Across the Street

The house was glazed with an icy sheen that shone in the sun and surprised naked hands and feet in the dark. She stared up at it, brow furrowed, contemplating whether it deserved a goodbye. She never loved it. She doubted it held any room for love for her within its walls. It barely held enough room for her, alone. She always found herself stuffed into a corner, the voices of others swelling to fill the rooms, pushing her into closets and under beds. She blinked up at the house, watching it shiver in the winter.

The cold had arrived early that season, both inside and outside the house. Green still clinging to grass poked up through the white snow. Red and brown leaves lay preserved in the ice lining the driveway. She surveyed the yard through the haze of her breath as it floated through the air. A squirrel desperately dug through the snow, searching for any surviving acorns to take back to his understocked nest.

She cast one more look at her old home, narrowed her eyes at the frost on the windows and the chimney emitting no smoke. No, she thought to herself. If I’m going to freeze, I will meet the cold where it belongs. My bones may turn to ice but at least I can see the sun out here.

The squeal of tires behind her pulled her eyes from the house. A dark vehicle slid across the slick road, narrowly avoiding a nearby mailbox. She flinched at the danger before noticing the house that owned the barely safe mailbox. The same glaze clung to the bricks and shutters but the window bore a fog that she knew meant warmth. The smell of burning firewood drifted across the road to fill her nose with heat.

The house sat directly across the road from her, ten or so footsteps from the spot she was occupying on the lawn. The only problem lie on the road in between. A road that also happened to be a back country highway. The road was mostly clear, no issue for the four-wheel drive trucks barreling through the countryside. But a select few patches of ice hung around, ready to leap out at smaller vehicles like the mailbox swiper she had first noticed. She stared at the house, its heat calling to her. Her heart sped up under her coat, her eyes locked on the warmth glowing from across the treacherous blacktop. She had one foot in the street when the truck blew past, scattering bits of ice up and into her hair.

The hair on the back of her neck stood to attention as she scattered back to her place in the yard. She cast one last desperate glance at the radiance of the neighbor’s house, her face awash in the glow of the brightly lit windows. But as she felt the familiar tendrils of cool air whisper against her back, she turned away and back to her cold, dark home.

+++++++

The cold stuck around longer than usual that year. The green shrivelled into dry yellows and the reds and browns disappeared from the trees and ground. She spent most days on the porch, staring across the highway to the glimmer of the neighbor’s house. When it rained or snowed, she would sit inside at the window, eyes glued to the same spot. Somehow, the glare of the ranch made her colder, stuck in her private ice-box.

One morning, she got to her window just in time to see the neighbor exit his house, cross the street with ease and amble up her porch to knock on the front door. She snuck into the foyer in time to hear, “we are having a Christmas get together for the neighborhood tonight, you in?”

She opened her mouth to scream, to yell, Yes, please, we would love to but before she could answer---

“Sorry, think we are going to stay in tonight. Haven’t been feeling that well.”

The neighbor gave out his sympathies then noticed her, lingering in the door frame. “What about you? You up for a party?” Laughs and looks of pity met him before she could leap at the question. “She’s not much of a party animal, that one.”

That night, she stood on the lawn, the brilliant light spilling out of the house, across the dangerous road, into her yard. Her muscles ached with chill. Her head was full of storm clouds. Her eyes drooped with exhaustion. Yet, as she sat, frozen, beams of light edged across the yard and wrapped around her ankles, put an arm across her shoulders, and beckoned her forward. She reached the edge of the road and stopped.

“What if I don’t make it?” she asked herself.

But it was too late. She tasted warmth. The heat held her. But the road was particularly busy that night, being Christmas Eve. So, she waited. And finally, after what seemed like hours. Days. Months. Years. She looked both ways. And she walked across the road and into the light. She took it slowly, the glow overwhelming her at first. She snuck across the front lawn, nervous the gleam would turn her away, turn up its nose at a cold little thing like her.

But just as the made her way to the front door, it opened. The neighbor from before spotted her and broke into a grin that showed all of his teeth. He extended a hand towards her. She sniffed it.

“Hey there, little girl, he said as he scratched her behind the ear. “You look like a cold little cat. Come in here.”

And so she did.