This time of year, was always the hardest. Ringing bells would echo in the empty stores and the colourful lights only shone to the beginning of the atrium. She could never reach that far, something always pulled her back, deeper into the darkness.
What made her heart ache the most was when she could hear faint voices singing the carols she had once loved. Only now, the words were garbled and despite a fondness for the sounds, she had no idea what they were about. Not after so many years trapped in this crumbling building.
There used to be people in this part of the mall too, they’d walk right through her as they went from one bustling store to another. The atrium used to be full of thriving plants and people chatting on benches, but now it sat under a caved-in roof, debris and snow covering the tiles. No one ever came to clean it.
There used to be colour, but now it had all faded. As she circled the halls, all she saw was gray and white, and all she could feel was cold. It wasn’t when she touched the snow though, but more a deep chill within.
People had come and gone through this part of the mall every so often, but none ever stayed for long. Especially not when the wind howled and the snow poured in through the hole in the roof. She wasn’t expecting the figure she came across curled up against the atrium’s wall.
His clothes were worn thin, torn here and there to expose skin. His feet were exposed, only sandals hung from them. Though his hands covered most of his face, she could see the purple frostbite that littered his flesh. In each curve of his body, snow gathered. She would think he was dead if it weren’t for the shaking wracking his body.
After another onslaught of snow, his brows furrowed in pain, and he tried to curl in on himself more. She frowned. The cold inside her grew the longer she watched him.
This was wrong. No one should be here, not during winter, not when the newer part of the mall was where the music and lights and jolliness was. That was where the people with beating hearts needed to be, not here, in this cold, wet, gray mess.
She searched for something warm and dry, but the only blanket she saw sat just outside her boundary. But he’d fade away without it. She pushed forward, forward until every part of her being was strained, until her fingers just curled around it, and she let the force pull her and the blanket back.
She brushed away the snow that covered him and laid the blanket over his body. It would still take a while for his shaking to stop, but when it did, the man opened his eyes.
He would never quite be sure if he saw a woman’s face or not, it was nighttime and he had to blink away snow, but he’dalways be grateful to whoever warmed him up that Christmas Eve.
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