The student café smells like tea and old afghans, thick with dust because no one wants to open a window and let in the freezing February air. Jacin adjusts the strap of the book bag on his shoulder, looking for someplace dignified to sit. The space designated for the poetry slam is populated only by beanbags.
His jaw ticks.
"All right, everyone, we're going to start in a minute," chirps a girl in overalls and highly impractical heels. Her braids swing behind her as she ushers the milling students to the floor.
Jacin gives up and plops down on a red beanbag that's lost most of its beans, leaving it basically a sack with too little stuffing to keep his butt off the floor. The book bag leans against his thigh, paper whispering to him above the murmur of the four o'clock crowd.
Let me out, let me out, let them hear me.
He pats a hand against the fabric to silence it. He hadn't known before that poems so longed to breathe – that they begged to be spread like wishes, like dandelion seeds on the wind.
Across from him, a willowy young woman sits cross-legged on a purple beanbag as comfortably as a bird in her nest. Curly black hair frames the face of an enchantress. Jacin catches a glimpse of luminous amber eyes as she flips through a battered notebook, her lips bunched together.
"Who'd like to share first?" says the girl with blue braids once everyone has settled down, clasping her hands under her chin. "We'll go around the circle, shall we?"
He listens with detachment as his fellow students read their poems from paper or from memory. Some are pretentious and elaborate, others as literal as bricks. It's the simple ones that pack the most punch, he notices.
Not that he would know. He's not a poet – he's in pre-med, actually, and wrestled with himself for a fair bit before coming here. Something must have possessed him, a couple of days ago – some sort of poetry virus that every teenage boy is bound to catch at least once in his life before becoming immune forever, like the chicken pox – to try to capture in words how he felt about being entrusted with life and death, as a doctor.
He'd put pen to paper, as awkward as someone on his first date, and now here he is. Like an idiot.
Maybe someone had sneezed on him.
Quite simply, a poem should fill you up with something, he once read on a poster in the metro car. Could make you swoon, stop in your tracks, change your mind or make it up. A poem should happen to you like cold water or a kiss.
He's not a poet, but maybe he is a narcissist, because he wants someone other than him to know that this fledgling poem exists, written by his pen, written from him like tendrils of his own thought spun into calligraphy. It would make the thing real.
Maybe he's waiting for a poem to happen to him.
Maybe he hopes that his will happen to somebody else.
The circle comes around to the black girl with amber eyes. She glances up at Jacin, offhand, as she flips to a new page, and he straightens unconsciously against the wooden wall of the café.
"She carries her heartbreak in a metal case," she reads, her voice melodious and clear, "and feeds it gasoline and memories. Her hands shake as she tries to stitch it whole …"
And Jacin forgets all about his irritation with poetry.
It's a story – the story of a girl with a broken, feral heart, a girl on her knees trying to patch together something irreparable, a girl with a bitter tongue and a basketful of gunpowder and flowers. What do you know about heartbreak? She can't carry it anymore, can't feed it anymore –
The poem washes over him and settles into his skin like cold sea spray, the tingling of a spell. He holds his breath until the very end, and when it comes, he's too disoriented to clap along with everyone else. It feels like being abruptly shaken awake from a nap.
He can't remember ever being … moved like this. And by what? A certain arrangement of words, a story told just so. Her words have already evaporated into the stifling, musty air of the café.
The applause dies out, the circle moves along. Jacin's little seedling poem is ready to spring awake from the depths of his book bag. If he listens closely, he thinks he can hear it rustling its wings.
And all at once, he is ashamed of it. Next to the story about repairing heartbreak, which encapsulates everything a poem should be, his is ungainly and awkward, pitiful really. Not fit to be read aloud.
When his turn comes around, and everyone turns to him expectantly, he shakes his head.
"Just here to listen."
Then he looks at the person next to him, passing the hot potato.
He's not the first to pass. No one suspects that he still has a poem stuffed down in his anatomy textbook. No one ever needs to know.
Jacin stares at the enchantress-girl out of the corner of his eye for the rest of the half-hour, and leaves the minute everyone gets up for lemonade and store-bought cookies.
He stands atop a small hillock, holding a scrap of paper in his fist. Fields of overgrown grass unfurl around him in every direction – the horizon an infinite, unbroken circle hemming him in. A few white clouds are strewn across the midday sky. Wind whistles quietly over the hills.
