That morning the fog rolled in so thick you could weigh it in a cupped hand and feel as if you were holding something important. It smelt of ripe spring but was edged in frost and tinged with the nip of winter. There was still a thick layer of snow that covered the ground and began to glisten as the heat of the growing morning reached its fingers.
She rested in the dark of the cave quietly as dawn sprinted through the trees. Her hand smoothed the stack of blankets she had collected the day before. However much the warmth of the new season was spitting onto the territory, it was colder than she had anticipated. So she had traveled to the village and taken what she could find. Lana wouldn’t call it stealing, for the fabrics she took were veiled in so much dust only insects could have taken refuge in them. And because of this adverse fact, Lana left the territory as soon as the pinks of sunrise stopped bleeding into the sea.
The river tossed and gulped the frigid air as she trailed beside it. Small livid waves fought off the frost triumphantly, carrying pebbles and foliage debris along the gentle turns. Lana wandered with it until she found a secluded spot with a bank large enough for her to stop in. She flung a blanket in the river and with it wings of dust that exploded against the fog. There were many reeds that clung onto the foreign surface of the fabric until Lana yanked them free, cursing freely as she did so. Soon there was mud along the seams from being in the shallows. The woman growled in frustration before shoving the entire cover underwater and scrubbing with a stone, ignoring the temperature that stiffened her muscles.
Lana lit a cigarette and weighed down the blanket so it could soak. Inhaling the bittersweet taste of her blue incentive sharply, the Italian removed the items from her bag before letting the hide soak in the littered river too. It had started giving off the bad scent of abused leather. She folded its contents in the cleanest of the filthy blankets and scrambled farther up the bank after placing the other bedspread under.
With drained victory, she opened her medical journal and sketched a sprout nearby, eager for the taste of anything but winter. In her small print Lana put down a description and tore off a leaf with as much care as she could manage. Setting it in her lap, without one of her jars that lay safely at the bottom of the bank, she began to dissect it on the spot. The morning was still chillingly silent without the bird song of the day and only the hissing of the water. Snow shifted off a branch close by but disappeared without so much of a whisper as it hit the fog. A skeptical amber eye strained to see her blankets below, but was rewarded with only a hint of dirty mud through the haze. Claw sank into the leaf and ripped it in half, puffing blue smoke.
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