It's all right. Stillwater Valley, Colorado Territory. December 24, 1879. The wind came down from the mountains like a living thing that night, carrying ice in its teeth and hunger in its howl. Clara Dawson stood at the window of her cabin, watching the snow pile against the fence posts until they disappeared entirely, swallowed by white the way everything in her life had been swallowed by emptiness.
Christmas Eve 1879. The year was dying, and Clara felt she was dying with it. She pressed her palm against the cold glass, watching her breath fog the pane. Through the frost patterns, she could see the small wooden cross at the edge of the property, barely visible now beneath the accumulating snow. Two names carved into that cross.
Two lives ended before their time. William, age 34. Thomas, age five. She had not celebrated Christmas in two years. Not since the fever took them both in the same brutal week, leaving her with a cabin full of silence and a heart full of ash.
The memories came unbidden as they always did at night. Thomas's small body burning with fever, his eyes glazed and unseeing. William working himself to exhaustion, trying to care for their son, then succumbing to the same sickness three days later. The doctor from Ridgewater arriving too late to do anything but shake his head and mutter about quarantine. The neighbors staying away, afraid of contagion, leaving Clara to dig two graves and ground so cold it seemed to resist her shovel out of spite.
She had survived. Sometimes she wished she hadn't. The cupboard held three potatoes, a handful of dried beans, and half a jar of preserves that had gone questionable sometime in November. No meat, no bread, no coffee. She had rationed carefully through the fall trading needle work for flower, eggs for salt, but winter had come early and hard this year, and the trading had dried up along with everything else.
Last week, she had eaten the last of the chickens. The week before that, she had sold her milk cow to the Harper family 8 miles south, getting barely enough to cover the property taxes. The county demanded whether you could pay or not. Now Christmas dinner would be whatever she could scrape together from nearly nothing. Clara pressed her forehead against the cold glass.
32 years old and already a ghost haunting her own life. The woman who had once laughed easily, and dreamed of filling this cabin with children, now moved through her days like smoke present, but insubstantial, waiting for something she could not name. Outside, the wind screamed and the snow fell and the darkness pressed against the windows like something trying to get in. Clara thought about the rifle above the fireplace. thought about how easy it would be to simply stop fighting, stop surviving, stop pretending that there was any reason to see another morning. But she had thought about that before many times in the worst nights after the funerals.