He looks at the poem in his hand. It flutters hopefully at him, seeking approval. He frowns.
"Not you," he says.
Above him, a cloud drifts nonchalantly closer to the sun.
Scraggly branches wave and scrape against his window. It is eleven oh two at night. Jacin pores over his books, a pen tap-tap-tapping against the page.
The labeled illustration of a human heart stares back at him.
Out of nowhere, he thinks, this diagram is scientifically inaccurate. All the blood vessels are there, the thick tubes of arteries, the colour schematics perfect – but where is the sorrow, the patriotism, the infatuation, where are all the follies and stupid things the heart is capable of? Where are the clear-cut lines pointing yes, here is where love and hatred intersect in passion, or here, you see, is the node that seeds pure joy just once in a person's lifetime?
Where in this textbook does it explain why his heartbeat stutters whenever he looks at the girl with amber eyes, the girl who makes the English language into a magic spell, an overgrown rosebush, an endless blue sky, a new miracle?
His right hand, still balancing the pen between two fingers, drifts toward the desk drawer where he keeps scrap paper. Tentatively, he begins treading a new line of thought: they say there's a new heart surgery that can erase your name, carried by the pulse under my jaw –
Mm, too pretentious.
I have a new patient. And I can't figure out what's wrong with the thing beating inside of him –
No, that's. That's not really a poem.
His hand comes back to rest on his textbook.
At the next poetry circle, the enchantress-girl reads half a dozen verses about a monster in the woods. Jacin watches her face light up as she goes through the lines – the same fond, melancholic look people get when they sing a song they've known by heart since childhood – and wonders if poetry is a gift given to you or if it's something you can study, like cardiac arrest. If poets are born, or made.
(He wonders if there'll be any poems left in the galaxy, if she has them all to herself.)
The circle comes around to him and he refuses again, his face impassive. A few scribbled lines try to scratch their way out of his book bag (beside them, the first poem lies dormant and stale) but he pats them back down. It helps to think of himself as the cliché'd Emotional Bad Poet; the mortification stifles any stray words that try to wriggle their way through his pen.
When this round ends, he lingers by the snacks table, feigning indecision – conveniently within earshot of the poet/stargirl/witch/history student as she chatters in a bright voice to her friend with the mop of fiery red curls.
Winter, the other girl calls her. No, Winter, I'm not calling in any favours with the animal shelter … you know the landlord wouldn't let you keep him, anyway.
Jacin's fingers hover over a butterscotch scone he's not remotely interested in. He mouths the word to himself, tasting it. Winter. Cold and crystalline. The muffled silence of snowfall, the tinkle of icicles, the gentle chime of sleigh bells, freezing slush that soaks through your socks. Why winter, of all things? He has never known anyone who radiates so much warmth.
A chill wind hits his cheeks when he leaves the café, and he wraps his scarf around his neck to keep it out. He has a test tomorrow, and an essay due a week after that. He can't afford to get sick.
He can't afford to get distracted, either, yet Winter's poems lace themselves into his mental archive of medical knowledge, dancing in and out of his mind as he walks home, consumes cup after cup of coffee, flips a textbook page as the clock strikes witching hour
as the left pulmonary artery is an extension (she is just a child, with a child's eyes) of the pulmonary trunk, while the right (you could only ever be half a person, half a pair of bones) pulmonary dips under the aortic arch and under (I cried the way women on TV do, folding at the middle like a five pound note –)
His hands keep itching for a pen.
Whenever he does try to write something, though … all he sees is a blank page. Her poems have strung a cat's-cradle of fairy lights through his head and he cannot think through them, can't seem to find his own words when hers are all that he hears, giggling in the shadows, a crisscross of pixies and glowing fireflies.
Atop the hill in the middle of that vast prairie, Jacin examines another poem with a critical eye, and lets it slip through his fingers. Its small cry of abandonment is lost in the breeze picking up to ripple through the grasses. Strands of pale hair blow into his eyes.
Another, another. He searches his pockets for the spares.
Winter, he thinks, a pencil hovering over a blank page. A dozen scribbled-over beginnings litter the paper.
Winter.
The whimsy of wind chimes, a bright yellow songbird, the clear breath of snowmelt in your lungs on the first day of spring.
