Frostbite

A Story by Summer Grace

Flash Fiction

The snow was coming down, and the night was icy as the young blonde girl walked alongside the semi-rural road. Just a few more miles and she’d be in the city where she might be able to get a taxi home. Leigh’s blue eyes looked into the falling snow and down the silent road. There was nobody out. She did not want there to be anybody out. She thought, no, she knew could make it home.

Just a little while before, she had been a passenger in a warm car. But she and her boyfriend had a fight, she had just found he had been cheating on her. He no longer cared about her that much, but it had been in anger, and with her agreement, for she was angry, too (and a little drunk) that she had gotten out of his car on that bitterly cold night. She wasn’t thinking, she thought it was warmer than this. It was very late winter after all. But it had started snowing and getting colder a couple hours before predicted.

Leigh thought there was nobody out because it was icy. But, she would not accept a ride anyway, she did not think that was safe. It was safer to brave the cold, that late March night in the 1980s. Leigh tried to go on, but eventually just seeing falling snow, she lay down by the road way. She could not see to go on.

Nobody ever really knew what happened that night. Her boyfriend denied he had been with her when asked. His new girlfriend never admitted telling Leigh at the party that she had been replaced. All her other friends denied having been with her too, saying she had likely left with her boyfriend, from the party, but that they could not be sure, as Matthew and she had been seen fighting just before she might have left with him. Perhaps she had tried to walk home alone.

Leigh had been found dead of frostbite and cold at the age of only 17. With no evidence her death was other than accidental, the case was closed. But sometimes on winter nights, her former boyfriend was still haunted by the past. But, most of the time, his conscience was as cold as ice. Inner frostbite.