Uriel

Florets of snow pressed against settled raindrops on my window. It never laid—not long enough to stretch an angel in the garden or make a friend in the driveway. Instead, I pulled a wooden stool up to my windowsill, cleared the potted kalanchoes and cacti onto the carpet, and watched an image that I’d familiarised myself with over the past fifteen years glaze with white noise. Every few minutes, the roof would shudder from the wind, and the precipitation rode the same gust to tap against the glass. I listened for a message in Morse to impose grandeur onto watching shapes and colours and cold configure to the beginning of winter, but only silence replied. Then, against the fall of hard rain came the rise of grey smoke to a grey sky, one by one from the neighbouring houses, like a group of huddled factory workers out on their break. The snow formed a greater gossamer on their caps than it did on the road, where the surface remained matte with unlit downpour. 

Reminded of the nearing eve, I lit a cinnamon candle in the corner of my room with the lighter I’d use to smoke out the window on nights too sheer to stand outside. Its false scent of autumn drew my eyes back to the broken pigments of chlorophyll in the leaves of the bushes, drained from short days and late-year chills. Their rust, like the chain of a bike stored away in a shed after its use on the last day of summer, blended with exposed brick and terracotta pots to hide the languishing green of lawns whose frosted tips stood dewy in sodden dirt.

My yawn broke the silence of the room and of the empty house, echoed only by the rumble of the neighbour’s Bentley pulling up in our shared drive. The crunch of its wheels into the gravel was akin to a child’s glove pressing its final imprints onto a snowman. As I shuffled my stool along the carpet for a better view of my neighbour limbering out in his chauffeur attire, my hands brushed across the dust that remained on the sill, through the clean circles where the plant pots had been removed. I recoiled as my fingertip caught the edge of some pruning scissors I’d left on the side, and by the time I’d looked back up at the window, all that was left of the chauffeur was his footprints in the drive where the warm rubber soles of his Oxfords had dried the shingle. My pricked finger oozed a sob onto the sooty sill, so I depressed it against the roof of my tongue like a child trying to soothe itself to sleep, then rested my head below the window until I lost sight of the inside of my eyelids.

I awoke in a dim room of a dark house with my aching face resting in a pool of drool and blood. I smeared the glob onto my white shirt sleeve and stood up from the stool to a dying scrubland at my feet. Fatless cacti hung twisted from their pots, and the leaves of swollen succulents burst to brown scabs and dried pus. The window’s condensation froze the outside into opaque shapes, so I left the comfort of my room, walked down the stairs with pace, and stepped barefoot onto the doorstep. The bitter wind nibbled on my holly berry cheeks, but the shift in sensation from the dull humidity of indoors made the cold inviting. As I cast my sight across the street, no lens of static was left to buffer; rather, a silver sheet canvassed the surrounding houses to pressings of tangerine amaryllis, so fragrant I could almost taste the vanilla from their petals. I placed one foot into the dusting, and it sunk through to the drive. Before I could withdraw, the other foot followed, back and forth, until I stood in a porcelain garden, cracked by my footprints, feet side by side and arms spread wide. Rolling onto my heels, I let my body topple into the powdered ground, where I stayed stunned by the impact. Several shards of frost pierced through my t-shirt and raised the stray hairs on my shoulders to attention. I wondered if their willingness to rise derived from fear, or excitement at the notion of feeling something—anything. My questions ceased when Reynaud whittled the sensation to a sharp edge, and I regressed to the memory of a nursery rhyme my mother used to sing as she’d circle my palm with her index finger. Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. The thawing motif made me want to form tight fists until my nails broke the skin, but I resisted the urge in favour of clinging to a simpler time when the weather could turn schoolwork into a day outdoors. Only so long could I bask in memory before the tickling grated down my wrists, jolting my arms up to my head and drawing my feet apart. I stared up at the sky and fixated on a patch where the sun had dissolved clouds to blue and left an angel in the snow, its wings torn red.

————————————————-

I hope you enjoyed this piece of flash fiction. Next week’s post will be more festive-themed, but don’t expect a change in tone.