Counting To A Hundred by Aishatu Ado
1200 words, ~6 minutes reading time
Issue 9 (Winter 2025)
"Tell me 'bout the Frost Weaver again," Micah whispers, his small fingers clutch my sleeve as Daddy's voice crashes against Mama's downstairs. The words worthless and your fault seep through the floorboards like the winter draft.
"Not tonight, little man." I tuck a quilted blanket around his shoulders, the last thing Mama made before the blues froze her fingers still. But Micah's eyes, bright as copper pennies in sunlight, beg harder than his voice ever could.
"She comes when the first snow falls. When parents forget."
I swallow hard, remembering how Mama's eyes slid right past Micah at dinner tonight, his fifth birthday gone unmarked except for the small cupcake I'd bought with scrounged change.
A sharp whistle cuts through the night—Curtis's signal. My heart jumps like a rabbit sighting spring's first green. He's been asking for weeks to take me to the winter circus two towns over, promising carnival lights brighter than Lucedale's fireflies and cotton candy dreams. For once, I want to be thirteen instead of a second mama.
"Be right back," I promise Micah. His grip on my sleeve loosens. "Count to a hundred, real slow like I taught you."
Curtis leads me into the carnival noise, where winter can't quite follow. Calliope steam coils around the rides; honeyed wind threads through my braids. A warm hand presses a caramel apple into my palm, its glaze catching the lantern glow like amber sap. Curtis grins, tugging me toward the funhouse, mirrors winking under the bulbs. I bite into spun pink and the sweetness stings. He laughs, teeth flashing, and I join him—breathless—until my ribs ache at the tilt-a-whirl. For a while, there is no house, no shouting—only motion, only heat. Time slips away like water through cupped hands.
The road back is darker than I remember. Fields lie stiff beneath their crust of rime. Air sharpens as I walk; each breath cuts and hangs there, waiting. Ahead, the house shows itself in pieces—chimney first, then the crooked porch light still burning. The front door yawns wide; winter's teeth bared. Inside, loneliness prowls our home, a beast with misty bayou breath. Mama sprawls at the kitchen table, an empty bottle by her limp hand. Our tin roof rattles a frantic warning. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Outside, winter wraps around me like Daddy's whiskey breath. Pine trees crack overhead, their shadows dancing like switch-marks on snow. Each step breaks night's brittle skin, the percussion of small bones.
"Micah!"
The wind carries back something that might be his cry, might be the echo of my guilt-ridden voice. That's when I see them, children thin as morning's first ice, skin a translucent membrane with blue veins tracing frozen creek beds beneath. A boy swings from a branch that shouldn't hold his weight, laughing at jokes no one tells. A girl in a yellow dress spins endless pirouettes, her smile stretched wider than any living face could manage. More appear, shining with that same empty calm that settles over Mama's face when the pills finally win. They circle me, wolves made of frost. Their silence steals my breath, swallows my scream.
My eyes catch on a small figure ahead. Micah. My heart lurches at how alive he still looks, how his breaths still make clouds, how his eyes haven't yet learned that terrible, peaceful emptiness.
Behind him, the darkness shivers, draws tight as a held breath. Then she emerges, cradling Micah like Mama used to—before. The Frost Weaver’s skin ripples, northern lights trapped in human form. Air crystallizes around her footsteps, forming frost-ferns that climb the nearby pines with each breath she exhales, breath that doesn't steam like mine but falls as tiny diamond flakes. Icicles chime in her hair, each one holding a different child's reflection. But it's her eyes that root me, swamp-water green, deep as the Pascagoula River, and hungry as the blues that ate Mama from the inside out.
Fear turns my bones to water. "Give him back!" My words dissolve in the wailing wind.
The Frost Weaver's laughter echoes through the frozen forest, a sound like glacial spears shattering against stone. Her smile is too wide, too sharp. "He'll be happy here," she says.
She waves her hand and rime spiderwebs the air, forming a hoarfrost mirror. I see Micah growing tall and strong, laughing as he runs through eternal winter, never knowing hunger or forgotten birthdays or the sound of breaking bottles. In her vision, his smile never cracks like mine does, year after year of being the only one who remembers to care.
"I..." My voice catches. "I was coming right back."
"Your mama made promises too, before grief froze her tongue. They shattered, same as your daddy's morning-after apologies." Her words hit harder than ice pellets.
She reveals another vision of a girl with my face, my pink coat, my pigtails from before I learned to mother my mother.
Crystal barbs spread across the Frost Weaver's cheeks when she speaks. "You were almost mine, that night your mama first chose forgetting."
Courage burns through my fear as I lift my chin and meet her gaze. "Take me instead."
My mind flashes to last night: Micah curled against me as I taught him to blow smoke rings with his breath in the cold air, making wishes on each one. His laughter was warm as summer rain. That memory alone could melt glaciers. Could break hearts.
She tilts her head, Lucedale's December wind glinting in her eyes. "You’d let winter sculpt you into my eternal daughter?”
"Let him have all the warmth I never had."
Something shifts in her ancient eyes—recognition, maybe. The look of one who knows what it means to love someone enough to become monstrous for it.
As she places Micah in my arms, I glimpse Mama burst through the trees, Daddy close behind. Their faces carry something I haven't seen in years—concern.
I press my lips to Micah's forehead, etching every detail into my soul, his cinnamon skin, his ebon coils. "Remember, brother. You're tougher than Delta mud, sweeter than sugarcane. Remember our breath-ring wishes? They'll come find you now, wearing my face."
I set Micah in the snow, his warm weight leaving my arms.
Crystal flowers erupt at the Winter Maiden's touch. They bloom up my ankles; numbness follows, a frost-tide rising. At first, it burns. The night's marrow scours its way through my pores. My mahogany skin cracks cerulean. My legs jerk, a useless flinch. I claw at empty air. The pain bites higher into my head, the kind that floods behind the eyes when you swallow ice cream too fast. My braids harden, hollow ice filaments that sing when silver winds sweep through. The heartbeat in my ears slows, then falters. Sound dulls. Thoughts unravel; what's left is the shape of myself thinning, memories loosening one by one. I am lighter, smaller, terrified the world will go on without me. I open my mouth for a breath, for a cry, but arctic air locks around my throat; the scream stays trapped inside my skull.
The Frost Weaver's kingdom claims me behind its veil. Through winter's curtain, I hear Mama's sob as she clutches Micah, hear Daddy's voice break against Lucedale's pines.
"Elodie! Baby girl, where you at?"
