Winter Of Love

Winter was creeping into the city when they first met. The days were shrinking with fear from the cold, dark nights. The sun had been locked behind a prison of grey cloud to serve its seasonal sentence until Spring. Frost would tiptoe over him as he slept and each morning he would shake it off like icing sugar. He would awake with fingers and toes curled into a frozen claws, the muscles in his body aching from shivering.

She arrived late one afternoon, just as he was hunkering down for the night, cocooning himself into his sleeping bag. The moon was rising, smiling at them like a crooked Halloween pumpkin.

He had long ago stopped trying to make friends. In the early days, he had desperately sought companionship, a human connection, but time and again he was met by a pair of haunted, suspicious eyes. The misfortunes in these people’s lives were stacked into walls of hatred that could not be surmounted. They bristled like wild cats when he approached, ready to defend their territory.

But she was different to the others. She still had flecks of love and hope in her eyes. Her cheeks were still round, not yet sunken from the weight of survival. Her clothes were bedraggled, but they were only dusted with dirt, not layered with years of grime, like his own. The highlights in her hair, pushed from her scalp by black roots, established her connection to another life.

“What’s your name?’ he asked, as she arranged her belongings into a new home. It reminded him of afternoons spent building hideouts with his brother, so many lifetimes ago.

“Rachel,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Dan.”

And, like that, it began.

After so many years of loneliness, aloneness, he had a companion. Like a mother lion teaching its cub, he taught her how to survive the jungle of pavements and subways. Where to find food, where to hide, where the danger lay. Who was predator and who was prey. They shared everything, looked after each other. They were a pack of two, running side by side through the concrete wilderness, then curling up together in their den.

She wouldn’t speak about her past, or tell him why she was there. She had sewn her secrets into her heart and it was too painful to unstitch them. The faded bruises on her body spoke the words that she couldn’t. He told her his story - the series of events that had tumbled, like a Shakespeare play, towards a tragic conclusion. She listened silently, then held him tightly.

They huddled together through the freezing winter nights, passing body warmth back and forth. They fed each other dreams, their whispers sucked into the darkness. On the black canvas of the night, they painted a rainbow of hopes. It wouldn’t always be like this, some day they would have a different life.

One day in January she came back with a black bruise swelling across her eye and cuts pockmarking her face.

“What happened?” he asked. “Who did this to you?”

She wouldn’t tell him, just let him clean her cuts as best he could, then pulled him close as though she wanted to disappear into him.

She was nervous after that, skittish like an unbroken horse. She saw terror in every shadow, threat in every stranger. He promised to protect her, but she wouldn’t tell him what from. The light in her eyes flickered precariously in the winds of fear.

Eventually, winter began to fade. Each day was a little stronger than its brother from yesterday, stretching its arms wide and pushing the darkness away. Frost was pulled from the ground like a table cloth. Yawning animals poked their heads out of their burrows, shaking off hibernation. Buds sprouted on the trees like peas popping out of their shells.

One morning, he woke to the sunshine grazing his face. He smiled. Spring was here.

He opened his eyes. She was gone