Not a girl of ice and snow but a girl of sunshine and stardust.
Stardust. The word tickles at him. He has four lines down on the paper before the last line of her poem about sky-people splits his concentration, a silver dagger slicing through the air:
Now there's stardust in her hair, and ashes and obsidian in her wake.
If a poem is something that happens to you, this was a goddamn bolt of lightning. He staggered out of the student café dazed, bewildered, a little disoriented. He ended up missing his bus stop because he kept mouthing snatches of the poem to himself.
Fingers pinched around the pen, Jacin inhales deeply. And it occurs to him: Why bother?
He sets the pen aside and calmly, methodically, crumples the page in one fist and flings it out the open window.
Why bother, indeed? That girl, Winter, she has stories in her blood and ink stains under her fingernails; she is a poem, all graceful lines and mischievous eyes, a crimson-bright cardinal among dreary brown flightless birds, the only one awake in a city full of sleepwalkers. And what is he? A cynic, a pretender. A pre-med student who should stick to his science instead of reaching for gifts that don't belong to him.
Disgusted with himself and his painfully inadequate words, Jacin pushes back from his desk and leaves the stifling room, pausing only to grab his jacket on the way.
The vast gray sky casts the grassy fields in shade. He digs the poems out of his pocket and holds them to the waning light in his cupped hands.
He sees nothing worth keeping. He opens his fingers and lets the wind carry them away and out of sight, crumbling to ash.
It's not regret that sends a pang through him. It's not. He doesn't care about those attempts at poetry. It's better that they should disappear.
He stuffs his hands back into his pockets.
Three stories below, a girl walks down the street with her chin tucked into her brilliant crimson scarf to ward off the chill. A crumbled ball of paper drops gently from the sky, landing at her feet.
Winter stares at it for a moment. She thinks, absurdly, of falling pinecones. Then she crouches to pick it up, and smooths it out. Chunks of road salt dig into her heels through her soft boots.
It's a poem on cheap lined paper, likely a standard-issue 200-page notebook. University kids can't afford much better. A smile is already spreading across her face when her gaze snags on her name.
Winter.
Not a girl of ice and snow but a girl of sunshine and stardust.
The words send a peculiar, electric glittering over her skin. Her lips part. She glances up at the nearest apartment building, at the open window three stories above. There's a quick flash of pale hair, an arm extended to shut the window.
Before she can think to wave, the young man who never brings any poems vanishes from sight.
A chilly, foreboding wind whips through the fields. The grass is starting to wither. Vultures circle overhead. He crumples poem after poem in his fists and throws them to the ground, grinding them into dust with his heel.
"Worthless," he says harshly. He hates the pitiful things he holds, even as it drives a tiny shard of ice into his heart to feed his own hatred. "Meaningless."
They cry out for him to stop, to take them back, for nourishment. He ignores them. Better to put them down than try to heal them or make them grow.
His voice is thick with contempt. "Embarrassing– trite – pretentious –"
Another poem shrivels in his fingers, another crumbles like an autumn leaf in the winter. He tosses them left and right, scattering pieces of himself to the wind. It takes something out of him to hate these things he has created, but if they're supposed to reflect what's inside of him, he must be worthless too.
"Try the raspberry jam ones," says a merry voice behind him. "They're divine."
Jacin snatches his hand away from the plastic box of macarons. Winter has materialized next to him, a little too close than is polite to stand next to a stranger, and like a bird pecking at cornseed she snatches two at once.
"I don't believe we've met," she says through a mouthful of macaron, extending a hand to him.
Despite himself, the corners of his lips quirk into a smile as he takes her hand and shakes it, twice. She's like a child, completely shameless about taking more than her fair share of sweets. "Jacin Clay."
She covers her mouth with the back of the other hand so crumbs don't spew out. "I'm Winter."
"I know."
Her brows lift. "My name has gone around, then?"
"Yes. Your poems –" He hesitates. It costs him something to say it, knowing that he cannot speak to her as an equal. Not in this. "They're … very good."
She's already stuffing the second macaron into her mouth like a sticky bun. "Thank you." Bemused, he waits for her to chew, and after a moment she swallows and tips her head at him. "I wanted to ask – why don't you ever read out your poems?"
Jacin's smile vanishes. "I don't write."
