Frostbitten

Romy awoke to a sting as sharp as a cold snap - her arms shot out, shoving a box of complimentary Ginseng Zing Zen Bars off the desk and ejecting them across the atrium floor.

‘Oww…’

She rubbed the back of her head, turning. A young woman, smiling, dropped a damp towel back into the guests’ discard box.

‘Gross, Bethany. That could be anyone's.’

‘Even your biggest fan.’ She mimed a pointy chin.

Romy's eyes widened. ‘Ice bath guy.’

‘Sorry, would you rather I left you out cold on the reception desk?’ Bethany asked, picking a bar out of a eucalyptus plant and offering it to Romy, who was mid-yawn. ‘Ginseng Zing?’

Romy glanced over her shoulder. ‘Better not.’

‘How many jobs you got now?’

‘This one,’ she said, waving a nonchalant hand towards the robed guests, shuffling about in wafts of warming sandalwood. ‘The zero-waste place, bike courier -’

‘- worst job in December.’

Romy sighed. ‘Plus it’s the design competition deadline soon.’

‘And on top of that you've got The Greens,’ said Bethany, sparking up a tealight and replenishing the fizzy water (all things Romy should have done on arrival). ‘You coming tonight?’

Romy made a noise like a wounded seal and, palms to her cheeks, pulled her face into an expression Munch would have thought was over the top.

‘I forgot.’

‘You said you’d do the campaign logo.’

‘I remember now,’ Romy groaned.

‘I’ll get you a pad and pen,’ said Bethany.

* * *

Eddastaithe, on the frost-bitten ear of East England, was an old port city that had never had its heart in being urban. Most of the place felt the same as when the Vikings had hopped back in their longships, except they’d left the attitude behind with most of the residents. Narrow alleyways between densely packed plots led down to the water, studded with jetties. Romy’s tiny one-bed looked inland, however, onto fields. She knew they’d be built on eventually, but she held onto the view for now.

For Romy to be living there at twenty-five was weird. For her to be working herself so hard just to afford her tiny cottage was practically insane. Even the other Greens, her closest friends, thought so.

‘You’re too sprightly for this place,’ said Janet. ‘Get gone to Norwich.’

‘What are you here for anyway? Social media rep?’ said Stan. ‘I used Superzoom on Instagram just this morning.’

‘Wouldn’t miss your Get Ready With Me videos for anything,’ she said.

They were starting up a new campaign for communal heating in the village. The whole place was a patchwork of inefficient, outdated systems, and there were schemes to fund places like theirs with heat pumps. It was a no-brainer. And to the residents of Eddastaithe, it was almost universally unpopular.

The responses to the petition for support had clearly shown: Eddastaithe would require further persuasion.

“My gas heating’s served me right since the Queen's Jubilee!”

“I'd rather burn my house down than listen to a bunch of swampies.”

Romy had offered to come up with a logo, since it wouldn’t involve her actually having to knock on anyone’s door (or window, when they pretended not to be in) and try to bring them round to the scheme. In the remaining part of her shift, she’d managed to stay awake long enough to scratch out some passable options, but by the end of the meeting she was asleep on Janet’s shoulder.

‘Honestly,’ Janet said, gently shaking her. ‘How can you sleep through this stuff? I’m infuriated, and it’s less my future than yours.’

‘If you want honesty,’ Romy said, ‘the whole thing’s exhausting.’

‘And it’s only the start of the campaign. Clean Heat, Warm Hearths,’ said Janet. ‘Let me drive you home.’

‘I’ve got the bike,’ said Romy. ‘Anyway, the cold will wake me up.’

As she crossed the threshold into the below-zero air, it did. A prickle in her fingertips, a lightness in her chest - an inkling of relief. Good. Night was when her real work began.

What she wanted, more than anything, was a cottage on the edge of a field or forest, where the winter air withstood the warming world, and all day she could get lost in ink on paper. Finelining her mind’s eye was the only thing that offered her real serenity. It was also, unfortunately, the one thing no one would ever pay her for. So she did it at the only time that wasn’t already spoken for: the tranquil hush of the small hours, when the rest of the world put away their purses and slept.

Except the impish eye that twinkled through the frost.

It had started one night at the beginning of the cold snap, when frost first crept thickly over the kitchen window. She’d leaned close to the glass, following the branching crystals with her eyes, trying to sketch them exactly. She found herself covering a whole page in crystallised fronds, until she’d made an intricate canvas. Something in the window blinked.

She started experimenting - always beginning with the patterns on the window, half-focussing on what was actually there, but also on what was in her mind’s eye. Then she’d draw repeating patterns across the page, adding in little details behind the crystals: suggestions of winter plants and dormant animals, the landscapes of winter in repeated, elegant, intricate maximalist motifs. Frost-veined ivy tendrils implying the silhouette of a sleeping fox, crystalline bramble loops encasing robin footprints, thistle crowns rimed with white and just the suggestions of hedgehogs. And occasionally, through the fractals, a mischievous little eye, revealed to her now, and not seeming to belong to anyone in particular.

Liberty Design House sold only the most exclusive brands, but every winter they held an open call for prints. The winner got a commission. She always entered, but this week - this cold - she felt as though she was listening to music in a key never heard before. She couldn’t let the thaw set in before she’d captured whatever it was offering.

So, no sleep.

Tonight, as she pressed her fingertips to the freezing glass, her inner eye saw ferns feathering outward. Behind them, as if part-creature, part-ice: a cluster of curled dormice, sleeping and still.

The torpor of the day had been swept away by a freshness; she scratched away at the tablet until dawn.

This was the one. The hero piece.

She’d submitted it before the sun was up.

* * *

That afternoon, Romy refilled the pasta shells at the zero-waste place with all the vigour of a week-old helium balloon. She ached. She hadn’t stopped moving since dawn. She sighed, checked her phone.

The Liberty email sat between a discount code for a machine to make your own oat milk and an alarmingly titled petition to stop world leaders abandoning net zero.

We have reviewed your entry and it successfully meets our admission criteria. We have submitted it for formal judging.

Thank you for your interest in the Liberty Open Call.

Little warmth, but that was quite welcome, under the circumstances.

The shop door bell rang and a man hurried in, waving a leaflet in her face. She recognised her own logo bobbing about under her nose. She recognised the man as Mr. Queen’s Jubilee heating. She wished he did not recognise her.

‘This your lot?’ he huffed.

‘You know it is!’ she smiled, mindful of the CCTV.

‘Hardly green is it, printing these things to litter my private property with?’

‘How much is the gas costing you?’

Whether she’d stayed awake through the meeting or not, there was no argument in the world that could have come to her aid here.

‘None of your business!’ he shouted. ‘I only came here to return this junk.’ He dropped the leaflet on the floor and turned on his heel. ‘And tell your friends I don’t want to hear any more about it!’

The door slammed behind him. Some of the pasta shells jumped from the scoop.

Romy sighed, bent down to pick them up and sat on her heels, too tired to get up. A flicker caught her eye - something in the glass door, like dandelion seeds blowing by. She leant in, and saw creeping in at the corner of the pane despite the heated interior, was a single line of frost - it looked like a feather? Or a leaf? Or even a kind of toothy grin? She sprang up.

On her break, she opened her sketchbook. Her fingers moved without waiting for her permission - tracing the feather, expanding it, letting it flood the page until it became a great sweeping arch, then a winter canopy, then something with the essence, but not quite the form, of a figure.

The tiredness drained away as the hours wore on, and as she raced home in the early evening, which might as well have been midnight, she wondered whether she was just becoming nocturnal.

And when she turned her key in the cottage door, a whisper of frost was already threading across the draughty window frame.

* * *

The next day was a Greens day: fact-finding missions for the communal heating campaign. Google searches, emails, spreadsheets. They needed success stories to shore up the power of persuasion.

Janet and Stan were discussing sign-offs.

‘Do you think they’re more likely to reply if I say “All the very best”?’ fretted Stan.

‘Stan,’ said Janet, ‘You sound like you’re wishing them good luck for their operation. You’ll scare them off.’

‘Cheerio?’ he asked.

While they argued, Romy started to doodle on the back of a leaflet. Not frost, nothing wintry - quite the opposite. This would be something altogether more explosive.

She felt an electric hum under her skin.

She folded the leaflet away, making a note to go to the art shop. For an artist, she had very few supplies: just a stylus and a few pens and pencils. No paint, nothing large-scale.

‘Best regards, are you mad?’ said Janet. ‘Romy, what do you say?’

She was brought back into the moment.

‘Me? Nothing,’ she said. ‘No time.’

‘Hopeless,’ said Janet.

That night, it almost seemed as though the frost had curled into shapes that almost looked like hands. The eyes smiled.

She touched the pane and cold leapt into her fingertips.

* * *

The cold snap hadn’t yet passed when Romy straddled her bike, loaded up her phone - ready to see who else needed last-minute cranberry sauce couriered - and saw one unread message.

Liberty Design House: Outcome of your application

Dear Romy,

We are delighted to inform you that you have been selected as this year’s winner for the Liberty Design House Open Call. Many congratulations.

We’ll be in touch to discuss next steps.

We would like to share our judges’ comments:

“We loved this work because it recognises the quiet but ornate delicacy of winter. So much seasonal art asks nature to be loud, blooming, excessive. Your piece instead argued for stillness as a kind of power - that winter is not absence, but preparation. ‘Things are supposed to be frozen - things need time to go inside themselves,’ you wrote, and it’s rare to see such confidence in restraint. We felt the tension you created between fragility and firmness: the subtle layering, the cool palette held just short of icy, the shapes that look paused mid-movement. It made us think of the world taking a breath. Among this year’s entries, yours stood out for its clarity of thought and somehow being subtle in its maximalism. That’s why we’re thrilled to name you as our winner.”

Romy let out a thin squeak.

She called Bethany.

‘If you’re about to tell me you forgot to put the used towels in the laundry, I already - ’

‘I won,’ she said. ‘What they said, about why they liked it. They got it.’

‘Liberty?’

‘Yes! And the stillness and the layers and - I know it sounds stupid but it feels so good that like, they just got it.’

‘That’s because you served it,’ said Bethany. ‘Congratulations, Roms.’

She didn’t put her gloves back on. The cold bit at her fingers in a way that felt almost electric - like the air itself was powering her by its briskness.

She turned onto Briggate Road and passed a wall that looked perfect - so visible, and so plain. A perfect canvas.

Her phone buzzed again - Liberty proposing times for the call.

Romy pedalled harder, breath ghosting behind her.

For the first time, she felt brilliantly, unmistakably out there.

* * *

Romy didn’t even realise she’d left her coat at home until Maggie - sixty-four, retired postie, ardent Green Party leafletter - now balaclava-clad lookout - hissed, ‘Love, aren’t you cold?’

‘Nope,’ said Romy, hopping off her bike.

Maggie muttered, ‘I’m not driving you to hospital, you know,’ and returned to squinting at the end of the lane like it was enemy territory instead of Eddastaithe’s local florist.

‘I think criminals like us have to go to the vet in an emergency,’ said Janet.

Maggie shivered. ‘Jack Frost isn’t worrying about global warming tonight, is he?’

Janet and Stan wrestled a bucket of wheatpaste into place, next to a roll of stencils the size of a body bag.

‘Ready?’ Stan whispered. ‘I feel like I’m back in eighty-seven. Did you know I once spray painted STOP THE POLL TAX on a road bridge?’

‘You can’t compare your scrawlings to Romy’s art,’ said Maggie.

‘I think it may be about as popular,’ said Janet. Then, realising what she’d said. ‘Er, sorry Romy, just slipped out.’

‘Not offended,’ she said, unrolling a stencil. ‘I think that’s kind of the point.’

They moved fast. Romy directed with an alert, icy precision.

The image was a man - anonymous - feeding fistfuls of notes into a gas flame. His eyes were maniacal, devilish. Sweat beaded on his brow. Charred scraps spiralled around him. Beneath, the slogan read: ALONE, WE BURN. COMMUNITY HEATING NOW.

‘I’ll make a nice community mural once the scheme’s in place,’ said Romy.

Janet stepped back. ‘You’re shining.’

‘What?’

‘Your face. Or the air around your face. Probably the streetlight.’

Romy pretended to be nonplussed, but she felt it - a cold clarity, like a stark halo.

* * *

They all got home undisturbed. She kicked off her shoes, left the door cracked open, and crossed to her desk. The window was already frosting at the edges. She threw it open.

She watched as the crystalline lines spread - faster than frost should. They unfurled in branching curls, each curve appearing deliberate - in a way, conversational.

‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘I see you.’

The frost gathered thicker on the glass, then crept onto the sill, forming a delicate lacelike frill. A minute later, it slipped onto the floorboards - thin as breath, curling toward the open doorway.

Romy didn’t move, except for sharp eyes darting along the path of the frost. Her pulse slowed, matching the quiet winter outside.

She felt wide awake.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I see how it is.’

The frost lingered at the threshold, patient in its invitation.

She followed.

She paused beneath a streetlamp. Frost crystallised up its pole in a single sweep, catching the light and throwing a halo around her - sharp-edged, shimmering, crowned.

She walked on.

* * *

Eddastaithe woke to a glittering morning.

Frost feathered across railings and phone boxes in new motifs - ferns spiralling into fox tails, bramble crowns dotted with tiny, glinting eyes.

As neighbours passed, they felt a quiet evocation, a sense that these delicate things - winter, pattern, place - deserved tending. The thought of lifting a finger, of changing some small habit or stance, no longer felt quite so unfamiliar.

Liberty called. Romy didn’t answer.