The Next Day

Every day, it snowed. The trees were dead, their skeletal fingers reaching up from the ground in a mockery of reproach.

Tempest watched the glittering flakes fall down, before the Yeti woman looked down at her baby boy. Held against the white fur of Tempest's arm, he looked as black as the night sky, with little flecks of silver dotting his coat like stars. So small and beautiful.

So horribly wrong.

Some time ago, her friend Walker gave birth to a baby girl with one arm. The law of the Yeti pack was clear; a week after the baby was born, her friend had slowly made the journey down the mountain with the girl cradled in her arms. Walker had returned with the dawn, empty-handed and hollow-eyed.

Tempest should make the journey too. Tomorrow night would be a week after her baby was born. She should abandon her deformed child at the edge of the human settlement to die. It was pack law.

But pack law wasn’t the whole story. It didn’t take into account the subtleties of the dilemma, all the nuances of motherhood. Such as what happened after the law was followed. When Tempest had held her friend in her arms as Walker cried for her lost child.

Tempest lifted up the baby to her face and put one white, whiskery cheek against his. The baby slept on peacefully, not knowing that soon... very soon... he would be breaking his mother’s heart.