The Weight Of Snow

The cold carries what cannot be left behind

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Audio version with original music by

Nolan Green

, pick up a copy on Bandcamp.

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She wanted to see her home as more than severe and unforgiving. That’s how it settled in her mind: unforgiving. Standing at the snowy edge of the forest with the frozen lake stretching out before her, the word lingered.

Perhaps a poet—one hardened enough to make it out this far—might have described it in more picturesque terms. But she wasn’t a poet, and for her, it was those things—a place she wished she could imagine as softer, kinder, but…

She moved forward, her eyes on the distance, where the snow gathered heavier against the far bank. There was a place she needed to see, a place waiting under all this weight.

“He always called me Queen Anne,” she thought. “I could’ve hit him with a brick every time it came out of his filthy mouth.”

She sees herself with the brick, the loose one from the hearth, the corner one that always gets kicked to the floor. Heavy in her palm, she feels it and sees herself moving it back into place.

The images of the brick fade as flecks of snow sweep her eyelashes like crystalline razors. The hood of the old jacket flapped as she glanced ahead, squinting.

“And here I am dragging my tired ass out to see him,” she said to herself, the words whisked away.

Footsteps, slow and steady, rose over one snowdrift after another and back down. Even on snowshoes, her body sank deeply in the white until the last rise sloped slowly downward toward the massive lake with mountains all around.