Hoarfrost on the Windows

The frost on the glass looked like a map of a place he'd never been. Or maybe he had. Arthur couldn't be sure anymore. In the silent, frozen cabin, the real enemy wasn't the cold, but the thinning wall between memory and madness.

The patterns were the first thing. Before the sun, before the coffee, before the dull ache in his hip reminded him of the floor. Just the patterns. A world bloomed on the glass overnight. Crystalline ferns, feathers of ice, intricate maps of cities that didn't exist. Arthur sat in the armchair, the one with the springs that groaned like a dying animal, and watched them grow. The cold from the pane seeped into the room, a physical presence. He could feel it on his cheeks. He’d forgotten to feed the fire again. The last log had collapsed into a bed of orange embers, pulsing faintly in the pre-dawn gloom.

He drew the thin wool blanket tighter around his shoulders. It smelled of dust. Everything smelled of dust and cold wood. He tried to follow a single line of frost with his eyes, trace it from its origin near the window frame to its delicate, branching end. It was a pointless exercise. The structure was too complex, a labyrinth of its own making. His thoughts used to be like that, he supposed. A logical, if complex, path from one point to another. Now they were just… patterns. Jagged, disconnected. He’d start a thought about needing more kindling and end up trying to remember the name of the woman who lived next door to them in Ann Arbor. Helen? Ellen? It was gone. The name, the face, the entire decade. A whiteout. Like the view past the frost.

His breath fogged a small circle on the lower pane, blurring the ice-ferns. A brief, warm erasure. Then the cold reclaimed it, turning the moisture into a new, chaotic layer. That’s how it felt. Every time he tried to grasp a memory, to warm it with focus, it would just freeze over, becoming part of the new, meaningless landscape of his mind. The doctors had used softer words. Cognitive decline. Memory impairment. They gave him pills in a plastic bottle that rattled with a clinical cheerfulness. He’d left the bottle on the kitchen counter in the city, back in the house that was no longer his. He didn't want to be managed. He wanted to be left alone with the wreckage.

A flicker of movement outside. His eyes snapped to the fogged circle on the window. He leaned forward, the chair groaning in protest. He wiped the condensation away with the heel of his hand, the cold stinging his skin. The world outside was a study in grey. The snow-heavy pines, the flat, white expanse of the frozen lake, the sky the color of dishwater. And there, on the ice, was Karen. She was wearing the yellow sundress she loved, the one with the little blue flowers. Her feet were bare on the snow-dusted surface of the lake. Her hair, the color of dark honey, wasn't touched by the wind that he could hear moaning around the cabin's eaves. She was smiling at him. Not a memory of a smile. It was happening right now.

Arthur’s heart didn’t race. It just stopped for a second, a skipped beat that made him feel hollow. He didn't feel shock, or fear, or even longing. Just a profound sense of… quiet confusion. The dress was wrong. The bare feet were wrong. The lack of breath-plume in the freezing air was wrong. Karen had been dead for eleven years. He had held her hand in the hospital room. He remembered the feel of her bones, the dry rasp of her final breath. That memory was solid. A rock in the shifting snow of his mind. So what was this? He pressed his forehead against the cold glass, the pressure a small, grounding pain. She raised a hand, a slow, lazy wave, then turned and began to walk across the lake, her yellow dress a slash of impossible color against the monochrome world. He watched until she was just a yellow speck, and then nothing. The lake was empty again. The wind howled. He was just an old man, alone in a cold room, staring at a window.

He pushed himself out of the chair. The ache in his hip was sharp, a hot needle. He hobbled to the fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, and jabbed at the embers. They flared, spitting sparks. He laid two fresh logs on the grate. They were damp and hissed, reluctant to catch. He watched them, his mind as blank as the snow-covered lake. Karen. Was that a memory bleeding through? A dream? Or something new? Something the silence and the isolation were building out of the spare parts of his life. He didn't have an answer. The question itself felt slippery, hard to hold onto.

On the rough-hewn mantelpiece above the fireplace, there were photographs in cheap frames. A small gallery of a life he was increasingly certain belonged to someone else. He picked one up. A younger him, black hair thick, smiling, arm around Karen. They were on a beach somewhere. The sun was bright. He tried to focus on her face, to remember that specific day. The salt spray. The heat on his skin. Nothing. Her face in the photograph was… indistinct. A smudge. He held it closer. It was like looking at a watercolor left out in the rain. The features had bled into one another. He could see the shape of her smile, but not her mouth. The suggestion of her eyes, but not their color. He blinked, rubbing his own eyes with his knuckles. The picture didn't change.

He put it down and picked up another. His son, Michael, as a boy, holding up a string of fish. The same thing. The proud grin was a blur, the eyes were just dark spots. He went through them one by one. His wedding day. His retirement party. A life documented in smudges and blurs. Was the paper fading? Was it the dim light from the fire? He turned on the lamp on the side table. A weak, yellow glow. He held the photos under the light. Still the same. A collection of ghosts. The anxiety started then, not a panic, but a low hum, a vibration deep in his chest. It wasn't that he was forgetting. It was that the past was actively disintegrating, pulling away from him, becoming unknowable.

