Flash Reprint: Kristina Marie Darling’s “North”

North

Kristina Marie Darling

A girl drove into a blizzard at sunset. Her fiancé told her not to, and she thought about making tea or cocoa, but she started the car anyway. She did it because the road glittered in the lamplight. She did it because he told her not to.

The blizzard was the exact same temperature as her heart. She kept driving past barren corn fields, watching the snow fall. She felt a numbness in her chest, and when she placed her hand there, the warmth was gone. The girl began to worry and stopped the car.

I could have seen this coming, the fiancé said when she walked into the kitchen.

This didn't happen to you, too? But as the girl began speaking, she sensed the weight of her clothes shifting. Her dress crackled with frost. The frozen part of her fell off, leaving a small scar. The fiancé smiled.

You just became a wife, he said.

Note: Originally published in Tupelo Quarterly.

Author's Note

"North" was written in 2014 during a snowstorm in Buffalo, NY. Though the poem has been published and reprinted, the snowstorm still hasn't ended.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books of poetry. Her awards include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University's Kittredge Fund. Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, The Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward both a Ph.D. in Literature at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo and an M.F.A. in Poetry at New York University.