Winter is for watching.

When the first white flakes stumble down from the yellow underbelly of the clouds, the city falls silent. The last birds hide their beaks beneath feather-down wings, their kin drawn south, or caught by cats on the prowl, fur fluffed against the cold. Streets sleep beneath snow like a second skin.

Winter's cloaking masks the city's blemishes, like the soot that crawls shadow-like over brick and stone, staining mortar and darkening gargoyles to hunched silhouettes. The sun sets early, before the working people have struggled into their jackets and turned their steps towards home.

In the gathering dusk, street lamps flicker on one by one.

Snowflakes fall like sparkles in the golden glow. Installed only a year ago, the lights' crystal casings are already battered, the bulbs inside burning up beneath the heat of their own incandescence. They cast no warmth on the streets, where weary feet wear tracks in the ever-gathering powder. The people's heads do not lift. Their view, for the most part, contains nothing of note: just their fellow citizens trudging past, indistinguishable in their winter coverings, and a line of buildings without ownership or use.

From the boarded-up windows, others observe them. Others most cannot see.

Winter is for watching.

The dead rarely cross paths with the living, in the other seasons of the year. In spring, those that left the world young romp in the parks like they do not realize how the sun glances through their bodies, painting no shadows on the grass behind. Old folks sit on their stoops in summer, smiling at a world that rarely smiles back. Those that see them offer a nod of deference before hurrying away. Most have let a ghost grow attached to them at some point or another. They know better than to repeat the experience.

When autumn lays its lengthening shadows over the cobblestones, the restlessness begins. Perhaps it is the cold, or perhaps the change in energy of the people who walk the living side of the streets. Heads drop and footsteps quicken. Few linger outside on the long evenings after the equinox, and most will not ease up again until spring greenery has cloaked the barren skeletons of the trees.

A street lamp gutters and goes out.

On the sidewalk opposite, a young woman stops. Others grumble and trudge around her as she lifts her eyes for the first time since the sun last broke through winter's grip on the sky. There is nothing special about the street lamp. Nothing perches atop it, or dashes into the alleyway cut between the shuttered storefronts behind. She is almost disappointed.

Almost.

She lowers her gaze again and rejoins the slow river of people wending their way to wherever they are going. Half of them are there but not there. Those with corporeal forms shoot the gaps in their midst nervous glances, and try to press their collective pace just a little bit faster. They can sense the dead, even if they cannot see them. Most do not deal well with what they cannot see.

Their concern is misdirected. The young woman knows that these are not the dead that should worry them. These are the recently deceased, whose feet still remember the routes they once knew by heart. They will walk to work, to their houses, to the store just like any other citizen, and sit where they once felt at home until the time comes for them to move again.

She can feel their eyes when they land on her, but not like she can feel the ones in the alleys and boarded-up windows she passes. Memory fades in death. Some go faster than others, but all eventually end up the same.

Lost. Trapped.

Restless.

Before she realizes she has arrived, the door to her building stands before her. The young woman's shoulders slump like the arches of its elaborate facade, as antiquated as most things in the city. Old Saint Boniface is old. Centuries old, with architecture that has not been torn down or built up in half as long. The wind tugging her hair from its messy bun will cut right through these walls tonight.

She drags the door open and trudges inside.

The electric lights of the building's lobby are a stark contrast to the softness of the street-lit night. They pin her like a patient on a surgical table, laying bare the hollows under her narrow eyes, her rumpled hair, her crumpled waitressing uniform. They told her to bring it back tomorrow, washed, when they dismissed her today. She shuffles to the elevator, hoping nobody else will walk in until she is safe behind its mechanical doors.

After an indeterminable length of time, the elevator's ping shoots the silence. It is followed by the first muffled, distant toll of the city bell tower. Half past the evening hour. The young woman is almost tempted to turn around and walk back out into the street. Back to where the cold and the snow feel like something, even if that something is ghosts' eyes and the prickle of numbing cheekbones. At least the street and the warm sound of the bell feel alive.

"Ground floor," chimes the elevator in a lilting synthetic voice. Its door rumbles open.

She doesn't have the will to break her footsteps' default path. She rides the elevator one floor up, to a hallway as vacant and bare as the lobby. The lights are less aggressive, at least. She fumbles with her key until it clicks like the clasp on a coffin's lid, stiff and reluctant. The sound echoes down the corridor, past doors she knows hold living people, and doors she knows mask nothing but empty rooms.

Her own door discharges a waft of cold air when she opens it. Her apartment is as she left it, dark and lifeless. Shedding her shoes, she doesn't even bother changing out of her uniform before sinking down on the couch, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. The TV flicks on with a click of a worn remote. It's the news. The same news she's heard a thousand times, from every worried outlet in Old Saint Boniface. They cover little else these days.

She changes the channel until an overdone drama fills the screen. It's just mindless enough to bury her, and she remains on the couch until well into the night, eyes fixed on nothing as the TV's flickering casts her face as a living person's one moment, a living ghost's the next.