He sat back down, leaving the photos scattered on the mantel. The fire was catching now, tongues of flame licking at the damp wood. He closed his eyes, trying to picture Karen’s face from memory. He could see the yellow dress on the ice. He could see the shape of her head, the color of her hair. But her features wouldn't resolve. It was like trying to read a book in the dark. The harder he tried, the more the details slipped away, leaving just a frustrating, hollow outline. A person-shaped hole in his memory.

That’s when he heard it. Faint at first. A low, rhythmic whine, a mechanical sound cutting through the natural moan of the wind. A snowmobile. It was distant, coming from the north, along the old logging trail. His body went rigid. The humming in his chest sharpened into a distinct thrum of fear. No one came out this way in winter. The road was impassable. Only the trail was open, and only to locals who knew it. He wasn't a local. He was just a man from the city hiding in a cabin that had been in Karen's family for generations. Hiding. The word surfaced on its own. What was he hiding from?

The sound grew louder, closer. A steady, insistent buzz that seemed to vibrate in his teeth. A face flashed in his mind. A man from the university. A plagiarism accusation. Years ago. A nasty business. The student had been expelled. The boy’s father had made threats. What was his name? Collins? Colton? The name was a smudge, just like the photographs. But the feeling was sharp. The memory of rage, of righteousness, and a little bit of fear. The father had said he’d find him. He’d said, 'People like you, who sit in their ivory towers… you always get what’s coming to you.'

Was this it? Was this what was coming? Decades later? It was absurd. A paranoid fantasy. But the engine noise was not a fantasy. It was real. It was getting closer. Arthur slid off the chair and onto the floor, his hip screaming in protest. He crawled behind the armchair, pressing himself into the corner of the room. The floorboards were freezing, the cold seeping through his thin socks. He could feel the vibration of the engine through the floor now. It was powerful. Not some kid on a recreational machine. This was heavy. Purposeful. He held his breath, listening. The sound was deafening now, filling the small cabin, rattling the very glass in the windows. It was right outside. He squeezed his eyes shut. A memory fragment: the angry father’s face, contorted, mouth open in a shout he couldn't hear. The name was gone, but the threat felt as real as the cold floor.

He waited for the sound of the engine to cut out. He waited for the crunch of boots in the snow. For the knock on the door, or worse, the splintering of wood. His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. The whine of the engine peaked, a piercing shriek that seemed to drill directly into his skull. And then… it began to fade. It wasn’t stopping. It was passing. The sound moved from the front of the cabin to the side, and then receded, heading south down the trail. The volume dropped, the pitch lowered, until it was once again a distant whine, and then, finally, it was gone. Swallowed by the wind.

Silence. The silence it left behind was heavier, more profound than before. Arthur stayed on the floor, curled behind the chair, for a long time. His body was trembling, not from the cold, but from the adrenaline crash. The fire crackled. The wind soughed. Nothing else. No boots. No knock. Nothing. It had just been someone passing by. A hunter, maybe. Or a park ranger. A perfectly logical explanation. But the terror had been real. The man with the smudged face and the forgotten name had been real, in this room, for a moment. He crawled out from behind the chair, his joints stiff and painful. He pulled himself back into the seat, his body exhausted. He looked at the window. The frost patterns were unchanged. The lake was still empty.

He sat by the fire as the sky outside slowly lightened from grey to a pale, washed-out blue. The fear was gone, replaced by a strange sense of calm. A weariness so deep it felt like a kind of peace. He couldn't trust what he saw. He couldn't trust what he heard. He couldn't trust what he remembered. The lines were gone. The photograph of Karen, her blurred face. The vision of Karen, her impossible dress. The sound of the snowmobile, a real threat from a half-forgotten past. What was the difference? One was a trick of light and paper, one a trick of a dying mind, one a trick of acoustics and paranoia. They all produced the same result. A feeling. Fear. Longing. Confusion. They were all equally real in the moment they were experienced.

He picked up the poker and gently nudged a log. A shower of sparks danced up the chimney. He had a choice. He could spend whatever time he had left fighting this, trying to draw lines between the real and the unreal, a frantic, losing battle against the frost creeping across the glass. Or he could just… stop. He could sit here, in this chair, and let the world be whatever it was going to be. Let Karen walk on the water. Let forgotten enemies ride their snowmobiles through the woods. Let the faces in the photographs dissolve into nothing.

They were just patterns, like the hoarfrost. Intricate, beautiful, and utterly meaningless. He leaned his head back against the worn fabric of the chair. He didn't know if the threat was gone, or if it was still coming, or if it had ever been there at all. And for the first time, he found he didn't care.

He closed his eyes, accepting the quiet hum of his own disintegrating mind. The cabin was silent, a bubble of surreal calm in the frozen world. Then, a floorboard creaked upstairs.