While the Car Doors Freeze
by Katya Fisher
Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University
Katya Fisher (they/them) was born and raised in Oxford, Ohio and graduated from Talawanda High School in 2021. They are a rising sophomore in the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, majoring in English. They plan to pursue a Creative Writing concentration and a minor in Geological Sciences. Some of their writing has been previously included in Talawanda High School’s Setting Stone literary arts magazine. When they aren’t reading or writing, Katya is often caring for their abundance of houseplants or organizing their extensive rock collection.
The afternoon’s meeting hadn’t started out with anyone leaning against a wall. Or staring out the frozen window, or storming through hallways, or trudging through a foot of snow. But the afternoon’s meeting also hadn’t started out with the sudden squall of winter weather that hit almost three hours before the local meteorologist had predicted.
The lights in the office waiting room flickered at 4:52, and then again at 4:57. Catherine chose to verbally acknowledge it the second time, lifting her bronze eyes to the ceiling and pointing, stating, “Something’s up with the lights.”
The woman beside her, ever-staring at her knees, simply muttered, “I never would have noticed.”
And Catherine’s shoulders sunk, dropping her hand into her lap again. “Do you have to be such a smart-ass, Angela?”
~~~~~~
5:03.
From her chair in the corner, Joyce pulled back the curtain on the tall window. She usually pulled it closed during their sessions, for Catherine’s sake, keeping the room dim to suppress her sensitive headaches, but today it was dark early and perhaps she thought the glimpse outside might be soothing. An honest mistake.
Joyce raised her eyebrows at the weather. Securing the curtain open on the hook at the other side of the pane, she said, “Some heavy snow out there. Hope you brought your chains for your tires.”
Catherine only hummed, a half-amused kind of sound.
At the far side of the couch, Angela dug her fingernails into her other hand. She stared at the window, eyes as dark as the navy winter evening outside.
“So.” Joyce smiled and adjusted her clipboard on her lap. “Where should we start today?”
~~~~~~
Catherine remembered falling in love with Angela because she met her while Angela worked in the basement of the campus’s Methodist church, serving coffee to concrete pourers, and Catherine thought this was quite a strange gig, and Catherine liked strange people. It helped that Angela’s hands drifted over porcelain cups like arial dancers and she was always trying to tuck her dark hair behind her ears, even though it was about an inch too short to do so.
Angela remembered falling in love with Catherine because Catherine loved strawberry lollipops and always seemed to have this smile on her face like someone had just offered her one. Angela remembered loving that smile so much that she started putting a jar of strawberry lollipops out on the counter where she served coffee in the basement of the Methodist church. She remembered falling in love with Catherine over and over again because of the way her hands clutched hardback books and her fingers dug into the halves of citrus fruits. Because of how she would smile that smile while sucking her knuckles clean, humming at the sweetness of the nectar, sticky in her nail-beds.
~~~~~~
Joyce got this all out of them sometime during the second or third appointment they all had in her office. It came out of Catherine easier, like poetry; Angela held her love close to her chest, clutching it tight in her ribs so that it could stay special when it flowed from her lips.
“I’ve always liked to think our love is ours,” she had said. Quiet, like she didn’t even want to say that, either.
“You’re protective of it,” Joyce had said in observation. “You’re protective of yourself.”
Angela had shrugged, almost smiling. Perhaps the deflection would have succeeded if the sleeves of her cardigan weren’t pulled so far over her hands, hiding the deep internal shiver that seemed to worsen when the questions started. She crossed her arms to keep her heart from wandering too far.
~~~~~~
It was easy for Angela to fall in love with her wife over and over again. After the giggly love and awkward kisses turned to houses and rings and the magic became mundane, Catherine still smiled like she did and their noses still bumped together when they kissed. It still made them both laugh.
It set Angela’s heart on fire to watch Catherine with the goofy little blonde boy that found them three years after they married. Angela fell in love with the strong arms that lifted Ethan above her head, with the sparkling giggles and smiles that came from blue ribbons at swim meets and scattered flour in the kitchen.
Catherine fell in love with the elegance with which Angela demonstrated the contours of The Itsy-Bitsy Spider for Ethan on the piano in the living room. A breath of fresh air, to come home from an afternoon of critiquing first-year college artwork and hear their son messily try to copy his mother’s rhythm. Catherine would smile that smile and resist the urge to interrupt.
