Into the Blizzard

With a quick whiff of perfume and a spring in her step, the woman closed the house's front door.

Her hair was yellow, the pasty kind you'd see in an old American commercial, and her eyes pale blue - widened as they were as she blinked innocently at all neighbors she came across.

Sunny and beautiful the day was, she'd say. Not an ounce more of nonsense coming from those meddlesome people she greeted daily.

Even better, she need not concern herself with that stain under the stairs that refused time and time again to be wiped away.

No more headaches. Today was a day to cool off - just her, her husband, and her lovable goofball of a child.

The presents she'd be buying that day... they'd need a truck to bring everything home. After all, it was her son's birthday, and what child didn't deserve presents on such a day?

*

*

*

It happened too quickly.

Having left the house in a hurry, the woman forgot to turn off the stove. The meager and shy flame, now left alone, quickly expanded.

Its licking tongues of fiery red took little time to engulf the kitchen's walls, ceiling, and floor - leaving nothing behind.

In contrast to the flames, an inky yet blotchy black smoke rose. It swiftly surged, embracing the whole house in a miasma of death and devastation.

As if on cue, a young child's scream broke from the first floor, coming from the spot under the stairs.

Shrill, raspy, and loud - you'd think an animal was being strangled inside the house. The neighbors did nothing, however - enamored as they were by the firestorm. Peering at it in a mixture of both wonder and fear, none of them had the courage - or decency - to run to aid.

By the time the firefighters arrived, the screams were already long gone, having stopped abruptly in the middle of the show.

*

*

*

There was a crackle of noise, sudden and loud - but it quickly got silenced by the storming blizzard. A small body dotted the snowfield as it fell from thin air. It was but a small and malnourished boy, no shoes or socks to protect his naked feet.

He had ash in his black tangled hair, and his eyes shone with the color of an emerald yet to be polished - innocent yet rough around the edges. Having just stared death at the eyes, the boy, in a state of fight or flight, instantly got up.

It proved to be a bad idea - such abrupt movement was too much for his weak stomach to handle. Curling onto himself in pain, he couldn't help but throw up all of his relatively empty belly's contents.

Weakly, though, he turned his eyesight from the mess he'd just made to his surroundings. At once, his shock overthrew the feeling of nausea.

There was snow everywhere. It stretched on forever into the horizon - as if threatening to swallow the sun. Somehow paralyzed into eternity, the sky was bleak with a grayish and humorless white tint.

'Where am I?' He thought, both terrified and out of his depth.

No landmarks were on sight, and with no idea of where he was, the boy could already feel the burn of the snow on his naked feet.

The blizzard only turned colder at that, and, not unlike his occasional whipping punishments, the harsh winds licked at his skinny and underfed body.

'I'll die.' Came the thought, unbidden - the same as the sun rising in the east and setting on the west, nothing but undeniable truth.

While once flames would take his life, now, the very opposite threatened to do the same.

He'd laugh if he could. Alas, his body was too weak for it. All he could do, instead, was to cough out a raspy giggle - it was small and broken into fragments, each seemingly unconnected to one another.

"Why?" He couldn't help but ask. Even someone such as him, a nameless nobody, didn't warrant that much misfortune in a single day.

Oblivious to the sizzling anguish within the boy, the blizzard only howled louder - inscrutable and unforgiving.

'I don't even have a name.' Somehow feeling even colder, a sinking feeling set within his empty belly. The scythe of death approached - he knew it - an invisible and vengeful spectral in the blank landscape.

Worse, no one would remember him. Even if someone did, it wouldn't be in a fond light.

A nobody, in the middle of nowhere, dying a meaningless death. If it came to comparisons, he was the same as a pebble - withering away with time, no one ever coming to notice.

His fists thundered at the snow bed at that, frustration and tears welling up, but not even indents marred the land. All it did, such burst of rage, was burn up his knuckles with cold.

A wave of exhaustion came over him - perhaps caused by profuse emotional distress, or maybe just by the low temperatures.

Still, just as he entertained the idea of curling up and finally resting his eyes shut, anger like never before overwhelmed him. Unlike the previous one, though, explosive and unstable, like a sizzling pressure pan, this time it was just the same as the snow-capped land.

Ever stretching, uniform, and frozen into timelessness.

'Fine.'

He got up, feet steady, eyes expressionless. Like a marionette given strings, he started walking. Where he was going, he didn't know. All he knew for a fact was: if he were to die, he'd do it standing up.