Drifa

In the attic of in an old, old house, a curio cabinet faces the room's sole window and a pair of button eyes peer over the brim of a teacup. Among the bottles, chalices, teacups, and trinkets, a lonely doll sits and waits, watching through the cabinet's glass. To pass the time, she chats with the other dolls, even though the others never answer back, and she makes games of counting all the spiders that weave their pretty webs in the rafters. A nervous little thing, the doll always hides when thunderstorms shake the attic window, curling up in her teacup to wait for it to pass, her patchwork wings tucked over her button eyes, trembling so much that she can't tell which tremors come from the storm and which come from her own small body. She feels as though her stitches might come undone, during storms where hail and lightning clash outside, beating against the roof with loud, loud clamors.

Not all storms scare her, though. Her favorite time of all is winter, when the wind carries snow-laden clouds to darken the window and the nights become long. She doesn't feel the cold, made of cloth and stuffed with fluff as she is, and she loves the ice crystals that form on the glass. Even in the thickest of blizzards, the winter sounds quiet and soft, the loudest sound the occasional thunk as a snowdrift falls from the rooftop. Sometimes in winter, she misses the spiders, but she'd rather watch the snowfall, counting the quiet flakes that drift by the window. She could watch the snow fall for hours, and she often does, as still and silent as the other dolls in the cabinet, the ones who never answer her back.

The lonely doll doesn't know that she's lonely, since she's never known anything else, alone for as long as she's known anything at all. Perhaps she would call herself Lonely, if she knew truly what loneliness meant, but instead she calls herself Drifa, naming herself after her most favorite thing to watch from her bed in the teacup, behind the cabinet's glass, facing the creaking attic window, inside the old, old house.

Old Norse drífa = 'fall of snow', 'snowdrift'