Fragments Read Free Page B

longer.
    The wind picked
up and drove sleet into her eyes; she stumbled, and gripped the
walls of an alleyway, holding onto the corner to keep her upright.
Across the road, someone fell over, and a couple of bulky figures
moved forward to help. One of the helpers went down. The wind
shrieked in her face, bringing with it the raw fury of the lakes
that funneled all that cold into the canyons of the city: she had
to get out of this onslaught.
    She picked her
way down the alleyway, trying to find the spot where the wind no
longer tore at you, the walls calming the demon. The grabbing hands
dropped and she was out of the wind’s assault. The sleet was
hammering down on her now, from above, still lethal, still deadly,
but no longer being driven into her sideways. She slumped back
against the walls, no longer bothered about how filthy they might
be, and tucked behind the corner of a dumpster. A moment: she just
needed a moment, and then she’d give in, try and sneak on a bus and
go home. Wrap her hands around a mug of hot water with a stock cube
in it and dream of summer, watching something on the box. Wait
until she’d dried, and then thawed on the radiators. Get herself
into bed while the heat was still in the air, then settle down to
listen to her radio and read a book.
    As she stood to
prepare herself for the battle back out into the wind, she noticed
something gray and furry, back in the shadows. Was that a dog?
Alone, abandoned? She moved forward. Oh dear god, please don’t
let it be a poor dead thing, abandoned here in the cold and
muck. She approached the mound cautiously; like humans, dogs
were animals. Animals required caution until you had the measure of
them. The closer she got, the less it looked like a dog, the more
it looked like... a wolf? Here? It was hard to see, between the
shadows, the falling sleet, and her tiredness. She called to the
animal under her breath, making reassuring noises. The sleet was
starting to settle in slush piles around the fur... surely it would
move out of that puddle that would soon form ice, if it
could...?
    She’d had to
kneel down, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in her knees as they
soaked in the cold. Her hand reached forward to touch the thick
pelt, but she couldn’t feel anything through her layers of gloves.
She stripped her right hand free, and touched the pelt again,
gently trying to shake whatever it was awake. Warmth flooded into
her fingers, over her palms, as she connected with the fur.
Whatever was here, wasn’t dead, that was for sure.
    Shaking it
brought no response. She took her other glove off, and tried to
search around to find the head, the legs, anything, that would make
sense of this shape. Her hands moved under into the slush and
little daggers stabbed into her. Ice was forming well under there.
A touch of panic prompted her to grab what she thought might be the
ruff of the animal and pull it back up and out, trying to unfurl
it. It gave too easily and she fell back onto the sludge of the
alleyway. The fur had come with her, and ended up on her: it was a
fur coat. She was holding the thick collar and the lining had been
revealed up to the skies; the fur side was touching down on her
body. Her butt was stinging, with both the impact and the puddle of
sludge she’d landed in. She stared at the coat in her hands, then
panicked and jumped to her feet as well as she could: the coat
lining was getting wet. Without a thought, she stood and whipped
the coat over her back, like a cloak: why was there a thick warm
coat, lying in the gutter..?
    The warmth, the
unctuous slide of heat that smoothed out over her shoulders
distracted her. The fur repelled the sleet, the cold. She felt the
chill lift and her body relax. Even her frozen backside was warmed
through. This is why they raised minks... to keep out the thick
cold. This is why they suffocated them by putting their heads in
jars... to keep the fur intact...
    She’d never
bought fur, ever. Not only had she never