~~~~~~
5:28.
Angela’s phone buzzed in her pocket. Holding it far enough away to read the screen without her glasses, she said plainly, “Level Three snow emergency. Road closed to all but emergency personnel. How fantastic is that?”
“We’re meant to turn our phones off in here,” said Catherine, like a child afraid of getting in trouble.
“That’s fine, let’s just continue on,” said Joyce calmly, rotating her pen in the hand that hung off the arm of her chair. The tip of her nose held up her wire-rimmed glasses and she glanced between the two women on the couch in front of her. Assessing.
She said to them, “We talked a lot last week about conscious listening. How has that been going?”
Catherine’s gaze descended to the floor and stayed there.
Angela shifted, irritated with the tautness of her jeans pulled over her knee. “It would be going better if Catherine would speak to me.”
“That’s not fair,” said Catherine. Half-confident. Her loose copper hair swayed into her face when she turned her head to stare at the floor closer to her wife. “You know that’s not fair.”
Joyce looked to Angela. “This seems to be a recurring frustration that you have. Can you think of why her quietness is so irritating for you?”
“She’s the one who wanted to do this in the first place.” Angela’s hand flitted around in the air, indicating this to be the weekly Wednesday hour spent in the small office decorated with too many plants and cheery books such as Understanding Hypochondria and Mindful Sex: The Art of Slowing Down.
Softly, Catherine said, “You say that as if you think it would be better for us to just stay the way we are.”
Attention insisting on Angela, Joyce tilted her head and asked her, “Tell me what you think about that.”
“I don’t think it would be better.” Reluctant exasperation. “Catherine knows that. I just wish we could get somewhere now that we’re here, since she wanted this so badly.”
Joyce nodded. “Then let’s get somewhere.” Her silvering hair fell into her face a little when she looked down at the clipboard in her lap. “I’d like to try talking about Ethan again.”
5:31.
Angela’s silent stillness drew less attention than the long sigh that Catherine let flow into her lap.
“I know it was a bit too much a few weeks ago,” said Joyce, “but I wonder if we can work on the listening by having you slow down and listen to each other’s feelings about this.”
Catherine brought her arms down in front of herself, grabbing onto her elbows, fingertips digging into the thin material of her shirt. Her foot bounced on the spot of hardwood where the rug didn’t quite reach. Angela watched, counting the staccato taps.
“Do you think that’s something we could talk about?” asked Joyce, voice gentle.
Angela lifted her gaze as water wobbled along Catherine’s eyelids – she couldn’t help but watch. Her chest hurt with not-quite worry and not-quite annoyance. She watched as Catherine started to shake her head, and then stopped herself and shrugged, holding her shoulders up high before dropping them with a quivering exhale.
“Let’s try, then,” said Joyce. “Let’s try.”
Angela’s hand tried to bridge the distance of the couch cushion between them, seeking to offer something to her wife, to the dull glint of gold on her left hand. Catherine had almost huddled herself at the far end of the couch. Inaccessible and awkward, when Angela lost the objective halfway to her uncertain intention. Instead, she looked past Catherine and fixed her eyes back on the window, on the torrent of snow piling smoothly on the bushes and trees outside. The street had become invisible plenty long ago.
~~~~~~
It shocked Angela when she saw how quickly the love became pain. Nothing but sharp agony that pierced her clean through when her wife had called her in hysterics, when she had tripped over herself evacuating from the city council meeting that the phone call had interrupted. When Catherine’s voice had choked on itself, and then on the brief silence when the phone was taken by the paramedic with the calm voice.
Too calm. Too calm for the pure fear that settled in Angela’s stomach when she hurled herself into the car. St. John’s Memorial Hospital, the paramedic had said, on the outskirts of the city where the snowplows hadn’t quite reached yet. Closed road after closed road after stuck line of traffic blurred in Angela’s eyes and the phone kept ringing.
The phone kept ringing, but Angela couldn’t move. Foot on and off the gas, chest pounding, heart sinking lower and lower with every minute that the fucking snow kept her away from the sixteen-year-old boy getting his stomach pumped in the St. John’s emergency department.
~~~~~~
5:48.
It took too long for Joyce to get the words out of either of the women in front of her. She had pieced it together, over the course of days and weeks. It didn’t help that Catherine hardly remembered anything about that night. Angela remembered everything. If only she wasn’t convinced her stomach would tear itself to shreds if she offered any relief to the burning behind her eyes.
