Her windows smell like ice. Frost like delicate threads of lace embroidered in the glass. It refuses to melt when the dawn hits the panes, like a surprise slap in the face. Her cheeks are flush with heat after a night spent under her mountain of blankets. One by one, she presses them on the cold sheet of glass, pretending she is an alpinist resting on her ascent of a snow-capped peak. She knows even before she turns on the radio that school will be cancelled. A blizzard has descended, hiding the pits and curves in the road, smoothing the curbs until she can’t tell where the sidewalk ends and the backyard begins. Enough snow has accumulated on the windowsill to bury a bird. If she were to leap into the snowbank now, it would swallow her whole. Sometimes she wishes her parents’ bank would get the whole mess over with already, take the house and the yard, stop giving her parents those predatory loans. Life would be simpler then. Smaller, colder.

For once, she wants to be sure of what comes next.

Her parents take turns shoveling the driveway while she eats breakfast in her slippers. No one notices when she dollops peanut butter into her bowl or sneaks a little ginger cookie from the cabinet. Or perhaps no one minds. Nothing matters on a snow day, it seems. Nothing counts. She could while away the hours reading comic books on the floor or making snow angels outside, but come tomorrow the world would be just as still and the day would be just the same: oatmeal in the morning, soup in the afternoon, canned chili for dinner, the flavors identical, all options exact but for minor variations in the bowl being used, the curve of the only clean spoon, the quality of light reflecting off the icicles in the windows. She can do whatever she wants in these periods between meals. Sled down the hill. Throw snowballs at the neighbor kids. Build a snowman and pretend it will never melt.

All of this is extra. A heart over an “i.” A spell that stops time. Why waste it?

After breakfast, she pulls on her winter gear, her waterproof pants, her big puffy coat that makes her look like a walking sleeping bag with teeth. Outside, she cinches the hood so tight, her field of vision narrows to a point, pinching away the extraneous, the prepubescent nuisances who might distract her from her goal. One snowman isn’t enough. She plans to build dozens. Not only men but people of all genders and of no gender, people more properly defined as witches from an ephemeral snow coven that emerges once a year, after the first big snowfall. What do they want? What spells do they whisper into the frozen heart of the cauldron? The girl cannot say. She is just the sculptor tasked with building containers for their magical spirits. She doesn’t understand their ways any more than she understands her parents’ jobs.

What she does know is this: snow is like love—it collects, it drifts. It takes on unexpected shapes reflecting the source of desire, not the object. You could say that the girl has fallen in love with the one witch at her school, but you would be wrong. It would be more accurate to say: love is the only magic sustaining her as she waits for the other shoe to drop. For months, she has been gathering its power in the bottle of her body, storing up magical moments with the witch—a pale afternoon spent panting on the swings; a portrait unit in art class, where she was the artist and the witch the model; the stray lock of hair the witch allowed her to tuck behind an ear. Now, she will draw on that magic to build her miniature coven. Their pointed hats. Their arcane symbols. Their brooms made out of twigs. She thinks they’re perfect just as they are.

Ruth Joffre is the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Lightspeed, Pleiades, The Florida Review Online, Flash Fiction Online, Wigleaf, Baffling Magazine, and the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness, and Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses from the Gloomy Northwest. She lives in Seattle, where she serves as the 2020-2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House.

Emi finds the deer in the forest. It hasn’t been dead long, is still warm. It reminds Emi of her mother, something about the grey around its eyes and the sagging nipples on its belly. Emi has the urge to lean down and suckle.

Emi will be fifteen this month. Her mother is planning a party with peony centerpieces. Emi finds the whole affair grotesque.

Emi sits down in the dead leaves beside the deer. It is heavy-looking and beautiful. Emi respects the deer, the way it retreated to the forest to die without ceremony. She wonders what it must have been like to live so quietly, to die in the leaves.

Emi’s mother wants to know what Emi will wear to the party. Emi says, antlers.

Emi visits the deer again the next day. It is still there, but a little less. There is a sparrow on its back, nestled in its fur. Emi strokes the deer’s snout. The bird is unbothered. Emi thinks the deer must have been a mother, and she hates it a little bit. She opens its eyes, yellow-orange irises. The eyelids droop slowly closed as if the deer is drowsy.

Emi goes through her mother’s closet. Sharp, pointed heels. Pearl buttons. Stiff fabric and wires and hidden zippers. In the back, white lace. Beading and tulle. Wherever her father is, Emi is sure he does not keep his wedding tux in the back of a closet. For this, Emi thinks her mother pathetic.

