The Garden

Blue

Blue

Nine o'clock on a lip-chapping, glove-wearing Friday night of December freezes Rapunzel's hair into an icicle.

Nine o'clock while the snow falls like a higher power didn't notice the salt shaker was still flowing.

Nine o'clock as the trees shudder and groan like they were already part of an aging floorboard from the creepy house on Patterson Street.

Nine-thirty strikes & the sky takes a raincheck on its own rain and turns black without stars

Nine-thirty-one and particles of snow still innocent and unaware of the ground dance across the blackened sky doing their best impressions of alien specks of light.

Nine-thirty-three and the wind howls a belting note at the end of a song someone wrote to appease the cold.

Nine-thirty-eight and the surface and the snow matures and grows shells and splatters instead of melts on the ground.

Nine-forty-four and the lake that used to house swimming children from the daycare began to cry and sealed its precious liquid underneath a hardy blanket while it reads with a flashlight under the covers.

Nine-fifty and a girl with hair like ice itself, white like the snow that assaults it and cold like the air it envelops steps out onto the ice in a pair of under-developed shoes.

Nine-fifty-seven and the girl drops the box she was carrying into the snow that seeps into it like a child does to gifts on Christmas morning and the girl ignores it.

Nine-fifty-eight and under the canopy of branches and the shadow of the absent sky and the shoes turn out to be skates that make silent noises against the lake.

Nine-fifty-nine as a girl skates alone on a lake in the middle of nowhere that nowhere doesn't know it exists.

Ten o'clock and Winter takes the girl's hand and now two people are skating on a lake in the middle of nowhere.

Ten o'one and on a lip-chapping, glove-wearing Friday night of December and only the cold that used to freeze is able to melt Rapunzel's hair back into a shower of gold.