The frost was on the inside. The old single panes do that when the stove goes low overnight and the room breathes against the cold glass until the breath freezes where it lands. By morning the window wore a field of ferns, white, feathered, standing up off the glass a hair’s thickness.
It is the night’s breath, made solid. Mine and the dog’s and the kettle’s, all of it, hung on the glass in the shape of leaves that never grew.
I did not have a blade to hand, so I used a nail. The thumbnail, dragged flat across the pane at a low angle.
The ice came up in a curl. It resisted for the first quarter inch, gripping the glass, and then it let go all at once and rolled up under the nail in a thin cold shaving. The sound was small and dry, a whisper with a scratch in it. The nail went numb before the thumb did.
Behind the scrape the glass showed clear, a dark wet arc onto the yard, the snow blue out there and not yet lit. The cleared strip was already fogging at the edges from the warmth of my face.
The curls of scraped frost landed on the sill and on the back of my hand and did not last. They were water by the time I noticed them, a cold thread running down the paint of the sill toward the corner where it always runs.
I scraped enough to see out and no more. The rest of the ferns stayed, standing white on the glass, and where I had cleared the arc a bead of melt hung at the bottom of the frame, not falling, not yet.