Such a Cold World

It was such a cold world. The squat stone buildings seemed to amplify the wind, rather than protect from it. The wind always blew too, day and night, blowing the snow, or the rain or sometimes both against any bare skin you were foolish enough to leave unprotected as you made your way across the gaps between the buildings.

The people on this desolate planet, when out on the surface were hard to distinguish from the animals that somehow managed to eke out a living from the unforgiving landscape. All were squat hunched-up figures, covered in fur, that scuttled and stumbled around in the blizzards, gales and downpours.

Sitting huddled up close to a fire in one of the squat stone taverns, where it seemed the wind threw barrow-loads of snow against the thin windows and sneaked in around the edges of those windows and the doors, somebody once told me, that the world had spring, summer and autumn as well as winter. I – of course – did not believe him.

I had been there many months, and still I had not got used to how one of those bundles of thick heavy cloths and strange dense furs could shed its outer layers and become a woman who would crawl into my bed and ease away the cold from my frozen bones in the way only a warm, living woman can.

It was only then, one morning, after months and months of cold and rain that I woke up to a strange silence, broken only by the slow breathing of the dark-haired woman who lay sleeping on my chest under the heavy fur blankets that covered us.

At first, reaching for my gun that lay on the table by the bed, I thought I must have heard some intruder, some sound that had woken me. Then I realised it was not a sound that had woken me, but the absence of a sound….

The wind had dropped.

Unbelieving, I looked over towards the window and for the first time since landing on that world, I could see its sky free from storm clouds.