5:51.
Joyce’s level of muted, professional sympathy made Angela want to be anywhere else in the world, if only to escape the heavy thickness of the air. But she looked out the window and the snow settled in little drifts against the glass and the lump in her stomach was far too heavy.
Joyce looked at her and asked, “Do you remember what you felt, seeing Catherine like that?”
Angela swallowed, shoving any external emotion down and away. Conscious of Catherine’s fragile state across the couch, she said flatly, “It was horrible. But I couldn’t process any of it, not yet.”
“What about it was difficult to process?”
Irritation stung sour at the back of Angela’s tongue. “My son was dead. My wife was inconsolable.” She dug her nails into her palm. “I’ll give you two guesses as to what was difficult about it.”
Across the couch, Catherine sighed again, thick with something between frustration and disappointment, and her body shrunk even further into itself. Angela shut her eyes and kept her heart in place.
Joyce was well and used to the cynicism. She leaned away from the back of her armchair and motioned gently towards Catherine, eyes boring into Angela’s.
“What does it make you feel now, knowing that she’s still hurting so much?”
There was a burn behind Angela’s eyes and she stared straight through it. Again, her hand ached to move, to nullify the vacuum occupying the space that separated her from the crying woman in the corner. A familiar tug.
It was an unconscious action when her hands pushed herself off from the couch. Catherine watched as Angela relocated, finding a spot against the wall to lean her back against. A spot where Catherine’s tearful silence wouldn’t make her feel such an infuriating mess of anger and misery.
Catherine shook her head. “This is how it always is,” she said to Joyce, voice thin. “Like I’ve told you. I feel like I haven’t gotten an ounce of comfort from her, not even in the hospital.”
Angela’s stomach dropped again when Joyce turned to look at her. “What did you do in the hospital, Angela? When the doctors told you about Ethan.”
Arms crossed as tightly over her chest as possible, Angela’s heel bounced back against the wall. Her eyes hovered somewhere between widened adrenaline and panicked defensiveness.
“She froze,” said Catherine, as if this was information that should have been inferred many Wednesdays ago. “She froze and I fucking collapsed on the floor and she just stood there.”
Voice anointed with gentleness, Joyce said, “Grief is processed in many different ways. It doesn’t surprise me that Angela’s response was silent shock.” She turned her head to the woman seething against the wall again. “I feel like we haven’t spoken nearly enough yet about your inner thoughts and feelings, especially about Ethan. It’s a difficult conversation to have, but I’m curious to know what it is about this space that makes you clam up so much.”
More silence, and Angela cursed herself.
~~~~~~
The love was nothing but pain when the constant tone of beeping steadied. When Catherine screamed and her knees gave out, and Angela couldn’t hold her up.
Angela looked for it all the time, but couldn’t ever find that smile of Catherine’s anymore. Sometimes she forgot she was ever so lucky to see it at all.
~~~~~~
5:54.
Angela’s mouth wouldn’t move to let her explain that emotion didn’t come as naturally to her as it did to Catherine – how Catherine could pirouette so effortlessly within the open tunnels of her own mind and release her floodgate of tears with ease. Angela didn’t need to say that such emotion had never come so easily to her – Joyce knew it. Joyce wanted to hear her say it.
“I don’t like talking about feelings,” said Angela, matter-of-fact. “It’s uncomfortable and it makes me feel itchy. So I don’t like it.”
“But there have been a lot of feelings for you, over the last nine months.” Joyce pushed her eyebrows together in that sympathetic way that made the fibers of Angela’s cardigan crawl against the hair on her arms. “You’ve shut yourself off from Catherine, even though she understands just as much as you do. Why is that?”
“Because she’s shut herself off from me, too.” Angela’s foot ached to kick back against the wall, hard, and it took a painful bite down on her tongue to resist. Her jaw shook. “Ever since we lost Ethan, she’s been so lost in herself. You seem to think she’s just readily available for emotional commiseration, but I’m not about to use her as if she’s just a live-in therapist. She shuts herself up in that room every second she’s in the house, anyway.”
“That’s not fair.” Catherine’s voice shrunk into the layers of paint on the wall. The confidence to defend herself any further than those three words had withered away.