"I don't think that's true." She draws a crumpled bit of paper from her coat pocket and holds it out to him. "I think this is yours."
Heat creeps into Jacin's cheeks as he stares at the paper, as though his face is a stovetop and someone is slowly, excrutiatingly, turning the dial.
"Where did you find that?"
"Your poem found me," she says matter-of-factly, as if he should know what his poems get up to when he isn't looking. As if he should be held accountable. "I think you could share it. I mean, not if you don't want to, obviously. But I liked it." Her lips flicker into an uncertain little smile. "Then again, I can't be objective, seeing as it's about – um."
He tears his eyes away from the crumpled paper, torn between mortification and the desire to scoff with every ounce of spite he possesses. She likes this ugly, unpolished thing? She, silver-tongued Winter who can move his cold, practical heart with a simple turn of phrase – she wants him to share?
She knows that she was the subject. She must. A girl of sunshine and stardust … How many girls called Winter can there be in this town?
Jacin picks the crumpled paper from her fingers, careful not to brush her skin. "How do you know this is mine?" It's tempting to deny it altogether, but he is too proud to do that.
"I'm fairly sure it fell out of your window."
"Ah."
There's an awkward pause. Students are filing out of the café, bundled into scarves and mittens against the icy winter wind. Winter takes a breath and asks, "Could I read another?"
"Another?"
"One of your poems."
"There aren't any more," he says stiffly. "This was just a fluke –"
She sounds genuinely insulted. "Poetry is never a fluke!"
He makes a derisive noise. "Easy for you to say."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"How can any of us write when you're here to blow us out of the water?" He'd meant it to sound flippant, a joking self-disparagement , but instead he just sounds bitter. "I mean, really, what's the point? You're better than anything I could ever be. 'There can only be one', and all that."
Winter's lips part in outrage. "Don't tell me you stop yourself from writing because of me –"
"Of course I do," he snaps. "Every time I reach for a pen and paper I have your voice in my head, and your poems, and how can I even try when you …" He gestures vaguely at her, more frustrated than ever that he can't put into words what he feels. When you can capture a feeling with a few lines the way an artist captures a face with strokes of charcoal.
She watches him, dismayed, as his ruthless posture sags a little.
"Never mind. Sorry for blabbing like that. It's not your problem." Jacin hefts his book bag more comfortably over his shoulder and turns to walk through the café door. "See you next time."
He knows before the words are out of his mouth that he's lying.
He fishes his very first poem out of his pocket – the one about life and death held in a doctor's hands, the power to heal and the power to kill in equal measure – when a horrified voice breaks through the whistling wind.
"What are you doing?"
It's the enchantress-girl, the wood-nymph, the witch. She stands at the base of the hill, her unbound hair whipping every which way in the gale, her eyes widening as she sees the poem crushed in his fist, the remains of its brethren at his feet.
"No!" she shrieks, and something tears in her voice as though it's her verse-children he's ripping to pieces. "Stop – YOU'RE KILLING THEM!"
Jacin frowns in surprise as she runs up the hill toward him, holding her peasant skirts so they won't tangle around her knees. When she grabs his hand and uncurls his fingers, he doesn't stop her. When she gently pries away the suffocating poem – a crumpled knot of spiky letters too jumbled to make sense, let alone beauty – he doesn't stop her then, either.
He just watches, uncomprehending, as the witch kneels in the soil and holds the poem to her lips. Shhhhhh, she breathes. It's all right now. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The wind quiets. The vultures settle down somewhere in the field. Calm descends on the vast, infinite grassland as the poem unfurls in her hands, carefully, painstakingly untangling itself like a crushed spider. But even in her gentle hands, it cowers, and the witch looks up at Jacin with grieved eyes.
"Why have you done this?" she asks, her eyes welling with pain. "How could you do this?"
Jacin blinks. He does not understand why she should care so much about his shabby poems. Surely, it's not her place to show them mercy.
"I don't want them," he says lamely.
The witch furrows her brow in genuine confusion.
"… but they're yours."
He hasn't taken two steps before Winter grabs his hand.
"Wait, Jacin –"
His lips part on a sharp breath; his eyes dart to where she twines her fingers with his, then back up to her face.
"I understand," she says earnestly. "Please believe me when I say I get it. Nobody is immune to this once they start writing. It's a side-effect you just have to live with."
