Inventory of a Frost

Overnight the window learned a new alphabet, ferns and antlers etched in a hand no one taught it, a language that melts the moment the sun reads it aloud.

I press my thumb against the glass and leave a window in the window, a small clearing where the street resumes— the bare elm, the parked cars dusted like loaves left too long in the cold.

Somewhere a kettle finds its one high note. The radiator ticks its slow arithmetic. And the frost, unbothered, keeps its ledger: each breath I spend it spends back, crystal for crystal, until we are even.

By noon the panes will run with their own undoing, the antlers slack, the ferns gone liquid, and I will have nothing to show but a clean square of glass and the cold print of where I touched.