It’s an inside job for sure.

I gaze out at the fat, fresh snow falling, fairy voices singing with bell-like giggles as winds gust and tumble them into one another. Not yet time for Spring cleaning. It’s only February. Yet an urgent inner tug tells me to create something to meet the pure snowfall half way.             

The last several months have been lots of words leading nowhere, but necessarily strengthening and joyful. In the world around me, trouble’s been brewing for too long, with such heat as to make life unpotable. We’d all hoped for a higher reset, sharing largesse, but we were wrong. Now we’re faced with the acid stink of burnt coffee grounds, murky water, and the sense that things may go up in flames before eventual reset and rebirth.

So let it begin with me.

Hands on hips, I survey my inner tower room. A lazy step-sister and wicked stepmother never rise from the bed, gimlet eyes glaring, beaked mouths clacking complaints about self-appointed entitlements. I consider shoving the bed through the glass and out the window.

Instead, I grab a broom of sweet, stiff hay and sweep the tower, scrubbing its walls and floors, grabbing flattened pillows, to wash bedding grown foul. That accomplished, I tip the bed, sending its occupants screaming into the now-deep snowdrifts. No thorns to harm them, but like us, they’ll have to slog through to survive.

Frau Holle smiles approval, and hands feather pillows to me, to shake out like snow.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2025)

Many thanks to Jenne Gray and C.E. Ayr for their photo prompt, THE UNICORN CHALLENGE.  02/07/2025). No more than 250 words in length.