Frost

A short story

Originally published on Medium on Feb. 6, 2026.

Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash.

Rob Frost lost control of his Subaru Outback wagon, its treadbare tires skidding on black ice that formed during the day and hurtling him sideways toward a homeless man’s encampment.
The car came to a sudden stop, inches from the median at the entrance to the strip mall and the makeshift home. Rob looked through his side window at the cardboard box. A blue tarp covered the box and was draped over the entrance, shielding a man’s body inside.
Rob’s car wheezed and coughed as it idled. He expected the tarp to part and a man to emerge and look outside to see what the commotion was about. But there was only a ripple as the winter winds whipped against the plastic. The windshield blades struggled to keep the ice pellets from forming on the car windows and his defroster was slow in keeping his view fog-free.
Around the cardboard box home were some plastic bags, a bucket, milk jug, egg carton, shopping cart, stiffened sweater and ice-caked blue jeans, and a Kermit the frog plush doll, matted with slush and crusted with icy crystals.
Rob exhaled, his cloudy breath fogging up against the front windshield. “Whew! That was a close one,” he said, hearing his own words again, something he was doing more of these days.
He waited a minute to see if the man inside the box would come out and was jolted by the blast of a horn from the car behind him as the driver tried to squeeze past him into the parking lot.
“Take a pill!” Rob shouted out loud to no one before straightening his car and driving on.
“Winter Wonderland” was playing on the radio. Rob spun the knob of the dial counterclockwise to an alternative rock station that was playing Alice in Chains. He echoed “rooster!” every time the singer said the word.
“Here they come,” Rob growled, looking back over his shoulder at the cardboard that was being pinged by ice pellets shining on the tarp like twittering Christmas bulbs in the glare of streaming headlights.
He parked his car and walked toward the large, glassed-in entrance of the Real Canadian Superstore. Large signs advertised Joe Fresh and others announced, “Welcome to our Store” and “SAVE FOR REAL.” Rob yanked a buggy free from a line of wet shopping carts and walked through the turnstiles that opened for him magically before the cart touched them.
A Black man, hunched over on his seat next to a Salvation Army kettle, rang a lonely bell every few seconds. Shoppers streamed past him, their backsides inches from his nose.
The store’s speakers were blasting out Mariah Carey. Rob stopped suddenly and turned to the Black man.
“Yo man, I think they need to play some Christmas rooster music! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” he said. His quarter made no noise as it dropped through the kettle slot onto a couple of bills.
“Hmph!” the man said and added a quiet, “Thank you.” Rob felt foolish trying to sound Black in such a brazen way and kept moving his cart through the produce aisles.
The Black man shook his head and continued jingling his bell. His dismissive sneer reminded Rob of Paul. Poor Paul. Long lost Paul who walked out of his life so many years ago.

*

“You don’t understand me father,” Paul said through Rob’s telephone speaker. “You never did, you never will.”
“Quit exaggerating. I know you too well. I gave birth to you — well, your mother did but I played a part too.”
“I’m going to live with mom in California. You can’t stop me — or Cec,” Paul said of his sister Cecilia. “There’s nothing for us in Windsor. We’re both going. I’m going. I’m an adult now–“
“In pursuit of your own happiness no doubt.”
“Quit quoting back music lyrics!”
“So it goes.”
“And literary lines! Vonnegut is dead and gone and so are you. You’re dead to me. Goodbye.”

*

Rob shook his head free of the dark reverie and started to think about Vonnegut’s famous refrain: So it goes. Then his thoughts went to his namesake Robert Frost and a similar line he once used: “It goes on.”
As an old man, the famous poet was asked what he learned from life and that was his response. It goes on.
“Really! What about when life stops?” Rob shouted out. A young woman holding a toddler next to the strawberries glared at him as her baby, startled, cried. She moved to the next aisle.
Rob thought maybe Vonnegut got it right. Life doesn’t go on. It’s just how it goes. Both life and death. So it goes.
Does the poor soul trapped in his cardboard cocoon think life goes on? Is the universe unfolding as it should when that poor rooster feels brave enough to step outside and stick out his hand in the cold air to collect alms from one driver out of 100 sitting in his warm car? Or maybe it’s more likely that when he freezes to death, a Christmas angel will weep over his body and chant, “So it goes.”
Like an angel probably did when Rob’s brother breathed his last?
Depressed, Rob cut short his shopping trip. He abandoned his cart and walked through the security partitions that separated the shoppers from freedom and went outside to his car. He turned the key, waited for the engine to sputter to life and drove out of the parking lot and past the median and cardboard home.

