You're not a person, they say, circling. You're one of Them. From the other side.

The cat followed him home.

Tomas Shine spent three and a half minutes in the stairwell hyperventilating. He heard Mrs Helen Acres, the widow from Unit Two, clatter and batter her way out her door, shopping bags in hand. She spotted the cat outside the stairway and reversed soundlessly into her unit.

Tomas sucked in a ragged breath, filling his lungs to the brim, and looked up. The cat waited on the far side of the glass door.

My mother always said, "People think winter is death. But they're wrong. Winter is potential." Her gift, and now mine, is this: to see potential. To turn life's misfortunes to what goodness I can.