Fiction by Jeff Burt
Snowflakes swirled under two streetlights at the park like shooting stars against the night sky. A young woman lay prone on the cement walk. I first thought she was making angels in the snow, but with more inspection seemed more on the path to becoming an angel. She did not move. The bellows of her chest had stopped.
I felt for a pulse on her iridescent wrist, flesh a translucent paper exposing thin, visible veins from arms gone gaunt. I touched her berry-colored lips to close them, the unlit indigo of her iris like an old bruise, a plum after the sun has caressed and not yet ripened, of a lily when the color vanishes and the petals fall, the pale purple of candles of the church lit for repentance, the amethyst of meditation, the lilacs pressed in books to mark a place of interest lost in the shuffle of reading, dried lavender, as if Death had kissed her but was interrupted before all color had been taken.
Her rayon dress ran through my fingers, like mercury freed from containment and spilling on the pavement unable to be contained by the merest boundary, without bond, lake water slipping through my hands no matter how hard I tightened my fists, and I remembered my mother’s hands covered in cornstarch when I was a child, her laughter at watching the water beads form in her hands as she tried to wash them, the starch remaining in the crevices of her palms like snowflakes she said, that do not melt in the darkness underneath trees.
I called for help. Snow fell and kept on falling. I wanted the snow to fall like rain, anonymous, consistent, but each time I looked out saw chaos, swirls without pattern, each flake individually propelled. I covered the woman with my jacket.
She survived.
That night my father called. Cancer had taken my mother.
Though I am separated by years from that night, I still see the silhouettes brought by that snowfall, the variations of brilliant white, dirty white, and gray, and the stunning blackness of the park’s backdrop. I still see every variation of flake falling under the lamps, the wide, the slim, the lace-like, the cotton-like, the confetti, the crystal, the furred, the angular, and the oblique.
The snowflakes perpetuate like a background that never gets refreshed, snowflakes not feathery like eiderdown which sways back and forth like a pendulum lowering itself to earth, but drifting, white blossoms floating on the dark swells of quiet waterways, white funeral mums among black cloth, white petals of roses against the dress of dark evening, white hair of my mother with cancer drained of pigment, white doilies she treasured as gifts, the white of waves high capped and falling, white of waterfalls in spring, eidolons of snowflakes lingering in memory, eidolons that haunt me.
All images now resolve into one collage and crowd my consciousness. They become a single form flying at me on a conveyor of wind until I cannot perceive, not blinded, but that visible shape has been coalesced into a picture book fanned repeatedly with frames I cannot distinguish, surviving, dying, all one.
People tell me this will pass. But it deepens.
The mind filters and selects things we do not wish to come forward, and most often, the years have eroded memories, and they no longer hold us. Snow melts.
For me, it has never stopped snowing.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He has worked in electronics, healthcare, and mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Per Contra, and Consequence Magazine.