The next morning, Rob threw aside his sheet, blankets and duvet covering his cold bed and slipped on a robe. He rubbed his hands together and hoped to make himself a coffee before Angelina woke up.
He looked around at his 10-foot by 10-foot room in the corner of the basement, the boxed symbol and sum of what his life has become. As his marriage and barbershop business dissolved, Rob’s life was like a sheet of paper that folded into increasingly smaller square pieces. He had to close his shop and rented a chair from a hair salon on Wyandotte Street: on what he called the ‘bad’ side of Wyandotte which was filled with bars, cheap restaurants, dollar stores, money exchange outlets, pawn shops and a large homeless shelter. Not the ‘good’ side which had undergone a renaissance with restored heritage buildings filled with hip restaurants, a bookstore, vinyl record shop and vintage and custom collectible outlets. Rob’s chair was at the end of the line of four hairstylists, hemmed in against the back wall next to the small bathroom.
When the pandemic finished off Rob’s business and he lost his home and finished paying off his debts, he didn’t have enough money to buy another house so he ended up renting a room from a sympathetic Italian widow who lived on Division Street. Angelina took pity on Rob and offered the room in exchange for a small fee and companionship. It was her gesture of gratefulness for all the years he cut her husband’s hair as well as the other elderly men who lived near that stretch of the ‘Via Italia’ district on Erie Street where he had his shop. The non-Italian clients called him Snips, the Storyteller. That was back when he felt alive, when he still had a family and his brother was still alive.
Angelina was a sweet enough woman who never stopped talking. About the old days, days Rob didn’t want to be reminded of. He just wanted a coffee and a few minutes to himself before he set out again for groceries to restock his small corner at the bottom of the fridge.
He walked up the stairs to the kitchen where he smelled the brewed coffee and saw Angelina already sitting at the table. “Too late,” he said.
“Eh?” Angelina asked.
“Nothing. I just had a frog in my throat,” Rob explained. He poured himself a mug and sat down to listen to tales she would spin of her dear husband Angelo, and of Rob’s “bello” boutique and the “bella signora” and “bellissimi bambini” he should have held onto.
Her ramblings dissolved into static buzz of the tinnitus in his ears while he sipped his coffee and thought about Frankenstein and the movie he recently watched. About the blind man inviting the monster into his home, to sit with him beside the fire. The scene kept him warm as he contemplated another trip out into the cold where the homeless man lived.
“I’m sorry Angelina, I have to run to the store,” he said.

The sun beating down felt good but the air was still bitterly cold as Rob’s car turned at the entrance of the Superstore. Outside his cardboard home, a wraith of a man shuffled up and down the median, holding a cardboard sign that read: “Homless. Help me pleaz!”
A heavy parka concealed the man’s thin frame. A tattered toque partially covered his rust-coloured hair and his bushy lamb chop sideburns were coated with ice crystals. His face was pocked with warts.
Rob wanted to stop to chat with the man, maybe hand over a coin, but a line of cars behind him were filled with anxious drivers who had to get into and out of the store so he drove on.
Maybe I’ll catch him on the way out, Rob thought.
Inside the store, a little girl took up a spot near the now-empty chair next to the Salvation Army kettle. She stood next to a Humane Society sign that said, “Be human. Be humane to this cute canine this Christmas” and showed a photo of a beagle with, he couldn’t deny it, puppy dog big black eyes and a warm smile.
The girl wore a sweater of the Grinch’s grinning dog, body glowing with Christmas bulbs. To complete the picture of Max, she wore a fake antler on her head.
“Good morning mister,” she said as Rob neared the turnstiles. “Donation to the Humane Society?”
But other shoppers beat him to it, dropping bills into her donation box. Smiling, they said how delightful and adorable she looked. Rob squeezed past her and made his way into the store, but the flash of her dimples made him look back and he stopped suddenly.
“Cecilia!” he said as shoppers, oblivious, streamed past his stalled cart.

