January Wakens …

KarenO’Leary

a gentle zephyr with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees. Her reverie would be short lived as her newborn twins demand nourishment only she can give. The breeze awakens her senses. Nearing a juniper shrub, a white rabbit darts out startling them both. He turns back eyes connecting with hers, before hopping away. She smiles. Dormant blades of grass peak through less than three inches of snow, a rare event for January in North Dakota. Today, these moments of solitude renew her spirit as she heads back to the demands of life.

Karen O’Leary is a writer and editor from West Fargo, North Dakota. She has published poetry, short stories, and articles in a variety of venues including, Frogpond, Setu, Fine Lines, Atlas Poetica and NeverEnding Story. Karen edited an international online journal called Whispers http://whispersinthewind333.blogspot.com/ for 5 ½ years. She enjoys sharing the gift of words.

It was a very cold winter that year. The lake was frozen quick and thick and no one ever thought there’d be a problem with the ice. You can’t trust anything. You can’t trust anyone. No one ever does what they’re supposed to do. Those warning signs are there for a reason. Children should always pay attention to their parents, and warning signs, and the color of ice.

The train to the office goes by there every day, comes back the same way every night. There are no other routes. One could get off the train at the stop before the lake, walk about a mile out of their way, wending through alleys and side streets and through a junkyard full of rusted scrap metal and catch the next train at the station just past the lake, but it would take an extra hour out of the day, so all you can do is close your eyes as the train rumbles past the flat water, sometimes it’s light blue and full of ducks, sometimes it’s gray and frosted with ice and chunks of dirty snow. Sometimes, it looks as solid as it did on that day you really should have moved to another town, another state, another country altogether. You should have left this place.

It didn’t take long to pull her out of the ice and onto the solid, far bank. Really, she was gone for so little time it shouldn’t have been an issue at all. But then the kid who said he knew first aid backed up, pale and shaken, and another person who said “you must have done it wrong” took over, and so it went, and again and again. What do you tell people who ask where she is, how she’s doing? Why do they still call?

The train rumbles closer and closer to the part of town where you’ll have to see the lake. It’s easier in the summer, because it looks like a different body of water. Now, years later, you can peek over the top of the safe wall your newspaper makes to see if there are ducks on the lake, or geese, perhaps a heron wading in the shallow end, legs long and thin as matchsticks, searching in the depths for fish that flash and flail against the surface like a flurry of tiny white hands.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.