He stares down at her and finds that his mind has scattered. Probably a side-effect of holding her hand. Truly, he is a sap. No wonder he turned to poetry. What kind of doctor lets hormones get in the way of critical thinking?
Winter searches his eyes for a long moment before her eyes drift to the paper still clutched in his other hand.
"I'm biased, of course," she says quietly, "but it – it's rather beautiful. More like a story than a poem, I think."
Jacin looks down at his boots. "I don't have your gift."
"You don't have to have my gift. Maybe you have something of your own, have you ever thought of that?" She gestures at his book bag. "You're in pre-med, you would know – no two human beings are the same. No two writers are the same. We all have our own fingerprints."
"Any idiot could tell you that," he points out caustically.
Winter gives him a reproving look. "Please don't be difficult. I don't even know if I'm saying this right, but –"
– she pauses, searching for the right words –
"– if I've learned anything about poetry … it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be yours."
The witch blows gently on the poem, revitalizing it, breathing new life, and plants it on the hilltop. She picks up the remains of his poems one by one until she has all the pieces, and puts them into his hands.
He cradles them, uncertain of how to be gentle with such delicate things. The poems he did not treasure. The poems he tried to throw away.
"Let them live," she whispers, folding his fingers around them. "Let them grow."
"I guess so," says Jacin quietly.
It's all the concession he's ready to make. Anything more concrete would jinx the tentative new thing planted in him, might erase the twitching of his fingers all over again.
Winter nods and releases his hand, as solemn as if they've reached the end of a ceremony. "I hope you'll let us hear what you write, sometime." She gestures outside. "Shall we?"
A smile flickers across his face. "We shall."
Once the café door clangs shut behind them with a cheery tinkle, she pauses to pull on her gloves, and Jacin gathers his courage.
"You know," he says, "I might let you read one of mine if you let me read one of yours. One of your rough drafts, I mean. It would only be fair."
Winter darts a glance at him through her lashes, an elfin look of mischief. Snowflakes have begun to settle into her curls. "Can't. They're all just variations on" – she pretends to fiddle with the hem of her gloves – " 'blond hair and beautiful eyes and the rising sun in his smile.' You'd cringe."
"I don't think you're capable of writing anything cringe-worthy." Maybe she'll write off his reddening ears as a side effect of the cold. "No less than 'sunshine and stardust', probably."
"You called me a canary."
"I did not call you –"
"And that would make you, what? What bird has a poker face and is in league with the mafia?"
"A horned owl?" he offers.
"I was going to say 'I'd Sell You To Satan For One Corn Chip', but that's a bit of a mouthful." Jacin gives her a perplexed look. "Remind me to tell you about troubled birds."
"Troubled birds," he echoes, bemused. She's kind of wacky. But what else can you expect from a poet?
Winter smiles at him, as bright as melting snow. "I guess you'll just have to come to the next poet's circle. With or without something to contribute." She turns and starts to walk away down the street. "Bye, Jacin!"
He casts about briefly for something clever to say, but all he can think of is the icy roads and so he settles on, "Walk safely."
She answers with a little skip in her step, sending road salt skittering in every direction.
Long after the witch vanishes from the hillside, he kneels in front of the poem-sapling, and cups it gently in his hands to shield it from the steady wind.
He's not sure when it will blossom, or what colour the flowers will be. Maybe it will rise as a colossal beanstalk to breach the clouds above. Or maybe it'll never be any taller than his knee.
He is certain of only one thing: it will grow, if he allows it to.
Author's Note:
I wrote this fic to cheer myself up after a bout of writer's doubt and self-pity. Here, Winter tells Jacin the things I wish someone else had told me - but maybe teaching myself these small lessons was the best possible thing. If that nagging little voice whispers "Why bother?" in your ear about your writing, or your art, or your music, I hope that you will think of this thinly veiled piece of writer's advice and take heart.
She carries her heartbreak in a metal case and Ashes and obsidian in her wake both come from poems by Snigdha Chaya Saikia (a.k.a Canvas Constellations). The first is called "Repairs" and can be found on her tumblr canvasconstellations; the second, "Stars," and can be found on the website of Strange Horizons under their poetry tag. Snigdha, I dedicate this fic to you. Your writing blows me away every time.