The snow crunches beneath the soles of my boots. My footsteps echo, as though I walk upon the skinned hide of a drum, and when I pluck the last persimmon from the tree, I feel the rumbling swell. I run.

The avalanche is the thundering of a thousand horses, hooves dispatching the crushing blows of bruises, pushing me beneath the surface, dainty and terrible and final. The golden glow of the sun glitters all around me, blinding.

Fear chokes my mouth, the pure essence of the snow forcing its way between my lips and into my ears, taking root in my nose. (But don’t look too closely because there’s dirt in it, isn’t there? Pine needles and sap and a whisker from a hare skirting above the rippling drifts, escaping to the rocky ledge where I could never dare to follow.)

For a scant moment I see my upended basket of persimmons tumbling away, broken straw, the vermillion fruit bright and bloody.

My womb is hollowed out, my lungs flatten, the cracking of tree branches…but no, it is the splintering of my wrist, the curving, delicate bird-like elegance of the ulna sliding through the folds of skin, peeling back to expose the bones.

Am I screaming?

I might have been. The white has become shadow, a pocket of space between my lips and the snow filled with only the memory of breath.

My limbs struggle against the horses, but they are gone, gone, gone. I am floating in between these worlds, cocooned against life itself.

I lick my lips, astringent and cutting, delicately probing the edges of a cracked tooth with a tongue thicker than salt. Frost packs behind my eyelids. The tiniest shaft of light shunts through a minute passage cutting through the depths of the snow, flirting freedom for a mouse.

The cold becomes comfortable, swaddling me in its arms, a pearl within the protective recesses of a shell. Above me shouting, but I can no longer draw breath to cry out. My chest shudders with each shallow inhalation until a thin membrane of snot and ice rimes even the smallest of apertures upon my face, blocking the last vestiges of air altogether.

* * *

When I awake, the shaft of golden light is gone, leaving me in nothing but darkness and the ragged sigh of a passing storm. My ears ring with this quiet, though my heartbeat does not.

If I stay here, I will die.

Using my good arm, I start to dig, ignoring the torn nails, the numbness searing the fingertips. It seems as though I simply dissolve; my body slides past each crystalline snowflake slicing into my skin. A thousand small cuts, and yet I don’t bleed.

Perhaps there is no blood left in me.

I emerge from the hole some time later; it is night and the snow falls thick and heavy. It blankets my shoulders, my hair.

One of my boots is missing but I cannot retrieve it. My toes are blue, the nails black.

The landscape is changed, broken trees littering the path, a scattering of dead leaves.

My shattered arm swings useless by my side, the bones glinting in the moonlight. My hand dangles, the fingers curled, but I can not feel it.

Home, home, home.

Where is it? I head off down the valley, where the village fires burn on the other side of the wall, the thatched huts and the warm hearths calling me.

The snow picks up, covering my tracks, the frozen tangle of my hair crackling past my face, blinding my already blurry vision. But still the flame in the lantern outside our door catches my attention.

The wind howls as I howl, my husband’s name whisked away before I can voice it. The door is shut tight against my harsh mutterings, against the cold, the wind. Against me.

I claw at the windows, broken fingernails scratching, scratching.

I’m so cold. Let me in.

My cries become accusations, curses, sobs; the noise prickles against the back of my throat, coated like dust from an urn.

My husband cracks open the door, the whites of his eyes filling me with pleasure, the sea pouring into a broken cup. His pulse flashes at the base of his throat, rich and thick and warm.

I smile and he shudders.

“Yuki-Onna.” He croaks it out, gathering our infant son into his arms. “Of course, you would return as such. But then, you were always cold to me, weren’t you?”

Yuki-Onna. Snow woman. The hostility of the word settles, unsettles. The baby whimpers and my breasts ache in response, the milk leaking hot against my skin.

“Mine.” I hold out my hand to the child, but my husband pulls away before I can brush my fingers against the swaddling blanket.

“You cannot have him. And if you take me, he will die.” He turns his head to the inside of the house sharply, his mouth moving though I do not hear what he says.

A pair of women’s boots crouch just outside the door, coy and unfamiliar.

Had he sent me out to find the persimmon trees on a warmer day where the sunlight bathed the peaks in a golden haze? Perhaps the cracking of the ice told him of this odd thaw, or perhaps the simple scream of a hare beneath the talons of a hawk would be enough…

Enough to bring the mountain down.

My dangling hand, hanging by a thread of tendon, uncurls suddenly like a flower, revealing a perfect persimmon, guarded and unbroken in the seashell curve of my palm.

The fruit falls from my fingers to rest at his feet.

I become water, melted, clear, empty. I puddle on the floor and sluice through the floorboards, while above me my husband screams and screams and screams. Little Kenta cries, his face buried in my husband’s shoulder.

The last bits of me have thawed and I am free, drifting away into the falling snow.

* * *

Ⓒ Allison Pang