Warm Enough — The Festival Review

The power had gone a couple of hours before, leaving Molly alone in the dark and frozen house with her sick grandmother, fast asleep in bed. She worried that the old woman wouldn’t be able to survive the chill, so Molly piled on all the blankets she could find, until the old woman was nothing more than a wrinkled face poking out from a pile of quilts and sheets, the mass of fabric rising and falling with a disconcerting slowness. Molly had put her coat and scarf back on not long after the heater shut off. She turned her head from the bedside and looked out the window at the snow-covered farmland, staring at the ocean of white that covered the fields where she used to run as a child, where she built snowmen with the same woman now sleeping beside her in the dark. Molly reached under the mountain of blankets and clutched her grandmother’s withered hand. The touch made the old woman’s lips curl into a slight smile, and Molly wondered if they were dreaming of the same shared past.

Oliver C. Seneca is a published author and legal assistant from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.