Not those crisp, December days when you still crunch over to break the pond's ice for birds. Nor those January afternoons when you light the fire early and disappear into some novel I never got around to reading. Give me your mud-slide February days, when your year yawns blank and the sky takes on the colour of old bras; when you are filled with memories of me, and I can curl, catlike, into your lap and almost smell your too-cold tea. I shudder at the first primrose: Bring back fog, tax returns, dog hair in your glass and that leak in our bedroom ceiling that nobody can fix. Bring back me.
Frances Orrok works with people in crisis and writes. Her stories can be found in Wigleaf, Smokelong Quarterly, Gone Lawn, New Ohio Review and other places. Her first novel explores how relationships and islands function as sanctuaries or traps (on query); her second examines tensions between capitalism and care.
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