Photo by Stefan Gabriel Naghi on Pexels.

Writing inspired by the following Secret Santa Story Share 2024 prompt:

Describe winter skies.

Welkin

by Eleanor Updegraff

The sky above the Gare de l’Est is smudged with pink. Thick smears of it hang low above the steel roof, candyfloss dropped on a carpet of silver. Just past five and the sun is setting, dusk pooled thick in the streets that throb with life. Here, at the end of the road, steps lead down to the station, and taxis pull up to the green metal gates in an endless slow procession. At a table under the awning over Café les Deux Gares, two men sit facing the traffic, each with a glass of wine. I wonder can they see the sky, its soft display of colour. The contrails left by passing planes, a cross at the peak of heaven.

         All day long I have watched the sky, intending to write it for you. I do this anyway when on a journey, especially one I am making by train. I find there to be comfort in knowing the sky is the same, continuous; one stretch of canvas linking where I’ve been with where I’m going. Only the brushstrokes vary, the colours in which it is washed, and these, too, can transfer between places: Winchester, London, Paris, Vienna. At night, when my skin feels thinnest, when I miss the city that used to be home, I tip my head back and I look at the sky, and it brings me a little bit closer.

         This morning I woke to the greyness of dawn, the day still nascent but gathering forces to chase the fluorescent lights of the tower blocks into brief oblivion. The night is never dark among the estates of South London, and this makes the day seem slower to arrive, especially now, in November. When it did, though, this morning, it bloomed into startling blue, a sky so high and wide and bright it could only belong to winter. Out on the street the air was sharp, cold cutting the fog of urban exhausts, and the light seemed to slice around the buildings, turning each road into a line of cutouts. Cardboard city leaning under a tissue-paper sky.

         That blue lasted, and lasted, and lasted, all through Kent and past the edge of the country. It matched, I hope, the sea I sped under, on the first of a series of trains that would carry me halfway across the continent. And when we emerged on the other side of the Channel, among flat French fields already colour-leached by winter, the sky was the same sky, broad and bright, dotted now with patches of whipped-cream cloud.

         These are my favourite of all skies in existence: these expansive swathes of winter, fragile light unfurled. A sky deserving of a grander name: firmament, ether, welkin. More so than summer’s hot marine blue, spring’s pink dawns or autumn’s golden afternoons, a winter sky that is flooded with colour is beautiful in its vast simplicity, the certain promise it holds. And as the train sped onwards, the sky kept its word, framing the landscapes passing beneath: farmhouses, small towns, thick wooded hills, roads enabling yet more journeys. The earth was a hive of movement, it seemed; only the sky was still. But even that, by the time we reached Paris, was losing its pigment, blue bleached to bone.

         I lost sight of the sky as I walked between stations, buildings crowding tall overhead to block it from my view. I was watching, too, the road I needed to follow, the snarl of traffic choking the junction, the clusters of young men on corners. I moved fast, displaying the nonchalant surety of someone who knows where they’re going, focusing solely on earthbound matters, navigating safely the concrete maze. From the Gare du Nord, where the train arrives from London, it is only ten minutes on foot to Gare de l’Est. Another weave of tracks, another set of girders vaulted overhead. The slope of the roof that looms up in the twilight seems to echo the curve of the earth. A second sky, metal, built inside the first.

         Night in the city rises from the pavements, as though perhaps it billows out from under the grates, the lights of the cars and crossings and shopfronts blinking against its onslaught. The approach is fast, outstripping even my pace, and I find myself keen to be out of the streets, to wait for my next train among other travellers, to have reached, temporarily, some destination.

         But here, look, high above the station: sudden stretch of silvered sky, daubed with wisps of pink. In the midst of it all, I stop for a moment, allowing my feet to rest, to be still. I look at the sky, how it towers over the buildings, and I let myself feel small. I let the echoes of the day trail through me, tracks left by planes in the air, and I try my best to imprint this moment, to make it a memory to hold. And then I walk on and into the station, before the last of the light can fade.

         From Paris the night train will carry me to Vienna, a city I left behind last year but whose handprint is still so familiar. Tonight I will sleep without view of the sky, in a berth with the window blind raised against the dark. I will rouse now and then to the glow of a station, wake stiff and restless to fingers of dawn. Outside there will be another day of November, with mountains this time and red-roofed houses, fields untrammelled by hedgerows. There will be above me a new-lit sky, maybe this time grey and low, sullen with cold and refusing to lift, or damp with hints of the year’s first snow. It could be a sky that is painted with cloud, leopard-print white on a cyan background. Or maybe a wash of ethereal blue, high and bright and vast in its brilliance. A sky full of winter, stretching to home, as all of us journey beneath it.