Free Forests of the Heart by Charles De Lint

lifestyle that could accommodate a pet. The trouble was, she wasn’t a cat person, and a dog needed way more attention than she would be able to give it at this point in her life. Between her work with Angel, private commissions, and the part-time graphic design work she did for the weekly arts paper
In the City,
she was already scrambling to find time for her own art, never mind take care of anything as dependent as a pup as well.
    But one day …
    She closed the magazine. Sometimes it felt as though her whole life revolved around things that might come into it one day instead of what was in it now.
    Putting her dirty bowl in the sink, she poured herself another cup of coffee and walked across the room to where her current work-in-progress stood under a damp cloth. The sculpture was far enough under way that she could see a hint of the bust’s features under the cloth—brow, cheekbones, nose, the rest lost in the drapes of the fabric. Viewing it like this, a vague, ghostly shape of a face under cloth, supported only by the length of broomstick she was using as an armature pole, it was hard, sometimes, to remember the weight of one of these busts. She could almost imagine it was floating there above the modeling stand, that it would take no more than a slight breeze to start it drifting away across the room.
    The illusion only lasted until she removed the cloth and laid it aside. Now the still roughly sculpted head of gray clay was all density and weight, embracing gravity, and the wonder was that the armature pole could support it at all.
    It was barely noon, though you wouldn’t know it from how dark it was in the loft. The storm outside made it feel more like late afternoon and she had to put on a couple of lights to see properly. She pulled up a stool to the modeling stand, but before she could begin to work, the sound of the wind rattling a loose strip of metal on her fire escape distracted her, drawing her gaze to the window. She shook her head as she looked outside. The thaw over Christmas had lulled everyone into thinking that they were in for a mild winter for a change, but true to form, it had only been a joke. At least it wasn’t freezing rain.
    The fall of the snow was mesmerizing. She’d always wanted to find a way to capture its delicacy in clay, the drift and spin of the individual flakes as they fell, the random patterns they made, their flickering dance and the ever-changing contrast between light and dark, all conveniently framed by the window. But it was something she had to leave to the painters. The closest she’d ever come was an installation she’d done for a group show once where the viewer peered into a large, black box she’d constructed to see confetti being blown about by a strategic placement of a couple of small, battery-driven fans.
    She’d painted tenements and alleys on the back and side walls of the box and placed a small sculpture of a homeless man, huddled under a rough blanket of newspapers, up against the painted buildings. Moody interior lighting completed the installation, and it had all worked out rather well—for what it said, as well as how it said it—only it wasn’t clay. It wasn’t a sculpture, but some odd hybrid, and the dancing confetti didn’t come close to capturing the snow the way she’d wanted it to. Snow, such as was falling outside her window today, had both delicate presence and weight, a wonderful tension between the two that played them against each other.
    She watched the storm a while longer, then finally turned back to her sculpture, thinking that at least the latest cold snap had broken. The street people would still have drifts of wet snow to deal with, but they would be spared the bitter cold of the past few nights for now.
    The businessman whose commission she was working on wasn’t available today, so she was stuck working from her sketches and the photographs she’d taken during earlier sittings. She collected them from the long worktable set