Icicles melt; Icicles refreeze. Then they rethaw. This is normal, but Feez Leemo knew what everyone was starting to realize this winter: it wasn't going to happen. This winter is colder. After just three days of reports from the weather bureau, saying that three consecutive coldness records had been absolutely surpassed, as compared to those days in past centuries, even the Committee on Emergencies and Atrocities began to hold session. But after fourteen record days, it was simply all anyone talked about. It seemed to be a case of global cooling. It might be because of ionospheric inverse-induction, indirectly related to heavy usage of cellular phones, satellite broadcasts, and the Internet. Feez just knew he had to get more fleece, more wool, more layers. It was just damn cold.

Some heating systems that had been known to work seemed to get a bit clunky in the new situation. And death tolls began to accumulate: homeless people freezing, people without heating systems freezing, sour weather attitudes accumulating and leading to stress-related psychiatric mishaps.

Feez just kept wiping his windows off; they had frozen with layers of hard condensation. He pried his mailbox open, no longer able to access it each day like before. Why? Why was this winter so much colder? He needed to know. No one was doing anything to remedy the situation; they were all just analyzing it. Sure there were Red Cross shelters set up and community "plans of action" launched, supposedly, but Feez sensed that the authorities were missing the boat. They hadnt pinpointed the source of this coldness. He was sick of their myriad theories.

So he ventured out to the woods behind his house. He could feel frostbite begin to harden his left eye, his only exposed surface. He walked by the old rusted tractor, which had been left for generations. He stepped over crisped shrubberies, trampled on some letters that someone had thrown out, gazed at distant water towers, climbed a hill, pushed aside frozen pine branches, climbed a steeper hill, and walked toward a bedrock plateau. He had heard of this vista, but had never been there himself. He started to focus that eye on distant towns, church steeples in the valley. He thought about the people in those buildings, all avoiding this tremendous shiver. He wondered what it would take to bring any warmth. Slowly his pondering body shifted and sunk in the sharp white snow, and he felt sleepier and sleepier sitting there, and as his eye changed its focus and almost closed, he realized his vision was being filled from left to right, from top to bottom, with a tiny clover right in front of him. Out from the icy surface it peered. And, he couldn't believe this part, it was a four-leaf clover. At this point his hand and arm were frostbitten, utterly incapacitated. He felt himself being mummified like the clover itself, and a gust of wind caused his body to sink another notch. It was a final, impossible gesture, a tiny speck of faith, which empowered Feez to rotate his jaw and reach it around toward the clover allowing his cracked, frozen lips to squeak closed around its stem, and his teeth, in one tiny motion, split that stem, allowing the clover to fall into his breast pocket.

As you can imagine, there was a crack in the clouds where a simply symmetrical ray of sunlight finally peaked through. In the distance, smoke could be seen coming from the factories. Cars beeped their distant horns. And the frost encasing Feez's body modestly released its death-grip.