The night is ice.

It is one am and she is seeing things. Snatches and blurs of motion and darkness in the corner. Real things? Chills creep over her limbs to freeze her in place. They wend their way up to her hairline, a cold pinprick in every pore of her skin. She clenches her locked fingers into fists and tells herself it is not that cold. This is a lie. The night is ice. Another flash at the border of her vision. She tells herself to go to bed, to go to sleep. How to sleep at this time? The time to fall into dreams is long gone. Nightmares threaten in the back of her mind, just daring her to close her eyes. Surrender, they whisper. She shakes her head. Perhaps her movements will cancel the phantoms, destroy the ghosts. But the truth is, she is alone. And the night is loneliness personified. The dark and the silence. The razor edge of something just out of reach and endless. The abyss. She shivers. Her eyes close and she sees nothing.