This Winter Heart
Snow falling like a thick white duvet, tucking-in the world before it
goes to sleep.
We sneak out of the house in the dark, as quiet as
mice. Jane is cold but I’m wrapped up warm and snug. My sister never goes
anywhere unless she’s under-dressed or wearing the wrong kind of shoes for the
weather.
We vault the low fence
at the edge of our parents’ property, cross the open field, and scramble down
the side of the snow-banked ravine, where we find him huddled against the trunk
of a dead tree.
A carrot as a nose.
Two pieces of coal for eyes. A battered bowler hat perched on his big old
snowball head. One of father’s old pipes stuck into his face where a mouth
might be. A thin red scarf wrapped around his non-existent neck. We built him seven
years ago, when I was four and Jane was five. He has returned here every year
since, whenever the annual snowfall begins. We never question his presence,
just accept it as part of the grand mystery of life.
Jane is grinning.
Her breath turns powdery and white in the air in front of her face.
-
Let’s leave him this time.
-
But we always destroy him. To see if he comes
back next year.
-
Not this time.
-
But why?
-
Just to see what happens.
I’m not convinced but I’ve always kowtowed to my
sister’s demands. She’s a year older and a lifetime wiser than me. It’s the
natural order that she takes the lead and I follow; it has never occurred to me
to ever question the chain of command.
So we leave him there, in the snow, in the shallow dip
in the earth, and we go back home to bed. Jane glances back at me as she walks
along the hallway to her bedroom, her eyes wide and excited in her cold white
face. She smiles at me but I don’t smile back. She’s spoilt my fun; she has
taken from me the joy of destruction.
My dreams are uneasy but by morning they are
forgotten; vanished like melted snow. Sunshine streams through the windows. A cold
white glare outside. When I hear my mother’s screams, I run straight to Jane’s
room.
The open door. Mother and father weeping by the wardrobe.
They look soft and empty, like deflating rubber dolls. A soft haze hangs in the
air. The smell of damp is lodged in my nostrils; the slightly metallic taste of
water on my tongue.
On the bed, a large mound of snow lies in state: a
person-shaped drift on top of the soaked mattress. Twisted carrot nose. A
couple of black coal eyes. A crumpled bowler hat, its brim creased and bent.
Pipe crudely set at an angle. The scarf, red as blood against all the mute,
dead white of her absence.
I walk to the window and look out at the snow,
wishing that I could see her there, dancing through the drifts in her thin
dress and her inappropriate shoes.
I still look for her every year, hoping that she
will come back. But neither of them does – not her or the snow effigy we once
created. Nobody comes; nothing happens. Just the snow and the cold and the wind
gusting through the empty chambers of this frozen winter heart.
© Gary McMahon, 2022
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