A Short Story by Christine D. Shuck

 

Warning: If you haven’t read Winter’s Child, please know that there are spoilers in this short story. The story that follows is set after the events of Winter’s Child and before The Return of Winter’s Child (currently underway).
 

The clay was the wrong kind today. It cracked too easily. Crumbled at the wrong pressure. Refused to hold shape. It reminded Nichole of memory—slippery, unreliable, always breaking at the seams.

She kept molding it anyway.

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It was Tuesday. Art therapy ran for two hours, and Nichole never missed it. She didn’t paint. She didn’t sketch. She didn’t speak much either. But she shaped clay like it was her lifeline.

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Because maybe it was.

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She was working on hands again. Small ones. Fingers splayed wide, pressed as if against glass. Caught mid-motion—grasping or waving goodbye. She couldn’t decide which.

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“You got a thing for hands,” said Marie, a gravel-voiced woman two bunks over and a regular fixture at the art table. “All your little statues got ‘em. Never faces.”

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Nichole didn’t look up. “Faces lie,” she murmured. “Hands don’t.”

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Marie gave a raspy laugh. “Ain’t that the truth.”

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Across the room, the CO leaned on the wall with a practiced disinterest. The other women painted abstract flowers or stitched lopsided cats onto squares of cloth. Someone was crying softly in the corner. Nichole had learned not to look when someone cried in here. It was safer that way.

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She pressed her thumbs into the clay, sculpting the curve of a palm, the dip at the wrist.

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It was Elizabeth’s hand she was making.

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Seven years old. Bright-red curls that bounced when she ran. Freckles like powdered cinnamon. A laugh like chimes.

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And those eyes that betrayed the monster within. Hard to see, hard to understand, unless you had watched the change come over her. The others, Isabel, the shy one, Lizzie, so warm and sunny, even Elsa, serious and haunted. The aspects she loved, looked forward to seeing, dreamed about. Each so special. But Elizabeth… Elizabeth had been devious, dangerous, and without a single ounce of compassion. Elizabeth was the face of evil. And her eyes, when Nichole had looked, really looked, they had betrayed the monster she truly was. The other aspects, Nichole felt guilt and sorrow rise like a tide, they had been Nichole’s victims, caught up in the only solution left. The one that insisted Nichole protect Theo, Jhon, and any other unknown, unnamed future victims.

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Nichole’s sculpting hand trembled. She steadied it. Kept working.

Her trial had ended eight months ago.

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They called it murder. Cold-blooded. Calculated. A mother who drove off a cliff, on purpose, with her child inside the van.

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They didn’t want the truth. They didn’t care about the reports from Australia. The fire. The threats. The dead animals. The darkness in Elizabeth’s eyes that had nothing to do with childhood and everything to do with something far older, far colder. Something beyond multiple personalities, or as they called it now, dissociative identity disorder. Because it didn’t make sense. Elizabeth had had trauma, sure, but what Jhon and the others claimed, well, it hadn’t mattered. A little girl, a beautiful, angelic little girl was dead.

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They wanted the story that made sense.

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So Nichole let them have that. She said nothing. Let her lawyer say she was traumatized, delusional, unstable.

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They gave her twenty years.

 

She didn’t argue.

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Looking back in the mirror, seeing Elizabeth, not Lizzie, not any of the others, but Elizabeth. Realizing that if she had broken through, in the middle of summer, taken over – that they would never be safe. That the rules didn’t apply anymore. Sweet happy Lizzie had been replaced by Elizabeth’s preternatural, eery calm. One that smiled tauntingly out at her. The tiny girl’s mouth twisting into a sneer that chilled Nichole’s blood. It was as if Elizabeth had leaned forward, and said, “You can’t protect anyone, Mama. Not even yourself.”

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Nichole didn’t remember deciding. Just the sound of the tires leaving pavement.

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The terrifying rush of the van in the air and the ground so very far below.

Elizabeth’s scream.

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And waking up alone in the hospital, bruised, broken, stitched, handcuffed.

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Alone.

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They hadn’t even allowed Jhon to visit her. Not without an officer standing there listening to every word.

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From the look on his face, he had already figured it out. His eyes, red-rimmed had said it all. And that had made it easy, in a sense, to say what she did.

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“Elizabeth broke through, Jhon. And I did what I had to do.”

