Twisted Winter by Catherine Butler

tense all the while, knowing that any moment Mum would hurry to Dill to see what was wrong. She would take one look at him and
know
, using her extra-terrestrial mother-powers. And then I would hear her accusing voice calling for me…
    But the hours passed, and she didn’t go to him. After a while it started to creep me out.
    She just went on working. His loudest screams made her frown, but in a distant, distracted kind of way.
    When I brought him to the kitchen for dinner, I found that she had laid two places at the table, but hadn’t brought out Dill’s high chair. Dill ran over to her, yanking with desperation at her skirt, but she just stared down at him, as if trying to remember who he was. Then she walked away to the fridge, leaving him to topple and sprawl in her wake.
    My blood ran cold. I went over and picked him up.
    Dill. Dill, her angel. Her favourite boy. The one who had left a thousand marks upon her heart and memory – bruises and jam smears, tiredness creases and crayon hearts. Before my eyes, those marks were fading, like footprints covered by falling snow.
    She was ceasing to care about him. Soon she would not remember him at all.
    * * *
    Dill’s screaming stopped eventually, his voice worn down to a miserable, quavering croak. Mum’s coldness seemed to break his world in two.
    For once he
did
have a reason to cry, a reason I understood. Dill was finding out how it felt when your pain didn’t count. Dill had fallen into my world, but he had plunged past me into the darkness and was still plummeting.
    I spent what time I could with him, but disasters kept dragging me away. A pipe burst, flooding the cellar, and I had hardly finished dealing with that when I had to go out and shovel snow off the ornamental bridge so it didn’t give. I brought Dill his truck and left him to play in the hall.
    While I was shovelling, my mind spiralled through nightmares. What would happen to Dill when I was at school, if Mum forgot he existed? What if nobody ever cared if he lived or died? What if all the crazy
stuff
inside him could never get out through colouring or breaking or getting attention? Would he go mad? I thought he would go mad.
    As those thoughts were going through my head, I looked up and saw the woman of the snows standing between our two pines, staring at me with a face like carved ice.
    She wore a dress of furs, so white it merged into the surrounding snow. Her shoulders and long neckwere bare, and her hair was loose. She was glaring at my shovel blade, embedded in her sweet, luminous snow. Somehow she seemed taller than before.
    Dropping the shovel I ran towards her, but she melted amid the flurry of flakes, became a pattern of shadows amid the smooth snow hummocks. I stumbled around for a while, calling out, but she had vanished.
    I came back to find Mum sweeping the step and the front door ajar. Dill’s truck lay abandoned on the threshold. There was no sign of him.
    â€œMum – where’s Dill?” I stared around at the thickening blizzard. “Did Dill come out here?”
    Mum did not seem to hear.
    â€œCome on in, Chloe,” she said. “I’ll go make us some cocoa.”
    I sprinted around the house, flinging open doors, but Dill was nowhere to be found. He must have wandered out past Mum, without her giving him a second glance. Now he was somewhere on the icy cliff paths, and there weren’t even any tracks for me to follow.
    * * *
    I didn’t try to reason with Mum, or call the rescue services. Even if they started searching for Dill, within minutes they would forget what they were doing, or stop caring. Instead I wrapped up warm, grabbed a torch and ran out.
    For an hour I scrambled along the cliff paths, yelling Dill’s name. Every shadow or half-buried stump looked like his sprawled shape. Every note in the wind sounded like his wail. Soon my feet and hands were aching with the cold.
    The dangerous thing about despair is that