Freeze

3

While she waited for him to come back, Tess curled her legs under herself and watched the fire.

She hadn’t taken off her apron after the

(accident? event? phenomenon?)

incident in the kitchen, but she did so now, balling it up and tossing it in the empty chair.

She leaned over and kissed the top of Bub’s head. “Do you believe me, too?”

Bub stuck out his tongue and licked the back of her hand.

“Well, I’m glad the two of you do, because I’m not so sure I believe myself.”

Bub said nothing.

“I was just imagining things, right? It was just snow or a bird. Like he said. Right?”

Still no comment from Bub. He left his chin on the arm of the chair and panted.

The fire hissed, popped, and…tinkled?

Tess frowned and stared at the flames.

The noise came again, fluctuating tones like the ringing of a cheap wind chime. But the sounds weren’t coming from the fireplace.

She turned toward the kitchen.

Footsteps on broken glass. There’s someone in the kitchen!

“Warren?”

Bub looked up at her, whined.

It wasn’t Warren in the kitchen. She knew that. She could hear him in the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, rummaging through drawers, looking for tweezers.

The tinkling sound came again. Bub lifted his head off the chair, turned toward the kitchen, and growled.

“Warren?”

“Just a second,” he said. “I can’t find the damn things…are you…wait, here we go.”

Bub’s growl had become a full-fledged rumble. His muscles rippled from his shoulders to his limp, unmoving tail and then tensed. For the first time ever, she was almost afraid of him. When she looked at the dog, she saw not a domesticated animal but a wild beast, a savage, wolf-like creature. She thought if she reached out and touched him, he might whip around and bite her hand clean off.

“Warren!”

“I’m coming,” he said.

Except he wasn’t. Not yet. She heard him returning items to the bathroom drawers, shoving them in all willy nilly probably, not that she cared about that right now.

Something moved in the kitchen. She watched it edge around the doorframe. Not a hand or an arm or any other body part, but a chunk of ice, like a horizontal icicle, forming on the trim while she watched.

No, that’s not real. You’re imagining that. Warren was right: you’re hurt worse than you thought. A chunk of that glass went up through your tear duct and into your brain. Like an accidental lobotomy. Close your eyes and it’ll go away.

Except, if she was imagining it, what was wrong with Bub?

He’s picking up on your emotions. Dogs do that. You know it.

The icicle on the doorframe elongated, thickened. The tinkling sound got louder than ever.

Tessa Marie! You close your eyes. Right now!

She did. She squeezed them tight and counted to ten. The fire crackled and blazed. Fresh waves of heat billowed out.

When she opened her eyes—first one and then the other—the icicle was gone and Bub had calmed down. Somewhat anyway. He still faced the kitchen, and he still had that tenseness in his back, but he’d stopped growling. When she put a hesitant hand on his back, he turned around and (instead of biting it off) gave it a quick lick.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It was nothing. I’m sorry if I scared you.”

Bub turned back to her, licked her hand again, and dropped onto the doggy bed between the two chairs. He let out a stinky little fart and closed his eyes.

When Warren came into the room, Tess blew out a long breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She thought maybe that was the most honest answer she’d ever given.

He dropped a bag of cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a small bottle of liquid bandaid, and a pair of tweezers onto the chair beside her apron and gave her a concerned look.

“I’m just…freaked out,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course. Taking a broken window to the face is definitely freak-out worthy.” He bent down to pet Bub but then turned and headed for the kitchen instead.

For a second, Tess wanted to scream at him to stop, to stay out of there. But what was she afraid of? Ringing sounds? Imaginary icicles? Even if what she’d seen had been real, it was nothing to be afraid of. An icicle in the middle of the house was weird, but nothing to freak out about. There was a blizzard outside, after all. There was ice all over the place.

Yeah, but growing horizontally out of the doorframe so quickly she could actually see it forming?

It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t real. You were imagining it.

Warren had disappeared into the kitchen. “I’ll have to cover this,” he said from around the corner. “Not that there’s a lot of heat in here to get out, but this place will be an icebox when we get back if I don’t at least tape a trash bag over the hole.”

“Yeah,” she said. But she wasn’t thinking about the heat. She was thinking about the shape smacking the glass, cracking it, and about the icicle growing out of the doorframe like some sort of twisted, Tim Burtonesque stop motion.

Quit it. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.

Warren came back into the room, kneeled beside her chair, and put his hand on her chin. His skin was rough, calloused, but his touch was as soft and caring as ever. He turned her head to the left and the right and then grabbed the tweezers.

“Again,” he said, “this is my one-hundred-percent-non-medically-trained self talking, but I really think you got off lucky. There’s one piece here.”

He lifted the tweezers to her cheek, pinched them together, and pulled out a small chunk of glass. The extraction hurt just a little bit, like getting stung by a bee in reverse.

“And here.”

He pulled the second piece from her jaw and one more from just beneath her left ear. None of the shards were any bigger than a fingernail clipping.

Warren patted her leg. “There might be more beneath the skin, but that’s all I can see.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He used a peroxide-soaked cotton ball to dab at her face, wiped a few spots a second time, and then sealed some (but not all) of the cuts with the liquid bandaid.

“No point in getting any but the deepest ones.” He chewed his lip and squinted as he brushed the liquid into her cuts, like a painter adding the last fine details to a canvas. He spent the most time on a single wound that ran down from her forehead and must have been several inches long at least.

“The rest have stopped bleeding,” he said. “For the most part anyway.” He closed the liquid bandaid and tossed it back onto the other chair. “I’ll get you a fresh towel. In case any of these others start dripping again.”

“Okay. But not one of the good ones.”

He smiled, took her hand in both of his, looked her in the eye, and said, “I love you.”

She opened her mouth to respond but couldn’t find the words. Warren was a caring, loving man, and a fantastic husband, but he rarely let the “L” word pass his lips.

“I…love you, too.” She said.

He smiled, gave her a quick kiss, and stood up.

“I’ll be back in a sec.”

She nodded. When he was gone, she stared back into the fire and tried to think of anything but broken glass, ice, and shadowy, smacking hands.