So White The Head High Snow

Daniel Castro (AKA) An extraordinary writer with a key sence for detail and and innate prespective.

But for their voices
The herons would disappear
The morning snow.
-Kaga no Chio

“How high is the snow?” she leaned over him on the bed, stretching to see out the window, which was frosted in blown white like thick cobwebs across the glass.
“I don’t know. On the news they said three feet.”
“The news.” She rested her chin on his chest, “The news is always wrong.”
“They predicted about three.”
“So we’ll either get six inches or twelve feet.” She dug in her chin.
“Is that how it works?”
“I dunno. Look out the window, hun. I can’t see from here.” He could feel the movements of her jaw, up and down as she spoke, and balanced perfectly over his heart.
“I want you to make me a snow angel,” she said, at this point kicking him by his side with both feet. Hank drifted out of bed like an avalanche, with thundering cracks, still heavy with sleep. His bare feet padded against the cold hardwood floor, each toe an icicle, as he made his way to the window. He winced as the cold went up his leg, and snapped like frozen branches.
“It looks deep enough for snow angels.”
“How deep? You need a foot or two to make a quality snow angel.”
“I don’t know. Probably a good foot or two.”
“You need four good feet. Two feet to get there. Two to sink in.”
Hank cracked a smile, “We have at least three and a half good feet between us.”
“Good.” She jumped up on the bed, sitting over her knees and smiling in his shirt. “Good. Good. Good.”
“How old are you?” Hank sat at the edge of the bed, looking.
“I don’t know. I’m as old as the snow is new. Cold on your tongue.” She walked on her knees over to him, and kissed him on the side of his mouth.
“You missed, kiddo.”
“You need to brush your teeth, stinky.” Her eyes were snow globes, with little flakes of light swept around, a nor’easter circling tiny irises. Hank grabbed her arms, smiled mercilessly, and kissed her, meanly.
“Eeeeewwww!” She squealed playfully. “Lemme-go, lemme-go!” He licked her nose and then released her, standing up to look out the window again.
“You do taste like snow.” He stared out past the single dogwood tree in the yard, past the frozen garden mounded white like a whitewashed cemetery, down the street where the plow truck pushed the snow into wet rubble for the morning traffic, past that old farm house on the right where the tree nursery still slept with all the young pines in snowy blankets, past the false horizon and the tree-line all in white and motionless. Everything and everyone motionless as he stood.
“You taste like old person.” She reached her arms from behind him, hugging his chest, and feeling him breathe, slowly. “But I guess you can’t brush that away.”
“Maybe. But I can shake it off.”
He wrested out of her grasp, but then she held him tighter.
“Careful,” she said, “You’ll shake the young off you, too.”
And then, he thought, she felt like Catherine did in the wintertime. With her long hands and cold fingers. But where Catherine had held him like a lover, to keep warm, this girl held on to him like a kid hangs around their parent’s ankles, always as tightly as she could, as if along for the ride. These subtleties were frigid reminders, and he’d almost rather no one, to someone close. He had met his wife at the pond when they were young, seen her skating backwards in big open circles over the ice. Her eyes were shut and her mouth closed, lips tight, and it was as if she had sleepwalked all the way there, and in her dreams she was dancing with someone dear to her. She was one of many very pretty girls he had seen in his lifetime, but perhaps it was because she moved with some unsettling grace, some angelic precision across the cloudscape of heaven, as though still through the white snow falling in petals, and collecting wet on his face, that Hank could not resist taking her picture.
“Isn’t everything so pretty with snow on it?” the girl asked, with her head resting against his back, and swaying.
“It is.” He answered. “It always is.”
“Every year I think it gets prettier. The first snow. The way it covers over everything. But I do hate it eventually. It gets tiresome. Sometimes I get afraid that one winter it just won’t be pretty anymore. It’ll just be cold, and tiresome.”
“Is it pretty now? It’s all that matters, really. If it’s pretty now.”
“It’s pretty now.” He couldn’t tell if she was smiling or not when she said it. “Isn’t it amazing how each and every snowflake is different. Every single one of those little tiny flakes of snow is com-plete-ly unique. And it’s been that way forever.” She kissed him, “Like you.”
He shook his head, and moved away from her.
“It all melts eventually.”
She brought herself against him again.
“You don’t seem so old. Not as old as you say. Not as old as the pictures.”
“I’m just as old as the pictures. I’m as old as the snow is new.”
She ran her fingers through his hair, sweeping it around.
“How long has your hair been white?”
“A long time.”
“Was it born white? I mean, were you born with it white?”
“It started to turn when I was about thirty.”
“That’s a horrible way to put it.” She fell back on the bed and reached out her arms and legs, moving in scissors over the white sheets and smiling. “Started to turn. Like as if you were an old fish.”
“You said it yourself that I stink.” He walked over to the bed and stood between her feet, and she closed them on his knees.
“You do. You’re a big old stinky fish.”
“And you’re an angel, kiddo.”
Catherine had this way of bobbing her head with a close-lipped smile and steady eyes, and she would do it whenever she was particularly proud of something. The girl mimicked the movement beautifully. She had only seen her in photos.
“Take my picture.” She kicked him away. “Go get your camera.”
“No. I don’t… not now.”
“C’mon…honey…” she whined, the pitch of the wind through cracked windows.
“I don’t have any film. I don’t think…”
“You never take pictures anymore. I don’t think probably once I’ve seen you take a picture.”
“I’ve taken your picture before.”
“Like really take it.”
“I have.”
“No. You’ve taken a picture of me. You’ve never taken my picture.”
“I don’t…” Hank sighed now. His sigh was older than her. “Why does it matter?”
“I like how I am on the bed. I think I’d look pretty right now, in a photo.”
She swept her arms up and down in the white sheets, her body spreading little hills around her, making a snow angel on the bed.
“You always look pretty.” He nudged her foot with his knee. She pulled it away.
“Why don’t you ever take my picture!” she sat up now, her eyes straight on him. “You’ve got pictures all over the walls. Beautiful pictures. Of your family, your kids, your friends. That you took.”
“They’re just photos...”
“No. They’re not just… you’re like…,” she sighed, terribly. “How long have I been here? How long have we been together? And I’m not a fixture yet. I’m not anywhere on those walls, in those frames. Why not?”
“Why are we doing this now?”
“Because it’s driving me crazy!” she said, “Because I live in this house. And I feel like it’s haunted. I’ve seen those photos of your wife, all in black and white. With her just frozen in light and shadows. And the way you look at them, like she’s been preserved in ice somewhere. I want you to do that to me, Hank. I wanna live forever in one of your pictures, in ice like that! I want you to make me a snow angel.”
“No,” he said. Picturing Catherine, in similar light and this same shadow, composed in frames on the wall of the staircase, crystallized in ice,and under all that snow, under all those good feet.
“Why not?” she cried, and he started to turn away towards the window again, in the silence of everything, and watched the snow fall over the tall old trees bending from the weight on every bough, crowned in white, and growing tired.
“It hasn’t been snowing that long,” he said, rubbing his finger, just over the knuckle, where the bone felt coldest. “But it’s not pretty anymore.”

WEEKS later, she was gone, and the house was covered in deep snow. Hank woke up next to a girl, who ran her fingers through his white hair, and smiled. She kissed him on his mouth, and stared at his face, smiling slightly. She was ghostly pale, and except for her freckles, two blue eyes, and thin rosy lips, she disappeared in the bleach of white sheets.
“I could stay in this bed forever,” she said.
Hank closed his eyes.


Hope you enjoyed it, I'll do my best to continue the updating.
-Ben