by Claire Guyton

Him? Still outside. Watching and waiting. Feeling the cold but not letting it really get inside him because that’s the trick of it, of standing the cold. You don’t try to keep it out entirely because it can’t be done. You learn that feeling cold is not so terrible. Feeling cold is part of being alive. Like peeling off socks that stick to broken skin, like cracking a tooth on a chicken bone—the shock of it all through the jaw and right down the spine. Like torn knuckles, torn clothes, like a fistful of hair.

Claire’s micros are forthcoming or have appeared in CHEAP POP, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and elsewhere. She was the Maine Arts Commission’s 2012 Literary Fellow, and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.