“What isn’t fair?” asked Joyce. She pointed towards Angela. “Say it to her.”
Catherine squeezed her hands around her arms and her fingernails went white. She tilted her watery eyes to the ceiling; looking at her wife might have made the room explode. “I’ve gone to work every day. I haven’t wanted to but I’ve done it, and when I leave, you’re cleaning the kitchen or fixing a – a loose leg on a nightstand. And when I get back, you’re – I don’t know – still doing fucking laundry or cleaning out the garage. I don’t know what choice I have other than to hide away and try to protect myself.”
5:58.
Angela reverted her eyes to the window. Snow had accumulated atop the evergreen bushes outside, falling through the branches, forming an endless maze of white. Only visible in the darkness because of the yellow light seeping through the glass.
“What would you have liked her to do instead?” asked Joyce.
Catherine shrugged, one of those shrugs that doesn’t come from uncertainty but from something else. Fear, maybe. Hesitancy. It shocked Angela’s heartbeat for a moment; her wife was anything but hesitant.
“I don’t know. Just – Just a damn hug, or something. We lost our boy and I have to go through every day trying to function anyway. I guess I’d like an acknowledgement of how hard I’m trying. And of the pain I’m feeling, at the very least.”
Fire. Bright red scorched in Angela’s chest and her foot halted its tapping. The snow burned her eyelids. For once, it hurt less to look directly at Catherine, in all of her trembling and fragility.
“Your pain.” She didn’t wait for Joyce to prompt her response. “You get to go to work every day and distract yourself with shitty ceramic sculptures. I spend all day cooking two-thirds of the meals I used to. I’ve been washing two-thirds of the clothes I should be. I walk by our dead son’s museum of a bedroom a dozen times a day and I can’t go in or else I’ll be gone for the rest of the week and that house will fall to pieces. Fucking forgive me for losing my energy by the time you get home.”
6:01.
Catherine’s eyes grew big and white and suddenly it hurt Angela to look at her again. It hurt to see her wife’s trembling and it hurt to look back at the snow-blinded window and it hurt to stand still. It hurt that Joyce paid so much attention to the time on the clock on the wall, committed to staying silent after the turn of the hour. It hurt to think that after they got home – however they managed to get there – that they would both resign themselves to silence in the storm of their too-empty house, placing themselves at the farthest borders of the open sea of their bed. It had been that way for months. Angela couldn’t fathom it ever being different.
And then it was Catherine breaking through the heaviness of the room, her voice somewhere between desperation and confession.
“Angie.” She squeezed her upper arms. “If I could have given you everything you needed after Ethan, I would have.” Her hair tumbled down into her face when she shook her head, chin low. “You know I would have.”
6:02.
6:03.
Angela pushed herself away from the wall. She cursed her feet for taking her to the door and she cursed her hand for yanking it open like she did. She cursed the hallway in the lobby for being so long and she cursed the tile floor for being so loud and she cursed herself for not thinking to grab her jacket before shoving herself out into the freezing air.
But outside it was quiet, almost as quiet as the dense atmosphere back inside had been, and the snowflakes stuck to Angela’s eyelashes. If she breathed in deeply enough, the air smelled the same as it had nine months ago. Her eyes watered and she let them.
On the sidewalk, the snow threatened to leak over the tops of her boots and freeze her ankles. Angela crossed her thinly-covered arms and pressed them tight into her torso as she walked, wincing against the biting cold on her face and ears and knuckles. The wind tore warm tears from the corners of her eyes, and she tried to convince herself that they were just from the weather and that her chin wasn’t actually trembling.
But somewhere behind her was her name, her name in her wife’s voice, and part of her wished the snow would muffle it entirely. That it would sweep Catherine up and settle her back down somewhere gentle, in some safe and sane and light version of their house, where the bed might not feel so big. Where maybe she could forget she ever had a wife so shut-off and cold, who would rather walk aimlessly through the snow than suck up the courage to be warm.
But Catherine’s voice didn’t stop and she wasn’t afraid to run, catching up with Angela’s dignity on the invisible sidewalk.
“You should go home,” said Angela, voice strained. She kept walking.
Catherine didn’t listen. “God, Angela, you worry me when you do things like this.”
“Oh, and since when did you start caring so much?” Angela threw the words over her shoulder like one of those curses.
