This work is Copyright © 1994 Lilith. All rights reserved.
It was January because the Snow Queen had ridden through and dropped her mirrorshards all over the land in a sprinkle and one landed in her eye and one in her heart and she neither felt pain nor did she feel remorse anymore. She loved the pain and the cold and it gnawed on her playfully.
She hadn't had a bite to eat in 38 hours and it was starting to feel that way to her fingertips; the cold was seeping in through the pads of her fingers and up her arms like they were straws and the windy streets were cold cold cold. She wasn't scared because the mirrorshard was in her eye.
She hugged a parka to her body because that was the only thing she had beyond the scruffed jeans and useless sweatshirt and the gloves on her hands had holes in the fingers and that's where the cold was coming through right there and travelling up her arms like slow poison and her parka had no buttons so she had to hold it shut.
If she didn't keep on moving the cold would find her shoulders and by then her fingers would start dropping off one by one from her hand like icicles pulled off from a garage roof by greedy little boys but already her toes were missing; she left them behind, they clinked off brittle and blue and she was walking just on her feetbones so that was why she was limping and walking like a foot-bound geisha.
In all this she wondered how her parka would be held shut after her fingers fell off, because after her fingers would be her hands and those would make a fine crash to the molecular concrete sidewalk, and shatter in a million pieces like ice. They would crash and they would smash and scatter and lodge in some others' eyes because she was a mirrorshard now, oh yes, and they weren't even her most tender of parts.
She could feel her nipples tight, painful, cold, as the cold got closer to her center and she knew without a doubt that sometime before her legs fell off at the knee the mirrorshards would win out and she would be lost, her nipples fallen, last vestiges of feeling in her body that was otherwise numb with the winds and the sharp dull heated heavy cold of the silver slivers that worked their way towards her soul and devoured it all in the name of the Snow Queen.
Later they found a street filled with silver fragments of a splintered mirror and two round diamonds in the shape of nipples that yielded a poem when you looked into them.
Winter is a state of heart,
The ice, the crystals my friends;
A most common symptom is memory gone cold
With time, and a heartache to mend
For the freezing. I beg the Snow Queen fly
To scatter mirror shards; their silver fall
Numbs my traitor heart. One pierces an eye,
Making me despise all the beauty I see
But the cold and the drear is lovely to me.