Dec 18 2008
Death by Snow
Nine inches more of snow–NINE! My kids are home again today, and I need to give them a bath soon, but right now they are happily playing, and I just happily wrote another chapter for my book. I hope to write at least one more before the day is out.
The whole world is soft outside, at least from my perspective, powdery and fluffed up, the world of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man (without the creepiness). Or, perhaps, I cannot help but feel an eerie element to the snow. It makes the whole world look beautiful, makes the leafless trees look graceful, the conifers drooping gently.
Yet the sky, nearly as white as the snow below, shades down to gray as it touches land. Color is absent, except in dark contrast with the sea of white. No footprints. No signs of life. Even the roads have only the rare set of tire tracks, the doorways half-buried in drifts of snow. Everyone inside, watching, waiting, their breath held to see whether the snow begins again.
If anyone is there at all. The place feels deserted, each house isolated, each family disconnected from the others, as if they are the last surviving family left on the earth. And what if they were? What if the snow brought death with it? What if it did truly kill the rest of the world in a single day? Anyone who played in the snow felt the poison. It seeped into their snow angels, dripped between their socks and their skin, killing them in seconds.
Only those who stayed inside, who did not touch the snow, survived. Yet even they succumbed when they returned to their cars, touching the poison as they opened their car doors. Who would survive this poisoning? Who could? Would the melting snow drift into the ground, contaminating the water system? What could save people from instant death? A drug? A food? Their own innate resistance to the poison, passed down through generations? Who would outlive this poison?
This might make a good short story.
(If only I could get my other novel finished!)
Y’know, there are a lot more people living where it never snows than where it snows… How would they react? How many would take their places even knowing the potential for the snow to grow lethal.
I don’t see any reason to help you hold yourself back. I have another novel champing at the bit and I haven’t gotten to mine either.
It is not fair we never get snow here in the UK. I mean we just never get it where I live. The whole of the UK got snow a few weeks back, but ours was about the only Town that didn’t get snow. I am so jealous, lol! I suppose snow like you describe though is not a good thing at all.
If one doesn’t have to go anywhere, the snow is WONDERFUL!!! It even enticed me to play outside.
I did use the snowy day to write 1 1/2 chapters today… yippee!
Can you tell I’m happy?
reminds me of The Day of The Triffids - only cause I’m reading it right now though
anyone that saw the comet dust or whatever it was, went blind.
we’re getting way too much snow here too … i detest it.
The mood definitely showed through in your writing. Some people don’t think it’s possible to feel through words, but you can.
I love where you went here…something calm and beautiful that’s also deadly…my writing (my poems and a short story or two anyway) tends toward the darker side of things, so this really spoke to me.
I love your blog!
I haven’t read The Day of the Triffids… I’ll have to check it out. I can’t say I detest snow. I think it is absolutely gorgeous…probably the most beautiful weather I have ever seen. Then again, I love rain, too.
And thank you ambrosiavenus. I appreciate the compliments, even for my short writings. I like situations where what is beautiful or appealing is deadly (or horrific), and what is ugly is good. False appearances horrify me more than anything. I like your blog, too!
Yes! I love that. I miss that about Colorado. When it shows and everything is white, and the sky is gray, and it’s so quite, and the snow is untouched…there is NOTHING like it. There is something beautiufl, yet erie about that and i LOVE it!