The wind made Cora anxious. It always had even before Bradley left her. She hated the way it would come battering the sides of the house no way to stop it. Sometimes she went to bed with the pillow crushed to her ears and still she could hear it. It drowned out Bradley’s night breathing and made her to feel utterly alone like she might just as well have been trying to sleep in the middle of the desert. And when she did sleep she dreamed of a great ship with sails flapping. Bradley was all the way on top of the mast and all she could shout was “what are you doing up there?” and he would call back to her but the wind in those great white sails made it too noisy for her to hear what he was saying. In the morning she reached to him to tell him of her dream but he was already at the breakfast table reading the newspaper.

That was before. Before he had gone to France with the boys. Before the man from the war office had arrived at her door to explain that there was nothing left of Bradley that they could send back from France. When she slept that night the wind brought her a dream of a tall ship with no sails. The water from the ocean crashed up against the hull. In her sleep she pressed the pillow closer to her skull. The water lapped and in the waves there were little pieces of Bradley all the way from France. It was the last time she saw him.

After that the wind whistled through the closed shutters and made her worry. She sat in her rocker by the fireplace and chewed at her fingernails till the tips of her fingers turned raw and red and the corners of her nails bled. The wind came all the way down the flue and whisked out her fire. The only thing left were the embers scattered around the grate like little pieces of Bradley still hot and smoking from the explosion. She took up the poker and snuffed them all out.

Cora tried to ignore the wind by letting in the cat from the barn for company. The cat jumped up to the fireplace grate and knocked the fish stew she’d cooked for her supper onto the floor. The bowl cracked apart and scattered like little pieces of Bradley in France and the cat jumped down to lick up all his insides. Cora could not bear to throw the cat out to the wind so she put it instead in the mudroom. She cleaned up the fish stew and ate bread with jam for her supper. The jam tasted like the soot in the fireplace leftover from her dead fire and afterward, she forgot to let the cat back inside.

In the morning she woke to find the wind had blown open the back door and the cat was gone from the mudroom. She put on her galoshes and went outside to call for it. She found the cat in the yard by the barn. It was dead and ravens were pulling apart its guts. Cora left the little pieces of the cat and went back inside to find a box. Then she put every single one of her houseplants into the box and then she marched down to the village and left that box on the doorstep of the church. She left it there like it was a baby, the one she’d never made with Bradley because he’d left all of his little pieces somewhere in a trench in France instead of inside her. She went back home and left the box of houseplants on the steps of the church because she could not bear to watch another living thing die.

When she got home Cora sat down alone at her rocker in front of the empty fireplace to have tea and a biscuit. The wind howled outside begging to be let in and she only smiled because she knew there was nothing left that the wind could take from her.