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Therapy was mandatory. It came with the psych eval and the sentence. Every Thursday afternoon, an hour in a bare room with plastic chairs and Dr. Halvorsen, a soft-spoken woman with tired eyes and a tight bun.

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“You never talk about that day,” Halvorsen said during their fifth session.

 

Nichole rolled a lump of clay in her hands. “I talk about other things.”

 

“Why not the most important one?”

 

Nichole paused. “Because you think you already know it.”

 

“I’d still like to hear your version.”

 

Nichole smoothed the clay. Her fingers moved like muscle memory, shaping a tiny thumb.

 

“She was seven,” she said softly. “Not some teenager with attitude or hormones. Just a little girl. Except… she wasn’t.”

 

Halvorsen didn’t speak. She waited.

 

Nichole’s voice grew quieter. “In winter, always in winter, that’s when the evil came out. She liked hurting things. Kittens. Birds. Us. She told me it felt like breaking dolls. She didn’t care if people cried. She said I looked prettier when I was scared.”

 

She paused. “We hid it. Covered it up.” She laughed then, “Hell, we even thought we had figured out how to avoid it by switching hemispheres.”

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Dr. Halvorsen blinked in confusion.

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“The hemispheres, north and south. When it’s winter here, it’s summer in Australia. We did,” a sob hiccuped out, “We did everything we could to survive winter’s child. To… to love the others.” “It was harder for Jhon to accept, but once switching hemispheres worked, well, the other aspects were so easy to love.” She looked up at the psychologist. “I would have done anything for them.”

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Halvorsen’s pen stilled.

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“She smiled that night in Australia when the flames caught,” Nichole whispered. “Like it was Christmas morning. Like it was all a game. And before I stopped her, she looked at me and said, ‘You’re next.’”

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Nichole blinked, eyes glassy. “She was seven. Just seven. And I loved her so much I broke.”

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She said nothing else that session. Just sat with the clay in her hands, shaping it into something nameless.

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In the evenings, the voices came back.

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Not Elizabeth’s. Those had gone quiet, mostly.

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It was her own voice now. The self that second-guessed, the self that mourned.

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You could have tried harder.

You could have gotten help sooner.

You should have held on longer.

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She pressed her pillow tight some nights. Not to smother herself—just to stop the echoes. Just to remember she was still here.

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Marta was the closest thing she had to a friend in here. Barely twenty. Sharp-tongued. Quick with a joke or a razor. She’d slit a man’s throat during a robbery gone wrong. Spent three days in solitary for stabbing someone with a toothbrush.

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But she always sat next to Nichole in the art room. Watched her sculpt. Said things like, “You got dead-girl hands down to a science,” without meanness.

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One day she asked, “You ever think you did the right thing?”

 

Nichole didn’t answer at first. Her hands kept shaping clay.

“I think,” she said finally, “that some things can be right and still ruin you.”

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Marta nodded. “Yeah. That tracks.”

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One morning, the art therapist pulled her aside.

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“You’ve got talent,” she said, holding up a sculpture of a curled-up child’s form. “Raw, but real. You ever think about teaching others? There’s a prison art showcase next quarter. Some of the others, they would like to learn from you. I see them watching. Marta, for one.”

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Nichole stared at the clay figure. It looked so small in someone else’s hands.

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“You can help others, Nichole,” the therapist said. “That’s got to count for something.”

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“Okay.”

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Nichole started teaching others. Before long, a dozen women were crafting their own clay pieces. Some were beautiful, others nightmares come to life. The group produced dozens, over the next few months. A girl crouched under a bed. A mother with empty arms. A doorway with nothing beyond it. A man standing over a cowering woman, his angry mouth open in a yell, frozen in place.

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A year passed.

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She learned to sleep through screaming. Learned which guards would smuggle aspirin. Learned that some women watched you not because they cared, but because they were bored.

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She never talked about Elizabeth again in therapy. Halvorsen didn’t ask.

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She sculpted instead. She taught the classes. That was where the truth lived anyway. Some women sobbed as they formed the clay, mourning life or a lack of life, choices, Nichole wasn’t sure which.

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One day, she made a new set of hands. These were different. Palms open. Fingers loose. Not grasping or waving goodbye.

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Accepting.

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Marta looked at it and raised an eyebrow. “Looks peaceful.”

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Nichole nodded. “Yeah.”

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Marta grunted. “Creepy.” Her hands continued to shape a delicate flower. She shook her head. “You make the creepiest shit, Nick.”

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Nichole smiled.