*

Rob remembered the moment when he stared at the photo of his daughter, his darling dimpled angel. His life was collapsing but her smile shone a light into the small corner of what was left of his world and gave him hope — for the moment. He remembered how he would feel 10 feet tall when he carried her on his shoulders and her arms reached up to the sky.
Then Cecilia grew up — and grew distant. She didn’t argue with him like her brother Paul. She just kept quiet and as she grew older and became independent, stayed away from her father. Didn’t take his calls. Didn’t call him either.
You don’t understand how quickly you can lose it all, even the ones you love, he would think as he looked at her photo. How pain can push you over the thin dividing line between comfort and joy to desperation and defeat. That’s what happened to me. And then I lost everything, including you.

*

A tear trickled down Rob’s cheek and tickled his mouth. It brought him back to the moment and he pushed his cart through the store. Andy Williams was crooning “It’s the most wonderful time of the year” and Rob snarled, “Really! I’ll tell you the most wonderful time of the year! Today, Dec. 21. The darkest day of the year. When the day is shortest and the night goes on forever.”
An elderly man wearing a turban stopped his cart as if to ask what the problem was but Rob pushed past him to finish his shopping. Back in his car, the radio was playing Michael Bublé’s “I’ll be Home for Christmas” and Rob turned it off, thinking instead of Ozzie Osbourne crowing “Mama I’m coming home” as he drove up to the cardboard box and the wretch standing next to it.
Rob pulled his car up to the homeless man and was about to ask him about his story but stopped when he smiled and blathered gibberish through missing bottom teeth. It sounded like the trill of a toad and, indeed, the man’s warts, his habit of smiling widely and craning his neck made him look like one. Maybe that’s why he’s got a Kermit doll? Rob thought.
The man kept gibbering and Rob saw for a second the face of his brother in his last days, locked away in a secure floor of the hospital before he took his life.

*

John was his fraternal twin, as unlike Rob in every way as two strangers, but the bond they formed was inseparable. From their days growing up to when Rob studied English in university (before reality forced him to pursue his father’s trade to become a barber), the pair were like identical twins. They joked about their names. Rob said he felt like the Michael Bolton character in the movie Office Space; he too resented having to shorten his name because of the other Robert Frost although he was one of his favourite poets and he adored his “The Road Not Taken” poem. John quipped his nickname Jack reminded him of another movie character played by Michael Keaton and said how he would come back one day to haunt his family at Christmas. They both agreed though that their older sister Carole had the worst nickname. She was a wild youth whose conflicted sexual identity and self-image led to her wanton teen years and kids started calling her Whore Frost.
The memories quickly turned dark for Rob who remembered that last time he saw John mumbling in his hospital room. Hours later, he was found dead. Alone.

*

Rob sped past the homeless man and made his way back to the small cold bedroom in the house on Division Street.

He waited till the chaos of Christmas and New Year’s passed before venturing out again to the grocery store. The weather was unseasonably warm and Rob felt buoyed by the idea that the homeless man could collect handouts in relatively mild temperatures for a change. He would make sure he gave him a toonie or two to help out.
Walker Road was empty of cars this early morning and his Subaru soon reached the turnoff to the Superstore. He turned right and a flare of sunlight off shiny metal caught his eye.
Ahead on the median, construction perimeter fencing with a padlocked gate replaced the cardboard box and the homeless man’s belongings. On the fence was a sign that read, “FREE Fresh Grade A Turkey when you spend $300 or more at Real Canadian Superstore.”
Rob drove past the median that divided the cars coming and going and looked down past the fence to see Kermit the frog staring up at him from the melting snow.

---

Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for about 40 years and has published a book of short fiction, Stories in the Key of Song. Visit him at claudiodandrea.ca or read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Bluesky.
 Contact him here. He would love feedback.