Frost Mourning

They say the thaw is the first mercy of winter.
They’ve never been to Gable’s Hollow.

We buried the last body under a frozen overpass just before the creek moaned. Old Bellamy said it was the water letting go of the ice, but he was lying. Everyone lies when the frost won’t leave.

The thaw doesn’t scream when it’s just water.

It was around the third week of January when the ground cracked like a spine. The temperature hadn’t risen. No melt. No sun. Just a sound. Wet and low, like someone gurgling through stitched lips.

Tommy was the first to hear it. He’d gone out to take pictures for his newsletter, the one that always had sections on wildlife and ice formations. He found neither that day. What he found was the boot of a child, protruding from a half-melted mound near the edge of the lake.

He swore up and down; it hadn’t been there before. Swore it was screaming. Not from the boot, as the boot.

They hauled it into the town square. The mayor, the baker, and Mrs. Lynette from the daycare all stood around and stared. No child was missing. No child had boots like that. It was old. 1950s stitching. Not rotted, not torn. Just… stuck in the thaw. And it wouldn’t stop screaming when they moved it. It sounded like nails across stone.

We called the thaw Mercy. But that week, Mercy had a voice.

And it didn’t like being touched.

By the next morning, there were more boots. Some came with ankles. Some came with faces. None of them matched the census. The school didn’t lose any kids. The elders didn’t recognize the faces. No one knew these people.

And yet every single one of us felt like we had known them—once.

Mrs. Lynette fainted on the third day. She swore one of the girls who appeared in the thaw was her daughter, born still thirty years ago. Except this girl was eight. And breathing. And still frozen in the earth.

They say grief makes the mind untrustworthy.

But we all saw the girl move. The screaming got louder. Like the ice was shifting, like something underneath the town was melting free. We started hearing it in our walls. Cracks in our bathtubs. People began to whisper: “The Hollow is remembering.”

Nobody said it aloud, but we all felt it in our marrow: this town was thawing memories, not snow.

They told us to evacuate on the seventh day. But the roads were gone and not buried, gone. Pavement pulled like taffy into the woods. Signs twisted. GPS refused to lock. Even the sky above us was off kilter. You could stare up and see stars that hadn’t burned in centuries.

Tommy tried to burn the boots.

That’s when the blood started coming out of the trees.

It’s the fourteenth day now.

The girl from the thaw opened her mouth, and everyone in town forgot their own names.

Not me.

I’m writing this by candlelight in the church basement. I’ve tied bells to the door in case something tries to get in. They warned us, didn’t they? That old saying:

“When the thaw begins to scream, don’t look it in the eye—
It remembers who you almost were, and it’ll drag you back to die.”

They thought it was folklore.

It wasn’t.

If this resonates with you, please consider subscribing to https://ko-fi.com/thehollowvale to help bring more of the dark to light.