Minty-mouse

    The secretary had been typing since she had walked into the room, although her eyes had followed her the entire time – little black dabs of charcoal that knew something that she didn’t. As she took her seat in front of the desk, the woman continued to stare her down shamelessly, and she fiddled with her wristwatch. It would have been silent, if not for the buzz of the long white lights on the ceiling; the one on the far side of the room, just above the door, flickered in and out erratically. With a cursory glance at her computer screen, the secretary pulled her fingers away from the keyboard and laid them to rest in her lap. S

It's cold. She's not sure what she expects. Snow stretches out far as the eye can see - a blanket of undisturbed, endless white from horizon to horizon, interrupted only by the smoking heap of skeletal, disjointed metal wreckage that was, at one point, a plane. She stands maybe ten yards away, glassy-eyed and trembling. Her fingers are crusty with blood that’s spilled from the gashes on her arm and, worse than that, rapidly growing numb, but she still finds the ring, and, in desperate search of some cold comfort, feels out the band. Wind whistles around her, knotting her hair into tangles. It’s not too bad yet, she thinks; at le