Winter in August

The fire burned, the wind blew, and the ash fell like never before. Water cruelly avoided this dance of the elements, an event that it had started by not showing up in the first place. The centuries-old growth burned better than any wood stove, its remains drifting east over the town and then back as the mountain, playing with cooler air, blasted the ash down towards the town. Ash piled up on the streets, choking the town.

It was the second winter in thrice as many months. “The Second Winter” most people called it.

It was the third new winter for Albert. First there was the winter that finally made him flee west from his poverty in the nation where one had to speak with care. Then there was this winter. In between the two was the town itself, Winters.

Forcing himself to think in the new language, he quietly mused on the humour of Winters-Augustine’s August Winter. Then he saw her.

She was marching against the ash-fall, resolute against everything elemental being forced against her. Her stride proved that she was of the utmost conviction that, while she too had been unhappily forced to move west, the fact that her birthplace was the most glorious nation in terms of everything on the face of this planet made up for it. But her face. In it lay the truth of her. This was not her second winter, nor her third: for young Olive Bard the ash was merely another snowfall in her one, long, endless winter.

Albert watched her approach his pile of boxes off North Main Street. For all his businessman-like tendencies (in the new manner, not like the fools who had caused everyone’s poverty in the first place), even his extreme practicality with money hadn’t been enough to get him a house. No one could nowadays, least of all a foreigner who would take the work that belonged to the local boys.

With his financial astuteness, Albert was hardly prone to gambling. But even though the girl’s face was hardly visible in the ashen flurry, he would have bet all his meagre savings on the fact that she was older than him. Not by much, but older still. Maybe it was her poise, as if she had seen her share of troubles and then found the years to stare them down, time Albert had never had. Or perhaps it was perceived age by contrast, for following her were six children, all in varying states of poverty, ranging from the ages of sixteen to four.

They couldn’t be her children, he thought, for with even the most deviant youthful behaviour only two of them were young enough to be her fruit. And she barked at the youngest children with the same ferocity as the oldest, denying any trace of mothering. What more, the eldest couldn’t even be her brother: as they approached Albert saw he was several shades darker than the others, not just in their troupe, but quite likely the whole town.

Insolently and finally, the eldest boy, whom Albert placed at 16, was dressed in better clothes than the ragged children around her. Disturbingly, he seemed to find his partaking in the desperate scavenging of poor children as an adventure.

However strongly Albert felt about the fool-boy after observing him from a distance for a period of under a minute, it was understandably not comparable to the absolute extremity of the girl’s own seething sentiments.

“What?” asked the girl, and Albert felt the absolute dread one feels when they realize that they are to be used as a substitute victim for a rage that must otherwise be checked. At some point during his detached analysis he had crossed the critical line between mere observing and full-on staring. Now the pseudo-mother-hen would defend her chicks, and Albert wished he had let her brood as she passed with her...brood

“Nothing. I only wondered if...” spoke Albert, while he mentally kicked himself for speaking every damn syllable with the accent of a foreigner. But if foreigners were as unloved here and in these times as he had experienced elsewhere...

“...I was only wondering why you are all dressed in rags while this, this brown clown,” and inwardly Albert congratulated himself for his mastery of this foreign rhyme, “is allowed to follow you, parading himself in such a bad, bad way. I mean, he can hardly provide you protection,” with this he broadly indicated the boy’s scrawny arms, while subtly flexing his own, “and I do not see him as a working man.” Albert ended with a more overt display of his musculature while he pointed towards the boy’s shoes, still shiny under a layer of ash.

The boy, dark as he was, visibly flushed. Albert realised with a start that this child had actually viewed himself as a defender, perhaps potential lover, of the woman. Albert’s simple gamble to defend his pride from the potential of a woman’s shrieking criticism had, in fact, dug right into the heart of a previously invisible cause of strain between the two.

“Miss Bard!” started the boy, and Albert dutifully filed this new knowledge away. “You, you should not believe, nor even listen to the words coming from this vagrant. You know I do my best to help you all, and I view it as a personal point of pride regarding just how well I’ve been aiding you.”

It wasn’t the boy’s insolence in calling Albert a vagrant or his claiming that he was helping these youths that enraged Albert the most. It was the fact that this more-foreign-than-Albert boy, even with his childish whining, still had a better command of the language than Albert.

The woman saw her chance.

The boy say him lose his. “Olive, I...” he started.

Albert would stay.

Leonardo ran, dreamlike, through the softly falling dust. It wasn’t ash, but an oak that he sought. Upon reaching it, he moved towards its base. Crying he threw himself...