Fire and Ice

Ice-mist has drawn in overnight, hip-high and thick. It lies over whitened fields, under the blue-clouded sky. So still. A part of me is out there, running through the stiffened grass, before sinking slowly to the ground under its cloak, deceptively welcoming. We drive over a small rise, and see the land ahead of us sunk under this ghost-sea, a lone tree-top breaking the surface - a rocky outcrop of an island, or the tip of a mountain showing above cloud level.

Outside the car, I pass a bus-shelter, one I pass every morning. Two panes of glass are blank and empty, the metal seat crumpled. Now the winter has touched it, breathed frosting on the glass and steel, transforming it into a thing of spun sugar and ice. Today it is fragile and beautiful, a relic from a lost world.


Afterwards, in the corridor outside my office, a splash of gold paints the wall where the sunlight travels through warped glass bricking. It looks as though the glass itself has become molten and puddled, molasses-like and marbled. As my shadow passes through it, it shatters into a thousand pieces and then reforms.