Crow calls puncture the icy air. In the silences between—our snowshoes punching a trail behind us—we make small talk like we have practiced in class. In my pockets I tuck his facts, the siblings and cactus-spotted landscapes of his youth, the book clubs and home brewing of his present. I save them like squirrel-stashed pinecones, as if the same snow-damp air that balloons my lungs might soften his details to something digestible, something familiar.

He will no longer be my teacher. This is what he told me after the asking, in the in-between of the classroom and the hallway, blurry chalk-print hands on his trouser legs betraying the nervous fingers he gripped in stiff fists as the other students streamed past to their night shifts, to their cramped apartments. He told me two times, as if I maybe did not understand the significance, as if I am wet behind the ears. We will be breaking no rules now if I agree to go on a date with him, he said. It was touching, his earnestness. His nerves shivered across his forehead while he waited for my answer. Like he no longer was the expert of verb tenses or slippery idioms sketching strange pictures in my head. Like this time I owned the words he needed to borrow. So I rolled the bones with my yes.

It is a yes I now wish to swallow back. We cross over our own tracks, looping a noose around an unmapped patch of forest. Shadows curl blue in the hollows, darker than they were on our first pass; dusk drops suddenly here. When I point this out, he does not worry. He dismisses my suggestion that we retrace our steps, like he ignored me when I told him his snowshoes should go each on the other foot.

“Just a bit further,” he insists. “This must remind you of home.”

I watch the teeth of his snowshoes bite through the crust and flick up powder from underneath. The sun no longer sparkles the snow. Nothing of this feels like home.

The trail unfolds to a field. As we cross the meadow, our talk becomes not so small. He tells me of the woman he says stole his job at the college, of the daughter he sees every other weekend, of the voting he will not do because too many contenders are corrupt. He tells me of his friend who believes immigrants are vectors of disease and crime, that they should be rounded up, imprisoned, shipped away. “Not the ones who came here the right way, of course,” he adds. He floats these ideas to me, swiveling his head to watch them land. 

I ice my ears to them, ice my face to betray none of my thinking. It is not logical that out here, dwarfed by the expanse of white-frosted pines and white-blanket sky, he seems larger even than he did in the cramped classroom with walls the same ill green of the hospital tent, of the helicopter that plucked me from the fighting in the nick of time, of the uniforms on the men who stitched back together my skin and sent me into this familiar snow and unfamiliar syntax. A shudder—of cold, I pretend to myself—xylophones up my spine. 

At the trailless far edge of the clearing, tree shadows stretch, warning us away. I wish to heed them, but I do not suggest again that we backtrack, do not use the word lost. It would change only his mood, I think, not his mind. 

“Looks like a dog.” The print he points to is larger than my mittened hand, tipped with crisp triangle claws. Here, under drooping cedar branches, blood and feathers mark the snow. 

“Wolf,” I correct him. 

He smiles with too many teeth. “Good thing you’re with me. These woods are dangerous.” 

The commotion now flapping inside me cannot be pretended away; I cannot tell myself it is only butterflies in the stomach. I breathe to trick my heart back into rhythm, breathe to grope toward some floating hope, but all the lift has left my lungs. 

The snow crust holds a pink-stained scallop of wingtips where the bird pushed off. I know I cannot join in her escape; gravity has cracked me open and pinned down my pieces. I can only squint to the now-silent sky, wishing her safe in the deepening blue.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson