Are In Need — 8. When We

He was lying too. He had seen the fever-grip before, back in the tenements. It didn't break. It wore a person down until they were nothing but a hollow shell, and then it blew them away like ash.

The knife slipped. A thin bead of red welted on his thumb. He didn't curse; he didn't have the energy to spare for anger. He simply put the thumb to his mouth, tasted the salt and iron, and went back to the pine. He was carving a small bird. A robin, or something like it. Clara had loved the robins that nested in the orchard back home. A heavy thud sounded against the heavy oak door.

The lantern sputtered, its flame a drowning wick in a pool of gray tallow. Outside, the wind screamed through the cracks in the cabin logs, a high, thin sound like a animal in a trap. Elias didn’t look up from the table. His fingers, cracked and mapped with dirt that no soap could reach anymore, worked a piece of dry pine with a small whittling knife. 8. When We Are in Need

A wave of freezing air and swirling white powder blasted into the cabin, instantly killing the lantern. In the dim, blue glow of the snow-light, he saw a shape on the threshold. It was a man, or what remained of one. He was on his hands and knees, wearing a coat of stiffened elk-hide, his beard a massive frozen shelf of white ice. He didn't look up. He just leaned his forehead against the doorframe, his shoulders heaving.

The stranger made a sound then. It wasn't a groan or a plea. It was a dry, clicking sob. His hands, bare and blue-black at the knuckles, slipped on the icy threshold, and he collapsed forward, his head resting inches from Elias’s boots. He was lying too

Elias stood frozen, the poker raised. Everything in him—the hard-learned selfishness of survival, the terror for Clara, the emptiness of his own belly—told him to kick the man back into the drifts and bar the door. They had nothing. To share nothing was to split death in half.

Elias didn't ask questions. He didn't demand to know where he came from or what he wanted. In the deep winter, need was the only language that mattered. It wore a person down until they were

He waited, his heart hammering against his ribs. Then, another thud, lower down this time, followed by a wet, sliding sound against the wood.