Mille lived behind the little red door in the hallway, right where the skirting board makes a bend. The door had a wreath, a window the size of a button and a mat that said HEJ. Mille was an elf, no taller than a coffee cup, with a hat as red as a lingonberry and two braids that tapped against her shoulders when she walked.
In the first night of November she woke because the hallway smelled different. Not of shoes, not of soup. It smelled cold and soft and a little of metal. Mille knew this smell from her grandmother's stories. “When it smells like this,” her grandmother had said, “the snow is coming. But nobody believes you until it is there.”
Mille opened the door a crack. The hallway lay still in the blue light of the early hour. On the round rug slept Molly, the family's striped cat, curled up like a cinnamon bun. Mille held her breath. Cats and elves were neighbours, but not friends. Not yet.
She crept past the rug to the window. Outside, above the roofs, the first snow was falling. Thick, slow flakes that took their time, as if they knew how important they were. Mille pressed her nose against the cold glass. She wanted to tell someone. But the children were asleep upstairs, and elves do not wake children. That is the first rule.
So Mille did what elves do when they want to show something without speaking. She fetched a pinch of flour from the kitchen, dipped her boots in it and set off. From the red door across the floorboards, in small careful steps, all the way to the window. There she stopped and looked out once more. Then she walked back, step by step, and placed a thimble of hot cocoa in front of her door. For whom, she did not quite know herself. For the morning, perhaps.
Molly opened one eye. Mille froze. The cat looked at the small figure, looked at the footprints, yawned so widely that you could count all her teeth, and laid her head back on her paws. Mille breathed out. Perhaps, she thought, we are a little bit friends after all.
In the morning Jonas came down the stairs first, then Lea. Jonas saw the footprints. Lea saw the cocoa. Both looked at the window, and then they shouted it through the whole house at the same time: “It snowed!”
Behind the red door Mille heard the shouting and smiled into her pillow. Nobody had needed to believe her. The snow was simply there. But the footprints, she thought, had led them to it. And that was almost as good as telling.
