by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

The sun is so bright this morning it would burn a hole right through my eyes if I looked at it. That’s what my father says. He’s a scientist, so he should know. Looking through the living room window there’s nobody out. Even the plows haven’t come yet. The snow is like a thick layer of vanilla frosting on the earth cake. Fluffy and perfect. Yesterday it started snowing in the afternoon, big puffy bunches dropping from the sky. Mom said it was like that because of the moisture since it was above freezing. We always walk the half mile to the ice cream store when it snows hard and this time I got pistachio—like every time. My big brother (who got mocha chip) says it’s a tradition, kind of like how they drink tea in the desert when it’s boiling hot, but the opposite. Today, I was the first one out of bed. The sun looked like it wanted to stay tucked in to the horizon where it was cozy and warm. I tried waiting for everyone else to get up but that frosty white icing looked too good to resist, so I made myself a bowl of corn flakes, put on my snow gear and went out to the porch. It’s colder than yesterday, so cold it makes my eyes water, and I can feel ice sticking to my eyelashes, but I don’t mind. The air smells like clean sheets on the laundry line and now the sun is caught between two bare branches of the maple tree in our yard, like someone grabbed it with a giant pair of chopsticks. The snow crunches under my feet like when the dentist pressed a filling into my tooth and I’m looking down from the top of our hill to the street where there are no footprints, no tire marks. Maybe I’m the first one up in the whole world and I’m like the great explorer Ernest Shackleton, but I know I won’t get stranded the way he did. So, I flop face first into the snow like an upside-down snow angel but instead of sinking into sweet yumminess, it feels like a cold, hard sheet of glass on my face and I start sliding down the hill. I try kicking my feet to stop, but instead I speed up and it seems like I’m going down a mountain before I get to the bottom where the little stone wall is and I hurtle over it onto the sidewalk that’s like polar ice caps on my forehead where I land first and there’s blood in the snow the color of the bright red cardinal that lives in our yard and I wish I had wings like he has but I can’t move and I know, I know, I know, I’ll have to go the hospital, but somehow I have to get back to the house first to wake them up even though they’ll be mad at me for going out alone and I’ll say please no stitches but the doctors will probably try to make me even though I’ll say, it’s okay, I’d rather have a big scar on my forehead, because every time I see it in the mirror I’ll remember how bright the sun was, the sky like the blue, blue ocean, how beautiful and perfect the vanilla-frosting snow looked before it tricked me and turned into ice.

Photo by POURIA 🦋 on Unsplash