By the third day, the deer is a home for flies and ants, a few maggots in the ears. Emi wishes to climb inside its stomach and go to sleep. She rolls the deer onto its back. It’s no small effort. Emi wants a good view of the stomach. Bald patches, dry blood, matted fur. This stomach has scraped the forest floor, nourished hungry babies with sharp teeth. Emi lifts her shirt to look at her own stomach. It is rounder and rougher than it used to be. A patch of dark hair blooms around her belly button. Perhaps she is turning into a deer. She feels around for extra nipples. Still only two.

Emi’s mother has locked Emi in the house. It is a small house in a cul-de-sac of identical small houses. Emi is not allowed to leave until she picks out a dress for the party. Emi’s mother suggests pink, to match the peonies. Emi suggests brown, like dirt or death. There is a standoff.

Emi will be fifteen tomorrow. She lies naked on her bedroom floor. She may not come out unless she is wearing a dress the color of flowers. Emi lies on her side, head tipped back, belly brushing the grassy carpet, eyes wide and seeing nothing. She imagines she is a dead deer in a forest. She can feel the maggots crawling into her eye sockets, the birds pecking at her tail. Emi’s mother calls to her from the hallway, but Emi does not move because she is a deer and she is dead.

On the morning of her fifteenth birthday, Emi slips out of the house. Her bare feet scrape the perfect suburban pavement. Behind the house, the sun rises above the forest where the dead deer lived. Emi is wearing her mother’s wedding dress. It droops over her shoulders, gapes at the chest, leaving space that Emi is not woman enough to fill.

Emi walks into the forest, the long white skirt turning brown beneath her feet. The deer lies on its back, the way Emi left it. Four legs splayed out, hooves reaching for the sky. Its chest is a cavern, ribs exposed, reddish-black guts spilling out. Emi rolls up her sleeve. The inside of the deer is cold and wet and alive. An ecosystem of things that live inside other, dead things. Emi searches for the heart, but another scavenger has already claimed it. No matter, Emi has a heart of her own.

Emi wipes her sticky pink hands on the white dress. She pulls more goopy blood from the deer’s innards, paints four fresh nipples on the front of the dress. She thinks perhaps this is how girls become mothers, or maybe it is how girls become deer.

Either way, Emi turns fifteen in a pink peony-colored dress.

Hannah Silverman is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker. She earned her BFA in Film & Television with a minor in Creative Writing from NYU. She is a reader at Pigeon Pages literary journal. Her prose has appeared in Litro Magazine, Pigeon Pages, Flypaper Lit, and elsewhere.

She asks if there’s a human inside, who scrubs the dishes and puts them back as they came in. I laugh, kiss her on her forehead, dipping my nose into her thinning hair.

I smear creamy lotion on my mother’s calloused palms, white settles in the trench of her lifeline. Years of washing dishes for restaurants, to send me to school, to buy books and uniforms after Pa died. Her back curved over dhobi ghats, wringing out towels and sheets. Her long face against the fabric on the clothesline, siphoning damp relief. Now, next to the sink where she has rinsed her life, a dishwasher is draining erasure into the creases on her forehead. During the day, she sticks her finger in the turrets of silverware holders, presses the soap pellets on her wash-annulled palms, their scent embroidered into her shadow. After dinner, her rosary-shaped eyes wait until the red LED of the machine turns off, expecting someone to walk out drenched in water, laced in froth.

“I haven’t embraced the porcelain in days,” she complains, her eyes dull with boredom. “My limbs are sore from underuse.”

“Ma, I have it all so you can rest now!” I plunge my gloved hands into the greasy dishwater in the sink, a mechanical whirring of the motor starting in the background.

“I wake up at night,” my mother says, “and grow sad about the world. It’s dying because there’s too much smartness and not enough touch.”

I shake my head and hear the mushy hurt of her guts–deep breaths, snotted air, a washcloth-cringed wetness split between us.

“It’s a curse not to use your gift to serve. Besides what do you do your entire life if not clean? First, the skin for good health, then the tongue with silence, and last, the mind with compassion,” my mother says.

 I don’t know what to say, so I interlace my fingers in hers. They don’t fit as they once did. There are gaps from which the light escapes.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is a writer of color and the author of the full-length flash collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, from Okay Donkey Press. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Post Road. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.