Author's Notes: I... I have to admit, I needed to go lie down for a little while after I wrote this, and that never happens to me.

If you want to make this even worse, put on Sarah McLachlan's "Song For a Winter's Night" before you start reading.

Snow and Honey

She is six months old, and Jack can't stand to see her cry.

Mother is always busy; there are scarves to knit and candles to dip and floors to scrub and dinner to fix and food to preserve for the coming winter. Everyone is busy, and so if sometimes the baby is set aside on a blanket, is swaddled against the chill of the autumn air and left to fend for herself for a time, it is only because it can't be helped. If sometimes she cannot be held and coddled – if sometimes the things that need doing are more important than the ones she wants done - it is not for lack of love.

But her tiny face, scrunched up red with displeasure, is Jack's least favorite sight in the world. When they break for a moment in the fields, legs aching and hands blistered from the never-ending struggle to turn the rough soil, Jack does not rest, but sprints home to where his sister lies, wrapped and wailing upon the floor. He scoops the child up, a gangly, scab-kneed youth clutching a baby to his chest, and he coos to her, and he sings to her, and he tells her what they've planted this day.

By the time he must go back, her swaddling clothes are filthy with the dust of the field.

She is two and a half, and Jack can't stand to see her cry.

It is the dead of winter, and the harvest this year is the worst he can remember. There is not food enough to go around, and though the adults bear it silently – though Jack, impressed with his own status as big brother, bears it silently – his sister is still too small to pretend that hunger does not eat at the house like a sickness. She wakes in the night, filling the room they share with hiccuping little sobs. She is pressed warm against him, for the only bed belongs to mother and father; Jack shares a pallet with the baby, and on nights like these, he is grateful for the closeness, for the extra heat.

"'m hungry," the little girl tells him, voice thick with tears.

"Me, too," Jack admits. He kisses his sister's forehead, and he disentangles himself from the blankets to sneak to the door.

Out into the snow he goes, in the middle of the night in the middle of winter, wearing nothing but his bedclothes, and he shivers as the bite of the weather steals into him. He bends to make two balls of snow, forming them with hands that shake from the cold.

When he has finished, he brings them inside, shuts out the chill night air and presents one of the creations to his sister.

"Here," he says. "It would be better with honey, but we're all out." He bites into his own, mumbles the rest with his mouth full. "They're good this way, too, though."

They eat snowballs without honey sitting up on their pallet in the dead of winter, dripping all over their blankets. In the morning, their mother will find whole sections still damp, and the pair of them will have the sniffles for the following week.

She has just turned four, and Jack can't stand to see her cry.

Her face is crumpled, is heartbroken, and Jack smiles for her as mother tends to his arm, pretending that it doesn't hurt more than anything he's ever felt.

"Honestly, Jack," mother is saying. "Does Johnny Miller go climbing around in trees like a chipmunk?" The worry has passed; the initial shock, the flurry of concern, has been left behind. It's time for the lecture. "No. And he doesn't have a busted arm, young man."

She seizes the bucket from the floor, marches toward the door to go draw water so that she can clean him up before the bandages. Beside him, Jack's sister watches as though the pain is hers, eyes welling up with tears.

Jack grins at her, a narrow, conspiratorial sort of grin, and he kicks off one of his boots. The sock has a hole in the toe that needs darning, but it will serve his purpose well enough, and he works it off one-handed. With difficulty, he slips it over his fingers, presses them together to form a mouth.

"And don't even think that you're going to get out of helping your father," says mother, in between the creak of the water pump. "It's nearly the harvest. Could you possibly have picked a worse time?" Jack moves the sock's mouth, matching the motions to the words, and he wishes his other arm didn't hurt so much, or he would draw angry eyes on the makeshift puppet.

Already, his sister is biting her lip to keep from giggling.

She is six years old, and Jack can't stand to see her cry.

He knows that the tears are coming, because her face is scrunched, and her lower lip is trembling, and she stands as though she wishes the world would disappear around her. "Jack," she tells him, "I'm scared."

The ice cracks, and Jack promises her a game. He has had a lot of practice, coaxing his little sister away from tears. He has had a lot of practice at cheering her when no one else is able.

Today, out on the thin ice of the pond, he gets to do it one last time.

He does not know the girl who lives on the edge of the village, but Jack can't stand to see her cry.

The other children in town are not this way; they do not huddle in their blankets late at night to weep in private. They do not come straight home when brief snatches of free time allow them a chance to play.

He does not know the girl with the wide brown eyes, but Jack watches her sometimes, and he wonders, and he wishes that she would laugh.

He leaves the girl small presents: ghostly flowers in frost upon the window, icicles longer than those of any other house to hang like crystal from her roof. He sculpts balls of snow for her doorstep, hoping to entice her into a game – hoping that she will join the other children in their revelry - but to Jack's surprise, she does not use them for what he has intended.

Instead she selects two of the snowballs and cradles them close. She brings them inside, and she sits upon her pallet, and she eats one with honey.

The other melts upon the blankets, untouched - and though she cries, this time the girl smiles, too.