She shivered in her layers of jackets, hunched over on the park bench. So cold that even the birds dared not sing for fear of cracking their beaks. A bedraggled squirrel flicked his careworn tail, hopping from frozen bundles of dirty gray leaves, to clods of dirt, to pieces of trash embedded in ice. Try as he might to make little to no contact with the ground, even his toes got cold, and he limped over to a concretized tree and jerked his way up and around the trunk and disappeared. Continue reading →