You must die, my husband sweet.
But not yet. I must die. One of us may die tonight. We cannot die tonight. If we can keep talking, telling stories, wakeful, breath full, we might live.
I don't want to die.
To die is to offer up your life. To live is to kill your enemies, to take on their lives, and so take on their strength. Life, then, is a predatory thing. Death is what's left, is what the ghosts feed on, mere scraps. I don't want to be devoured by ghosts, and I don't want to die. Can you hear the wind running in circles? The snow taps the walls, and the taps are like the ghosts' fingernails. They see us and see that there may be some death for feeding soon. The tapping is only the snow. Unlike in your dream, I cannot run, and I wish that the snow was rain.
Once, after a rain, there was snow. The ice was slick on the tree limbs and upon the forest floor. The world was gray and blue like the surface of the moon and giant mushrooms grew as big as a man, and white caverns blossomed between the ancient tree trunks. The air was spiced with pine and ice water, and the world was silent, silent, except for the deer, the crush.
Once, a boy and girl fell in love in the snow among the caves and the mushrooms. They kissed with lips ice wet and blood warm. They never left each other ever, forever.
Once, in a town known for its goodbyes, an old woman calved for the thirteenth time. Five had died along the way, and three turned tricks, and the rest were farmers and shanty boys. The youngest child, a daughter, the thirteenth, was one of the tricksters. She tricked to keep her mother in health and whiskey and food, and while the other children scattered and gave up their ghosts and moved on, this girl remained at her mother's side because her mother threatened to kill her.
Now Jim Carr may say he's never been as cold as he is tonight, but the girl has been this cold before. Her shanty john abandoned her deep in the forest. He left her drunk and hungry in a wooden shelter without even a bed of straw to lay upon. The walls didn't reach all the way to the ground and she could see the branches ticking together through the holes in the ceiling. The full moon and the wet wind and the dry snow screamed across her skin. She fell asleep and the snow blew and lay like a pall upon her. She slept so deep, her blood moved so slow, that she didn't wake when a starving rat began to devour her nose. Life was a predatory thing. For the rat to survive, he must feed and the girl must die.