Catherine’s hand settled on her shoulder. As much as Angela wanted to shrug it off and keep walking, the weight of it made her halt. She stared ahead at the illuminated mess of mid-air flakes under the streetlight a few yards ahead.
“I never stopped caring.” The edges of Catherine’s tone bordered on anger and it startled something in Angela’s chest. “You know that, even if you don’t want to. You have no idea how much it tore me apart that I couldn’t break through to you like you needed. You have no idea how much I wish I could come out of my own head in order to help you.”
When Catherine finished speaking and Angela tumbled out of her words, her face was wet. She had lost all of the defenses that would have stopped her from letting Catherine turn her around so they stood face-to-face. Catherine had Angela’s jacket tossed over the crook of her elbow.
Catherine’s own voice broke on something in her throat. “I’ve been too numb to come out and help you and I’m sorry.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Angela shook her head and said, “It’s not you.”
“What?”
“It’s not you,” she said again, louder, yelling it at herself. “I did it all wrong from the start. Maybe you wouldn’t have suffered so much if I hadn’t become so fucking cold. Maybe we wouldn’t be here if I had shown even an ounce of vulnerability.”
Catherine let out a long breath through parted lips, eyes aimlessly searching the sky while she pulled her thoughts together. Snowflakes got stuck in her eyelashes. She brought her hands to Angela’s arms and kept them there.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. But we can’t go back to the night it started and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to.”
Angela found herself pulled towards the warmth in front of her. Forcing herself to give up the pride that dwindled in her stomach, her forehead landed on Catherine’s shoulder.
The snow dwindled. No longer falling in swaths of wind but instead in little, solitary flakes, swirling aimlessly.
Angela’s arms slid around Catherine’s waist and she held on tight. She would have begged for more if she had the energy. She would have begged for closeness and warmth and the permission to be a mess.
“I don’t know what to do about it all.” she said quietly. She let tiny tears freeze below her eyes. “I don’t know what comes next.”
Catherine was silent for a long time, hands still on Angela’s arms.
“I don’t know.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know.”
Interview with the Author
1. What was your inspiration for this piece?
I wanted to challenge myself to write a story that takes place over a short period of time, in a relatively confined space. Most of the short stories I read utilize large time jumps that allow the characters to be accelerated through their journeys quickly, and I wanted to see what would happen if I forced my characters to exist painfully in this one environment for a few thousand words.
I also find that media featuring queer characters tends to focus specifically on the struggles of queerness – issues like coming out, homophobia, family unacceptance, et cetera – but queer people face the same kinds of struggles and grief that cishet people do. Much of my writing features heavy topics, but I think it’s important for us to write stories that depict queer people dealing with hardships other than just the struggles associated with queerness, while also showing the love there.
2. What is your creative process? (How do you go about writing or creating?)
I find that the answer to this question varies depending on the project. For this story, I felt the space and setting first, and then I created the characters I wanted to put there. I find dialogue comes easily to me, so I often write out sequences of dialogue first and then fill in the rest later. Since this story involves a lot of dialogue, that process worked out well for me. I enjoyed allowing myself to get a bit poetic and romantic in the in-between moments, as well.
My fiction workshop instructor this past semester was kind enough to give me feedback on my first draft of this story. I find it essential to offer my work up to others and ask for their help, because I’m then able to take their thoughts and see more clearly where changes need to be made. Eventually, I have to stop myself from editing into a hole and accept that I’ve done what I can creatively.
3. What are some influences on your artistic process?
I gather imagery and dialogue from everywhere. I’m a solitary person much of the time, and there’s always a conversation or story or argument happening in my head. Sometimes a glimpse of an image will flash behind my eyes and I have to write it down, knowing I’ll use it for something eventually. Same with interesting scenarios, professions, conversations, and so on. Sometimes my brain will get an entire novel out of one image or snippet of dialogue that I hear somewhere. It’s all really just a mess of different inspirations and concrete details that I end up fitting together somehow.
4. Is there anything more you’d like our readers/viewers to know about you or your work?
I’ve been writing creatively since middle school, when a Language Arts teacher encouraged me and told me I had potential, and I’m still very much learning about my own craft and skills. Entering college has been absolutely monumental for developing my attitude towards writing, as well as my identity as a writer. There’s so much more I have to learn about, and I know I’ll always be learning. I look forward to discovering new things about my own writing throughout college and beyond.