Gratitude

Someone had piled snow in the shape of a person and sent her down-river. She sapped the heat from his arms and his chest where he carried her close, struggling through the door and making a beeline to the fireplace.

With it burning in a low roar, he piled up towels and blankets. As many pillows as he could find created a supporting bundle in which she nestled. Her skin was white as eggshell: he would hatch her.

Soup. Microwaved. A single bowl came out on a tray and he sat next to her in the dancing feathers of flame. Her lips were only the slightest shade darker than her skin. She was a corpse. The only colour filling her grey stretch of smooth skin was fire on slate.

She wasn't even shaking. That was the worry. Without even the energy to warm herself in that most natural of biological impulses, he knew how close she was to death. Perhaps she had passed already, even, though he had never been in the habit of letting souls go easily.

Thumb gently on the pillow of her lower lip, he parted them with the gentlest movement and, like a child’s toy, her eyes opened with them. Her sclera were as clean and white as the snow he'd dragged her across; that was the first thing he noticed. That, and how impossibly large her pupils were. Black voids devoured the light for a moment, before contracting in rings of deep grass.

For a few moments, they maintained that stare. He blew upon the spoon, and offered it into her grateful mouth. A small swallow tugged the metal. Pulling it gently free - hearing her teeth click - he got her another helping.

"Thank you," she said in a quiet voice. Even that smallest of sounds felt fragile, icicles falling from a gutter to shatter on the pavement. Something in it was hollow. It represented a necessary echo that would garner more food from the bowl her attention occasionally flickered towards.

He didn’t mind. Gratitude enough radiated from her cheeks. Perhaps it was just the light bouncing from the regular architecture holding her together, but she seemed truly to warm in colour and texture. Her scent, muted by her flirtation with fatality, possessed a fragrant femininity still that placed him not only at ease, but in the desperate position to protect.

“Why were you out there?” he asked deeply. “You’re lucky I found you. You’re lucky to be alive.”

She swallowed; shook her head. Her small pink tongue swiped a thin line between her lips.

He quelled the frustration by feeding her more. “What you… fell in? Crash your car into the river?” And then, leaning close. “Did you do this to yourself? On purpose, I mean.”

Again she shook her head, wordlessly motioning for more food the same way as a baby bird. He had stripped her from the wet clothes that clung maliciously to her frame, and replaced them with warm wraps of woolly fabric. Certainly she wasn’t yet warm enough, but the towels fell. Her hunger was her focus, and what fleeting heat was, supposedly, enough for her. It seemed not to matter that her pert breast was bare, and that her nipples stood hard and large from the beautiful twin peaks.

The window revealed below, like a small valley beneath a mountain range, was as much a snowfield as the rest of her. But her stomach housed a fire, and it spread with colour and life beneath her mellow flesh. Watching her body generate heat was indescribable.

“Do you even know what happened?” he asked, almost rhetorically.

“Mhmm.” Leaning back, she made herself a little more comfortable.

“Are you going to tell me?”

The answer was simple; a sharp, monosyllabic, “No.” Lacing her fingers carefully over her belly, she watched him like a porcelain doll. Still. Cold. There was no elaboration offered in her eyes. The point had been declared enough.

Holding out a hand as delicate as a swan’s throat, she waited patiently to receive his own. In spite of everything he had done, she was ice. Pale and perfect. And as he let her pull him close, shuddering at the unholy heaving in her chest, he gazed properly for the first time behind her parted lips.

“You aren’t human, are you?”

Once more, that slightest shake of the head. Intensity glimmered behind her eyes, the only warmth of her own she possessed. Even that small window into her soul closed behind dark lids, and as her chin swept across his shoulder.

He placed two fingers gently at her collarbone in the same way that one would pet a nervous hare. “Will it…” Not knowing quite what he had intended to say, he simply released. “I just want to know I’ve helped you.”

It didn’t even hurt. A small nip, before an affectionate tingling spread from his neck towards his brain and his heart. No hate or sadism poisoned the bite; she lapped at the scarlet bubbles that dribbled from the well she had made and, when it no longer flowed, sucked at the tear in the politest of kisses.

She thanked him between swallows, every syllable pulling him a little closer into a whirlpool that would devour him alive. He would refuse himself escape without even knowing why. An entire pint siphoned into her stomach, and then another. Before long, she was on her back among the blankets, wrapping around him with hooked ankles and tight thighs. With her blessing, he slipped inside and pumped in long, slow thrusts for as long as there was blood between his legs.

Soon, as the colour transferred from one of them to the other, and as his beating heart struggled to keep his consciousness afloat, they swapped. She twisted her hips and shoulders, manoeuvring him into the icy cave that he had constructed around her. For a quiet moment, she observed. And then, with the precise gestures of a nurse, she wrapped his shuddering mannequin just as he had wrapped her. She took up the bowl with which he had fed her, and brought the last few lukewarm mouthfuls to his lips.

An hour passed with her care. Though the role of mother didn’t outwardly suit her, she bathed in it with a laboured willing that warmed far more than his own cooking. She stoked the fireplace, crouching afore its maw like a bundled survivor that appreciated the novelty of life more than the sensation. Once more she wrapped herself, this time in stolen furs, and kissed him gently on the cheek as she tucked his shivering form in yet tighter.

A wild flurry of snowdust burst through the cabin door as she cracked it open. The blizzard outside was fierce and lethal. It had picked up with the occasional flash of lightning that seethed through the sky. She looked back cursorily at the pale, blood-dried mound. He would be fine, she thought, as she took back out into the dark.