The stove-table is a dry island. You lay out the night like a person dealing cards.

Knocks: echo, frost quake, ice in rock. Songs: tarn thermal stress, flue vowel. Chews: Thistle. Prints: hare, ermine. Frost: hoarfrost, breath-cloud, pooled fog. Rule: grate stays a grate.

Priya is almost through the drift; her last radio said twenty minutes if the shovel stays honest. Wen’s circuit is a rumor of a snowmobile far down, then not.

You could stop. You have enough to write the true night and still like the left-hand stories. You could also want the tarn, where the ice is still showing off, because some proofs want a stage.

You line papers left-names, right-mechanisms. Cocoa will stain it, which is allowed. Priya’s twenty minutes might be forty in a drift. Notch-time is stretchy. You are not stretchy on ice-center or in grates.