Nosebleed for six consecutive days, but the blood is never visible. It always lurks further up, choking the airways and making me sneeze.
People think I have nightmares, but I just don’t sleep. At night the lights are too garish, the snow too acridly refulgent. Dreams can’t get in through winter’s battalions of gleam and glitter; they’re too ethereal – they’ve got no substantial ambition. Rime is all ambition and sharp, heavy corners, digging into the softer folds of frozen earth and clutching the quiescent dirt with a pertinacious greed.