By James Stuart Nolte

Both Victoria and Chase loved bad weather and loved to walk in its wild beauty. One winter day, looking out the window, they saw the storm warnings broadcast all day coming true. There was a curtain of snow approaching so thick it seemed like a huge white blanket was being pulled over their heads. Although mid-afternoon, it became dark enough that the streetlights blinked on. Since they lived in town and were well supplied with food, and wood for the fire, they decided to go out and wade in the snow and watch the town react to what would soon become an emergency. 

As their walk progressed, they popped into the stores along Main Street, when necessary to warm themselves. There, the uneasy looks on the faces of the store clerks intensified as the weather outside their frosted windows got worse and finally store owners began calling to release their employees early. It was during a brief lull in the storm that they encountered outside on the sidewalk, dressed in clothes suitable for a spring day, an Amish youth, with his broad brimmed black hat, white shirt, and black coat. He seemed to be wandering around town totally unconcerned about the weather. With his hands deep in his pockets, he walked in an old fashioned, awkward way, the way teenagers might have carried themselves long ago, before the video mirror, and the studied emotional equilibrium that children exhibit today. This fellow rolled along like he had walked on uneven ground all his life. Victoria and Chase ducked the blast of weather by going into the sporting goods store. The Amish boy wandered in after them, very at ease, and saying, to no one in particular, “just staying out of trouble,” but, once inside the store he became rooted and anxious, would start to say something and then stop, and would stare around himself in seeming amazement. It made them so uncomfortable they went back out into the storm. Chase felt even more uncomfortable when the boy followed them into the street like a stray dog. 

“I hope you have less distance to travel than that I be facing.” He shouted through the wind which whipped any answer away in the snow now blowing so hard that, at times, it obscured the light of the street lamps. The boy came into and out of focus like the wind was moving his very substance, as though it were blowing straight through his white shirt front which had disappeared into the background. 

Chase nodded and tried again to say something, but Victoria began to tow him across the road. Chase turned and shouted back, “How far have you got to go?”

“Oh, up to the hospital is all,” They both heard him shout, then he vanished in a blast of wind and snow. 

Chase’ heart beat spasmodically, and he went cold inside, as though the wind had snuffed out the last ember of warmth in him. 

Victoria shouted, “There is no hospital in this town and has not been for a hundred years.” But the boy, a ghost amongst a million swirling ghosts, was gone.

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A graduate of Syracuse University, James Stuart Nolte was the recipient of the Undergraduate Prize for Poetry in 1975. His writing includes short fiction in The Chicago Quarterly Review, White Crow, and Unlikely Stories Mark V, poetry in The Climbing Arts Magazine and Illya’s Honey, humor in Defenestration, and arts criticism in The Washington Review. A retired librarian, he lives in Montpelier, Vermont.