There Is a Door in the Snowdrift
The blizzard arrived with a sound like shattering glass, muffling the world until every surface wore a veil of white. In the small hours, Mara found herself tracing the lines of the storm with a breath that fogged the air, listening for the knock of a knock that would never come. The cabin creaked as if listening back, the stove sighing with a throat full of embers, and outside, the wind pressed its cold palm against the door as though begging to come inside.
Beyond the window, the world was a photograph of white, but in the drift by the porch there appeared a narrow seam, as if the snow had torn a doorway and forgotten to seal it again. Mora stood, gloves stiff with frost, and pressed her palm to the pale surface. The seam widened—not with wind, not with thaw, but with intention. A door, pale as bone and carved with strange sigils, stood there where none had ever stood before. There is a door in the snowdrift, Mara thought, and the thought frightened her more than the cold.
- Cold that bites through wool and marrow at the same time.
- The soft thump of something knocking from the other side of the door, a rhythm that isn’t quite human.
- A keyhole etched with frost that reflects a room she has never seen yet feels unspeakably familiar.
She cleared the drift with trembling hands, the ice crackling like distant lightning, and pushed the door inward with a breath held tight in her chest. The world that opened was not the storm-torn yard she knew, but a corridor of snow-lit rooms, each doorway framed in frost. The air smelled faintly of pine and old paper, and a distant ticking—unseen—kept time with the heartbeats she could feel pierce through her gloves.
“Some doors do not lead outside,” a voice whispered, not from outside, but from somewhere inside her own chest. “Some doors lead you back to the moment you forgot to tell the truth.”
In the first room, Mara found herself standing before a mirror that did not reflect her, but the faces of the people she had tried to forget. In the second, a kitchen where a pot simmered with steam that tasted of rain and regret. In the third, a classroom where the chalkboards wore white lines like veins. Each door opened into a memory that had learned to breathe again, and with every doorway she stepped through, the present grew thinner, as if the storm itself had chosen to fade behind her, leaving only the echo of a choice.
She realized, with a cold certainty that burned rather than warmed, that the door was not a trap but a test of what she would carry with her when the snow finally settled. The door wasn’t here to imprison her—it was here to show what she could become if she listened to the quiet between breaths, if she refused to let the past line the edges of the future with frost.
When she finally returned to the cabin, the storm raged still, but the air felt different—clear, with a trace of something almost hopeful. The door, now gone, left behind a single phrase etched in frost on the sill: There is a door in the snowdrift, and it will not stay open forever. Mara wrapped her scarf tighter, stepped into the white, and walked toward whatever door might come calling again.