling over my hands on the wheel and pooling like rain around our feet. I want to tell him to relax, but I don’t say it out loud. I don’t say anything at all.

I can feel the air around us like glass, and I am afraid to shatter it.

We slam through a drift, snow flying over the windshield and across our vision, so for a moment we’re suspended in a colourless world.

Then it clears, and again we race across a snowy prairie that reflects the sun into our eyes and into our bones. A cold, harsh light that penetrates everything. I wear dark sunglasses. He shields his face with his hands and winces and grits his teeth.

“Where are we going?” he asks again, probably for the tenth time since we left my house this morning in the wan light of dawn, getting into my jeep without a word. I knew as soon as he saw the big tires held prisoner by snow chains he regretted asking me to show him more of myself. To open up to him.

I don’t respond, silent in my own regret. I scan the horizon for something out of place and wonder how I ever thought it would be a good idea to show him this side of me. It seems like such an error in judgment now, to think this man I barely know would accept this without question.

I'd told myself for years I was better off alone. That no one could understand the hours I spend driving in off-road circles on the flat winter prairie, always aware of my peripheral, the radio in my jeep a silent ghost. No one could understand the pull I feel to these dead lands.

But, for a moment, I thought he might. I'd never dated anyone for as long as I had him, never fallen as fast as I did with him. He made me question whether I'd ever been in love before. He made me wonder if it was worth opening up to someone, for once in my life.

But I never had, because somewhere deep inside of me I knew he’d never understand. I kept it surface level with him, like with every other man before. The days passed, then weeks, then months, and the green leaves on the trees felt the brutal kiss of winter and died in our hands, and he said, “Come on. Give me something. Make me feel like I know you.”

And so I brought him here.

The sky is cloudless, a wide expanse of blue carrying on in an infinite loop above our heads. We are so far from civilization there isn’t a hint of human hands on the land around us—just flat prairie miles and miles into the distance and unmarred snow, blown flat by the harsh winter wind.

I lean back in my seat and let one hand drop off the wheel. His spine is jagged as he sits beside me, his jaw tight as he looks out the window. I grind my teeth together, my sweeps of the horizon becoming more halfhearted as the sun climbs to its peak and the snow remains undisturbed. I think we’ll have to turn around and drive back, and I’ll have to explain to him why I took him this far away from home. I'll have to convince him I’m not crazy, and I know I'll fail.

Then I see a white swirl on the horizon, and something inside of me drops and soars at the same time. The pull deepens. Expands.

And yanks me towards it.

“Do you see that?” I ask, and his head whips forward. It’s the first thing I’ve said in the hours of our trip.

He squints towards the horizon, and his mouth drops open. “What is ...” he starts, but the jeep cuts him off as I press the gas to the floor and we fly forward. His hand grips the handle beside him, his face paling like the snow around us, but I barely pay him any mind. Instead, my gaze is locked on the snow devil.

The jeep revs, the needle of the speedometer jumping higher and higher with every second. Snow and sunlight stream past us. In my chest, my heart climbs up my throat and pulses in the back of my mouth. We draw closer. And closer. And closer.

We come upon it and I slam the jeep to a stop, his mittened hands holding himself up on the dashboard as I throw it into park.

“What’s going on?” he asks, his voice climbing, but I already have the door open, my breath a crystallized cloud like the air in my lungs given form. My feet sink into the hard-packed snow, the sunlight reflecting up under my sunglasses and into my retinas. In front of me, the snow swirls and swirls, looping lazy circles around itself up into a sky painted blue. There’s no wind, but the snow devil whips the hair loose from under my toque into knots around my face.

“Hello?” I say to it, trying to sound gentle, but at the sound of my voice the wind whips faster and faster and faster, until it spirals high into the sky and snow, hard like sleet, slashes my cheeks.

Behind me, I can hear him cuss, shielding himself behind the jeep as snow scatters around us and the wind whips into a frenzy, but I don’t flinch. I hold my ground, despite the ice crystals embedded in my skin and falling down the front of my coat.

He hisses my name. I ignore him. My gloved hands reach out, into the vortex.

I grit my teeth as it tries to suck me in and dig my feet into the prairie as it drags me forward. In the snow devil, my hands scrabble, searching.

When they feel something hard, I close my grip, as tight as I can. The joints in my fingers scream in pain as it fights me, but I don’t let go. Instead, I yank it forward.

Through the swirling snow, a face appears, her skin winter white and her teeth bared.

She is made of snow, from the ghost of her eyelashes against her cheeks to the tears on her eyelids to the cut in her lip as she growls at me, low in her throat. Snowflakes in her eyes catch the sun, her skin sparkling, even as the vortex swirls faster and faster around us.

“Leave me be,” she snaps, and her voice reminds me of a winter storm—of the howl of an arctic wind in the depths of the night or the steady thrum of sleet on a windowpane. “If you cannot help then you must leave.”

I keep my grip on her firm, forcing myself to look into her icy eyes. Forcing myself to feel her pain, right down to my bones.

Perhaps there’s ice in me, too.

“Who did you lose?” I ask, my voice almost inaudible over the wind she whips up.

For a moment, the wind slows. She slackens in my grip.

“My daughter,” she says, like it’s a whispered prayer on frozen lips. “My daughter.”

I pull her closer. Cold leeches through my gloves and into my palms, ricocheting down the receptors in my skin.

“I’m so sorry,” I breathe.

Her gaze latches on mine. Tears like ice glitter on her face. The vortex around us slows and slows and slows before it stops. We stand in the middle of an empty prairie, and all I can hear are my slow exhales and the strangled sounds of sobs working their way up her throat.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, and it’s not enough. It never will be, when you lose someone physically, never to know what happened to them, if they lived or died. When you die yourself and spend the rest of your afterlife haunting a desolate prairie, forever searching. There is no peace when you lose someone like that.

It’s not enough to give her this moment of calm, but still, it’s something. It’s better than nothing.

It’s all I can give.

She blinks once, twice, three times, then tilts her head back to the sun so each snowflake lights on fire, spangling her face with light. Something loosens in her; I can hear it in the way she releases her breath.

In my hands, she falls apart, into a pile of snow.

I lower my arms, crouching down to cast a prayer for the snow-woman. This moment of acknowledgment of her pain will not be enough. She will come back the same as before, a snow tornado of rage, searching for her missing daughter.

But this? A moment of true peace, where she could feel the light on her face and just breathe? Where she could feel rest, if only for a moment? It means something.

It has to. It’s what I have dedicated my whole life to.

Maybe it’s more than that, though. Maybe I have my eyes wide open, searching the world for what I’ve lost. Maybe I see her face in every snow devil I find.

Maybe I can’t help myself, so I try to help others who feel the same pain. The unwilling companions in my grief. Like trying to find my own peace in a whitewashed world and frozen ghosts.

I rise to my feet and swipe snow off my jacket sleeves. My pulse skitters through my veins as I force myself to meet his gaze.

I think he wants to ask what the hell he’d witnessed. He wants to ask how I knew where to find this creature-woman. He wants to ask me why I do this, even though he already knows I’ll never say. He knows some hurts stay as buried secrets—I saw it in him as soon as we started dating. Maybe that’s why I brought him here. Maybe I thought he’d understand.

But he doesn’t speak, and it doesn’t surprise me when he turns on his heel and walks away from me. It doesn’t surprise me when we ride in silence for hours in my jeep and he climbs out without a word when we get back to my house. It doesn’t surprise me when he drives away.

I am climbing the stairs to my porch, my gaze already turning back to the crystalline prairie, looking for a stark sun in the sky.