Untrodden Snow

Eliza Raben Grade

8

Death is not a skeleton with scythe and robe, nor is it a lady in white or an endless tunnel or simple void. Death is a small child, all bundled up, hesitating on the front step.

Their eyes scrunch up against the cold and bright, but stay open, because the snow is untrodden and it is beautiful. Can the child fnd it in them to take that frst step, feel the snow give beneath their boot? Because once they fnally do, they can’t go back, because there is a hole in the untrodden snow with commercial-brand boot treads at the bottom and a nimbus of kicked-up snow around it. So the child takes another step, slowly, forcing what should be muscle memory, and then it gets easier and they take another.

What’s the metaphor, your teacher asks. Is it killing at war? Is it choosing to let the snow take you without struggle? Pick from the list or make it up, whatever gets you an A.

No matter how carefully they tread, the child will leave a little mountain range behind them. Hills of snow clumps; footprint valleys. Is the child Death like the grim reaper is Death, or are they one of the reaped? Does it matter? For they are deep in the snow now. And maybe the snow is Death, too.

It may seem feeting in the slush and buds of March, distant in the splashing cerulean swimming pools of July, tantalizing in the dense oven air of August. But (or is it so?) the snow comes back. Delicately burning on your fngertips when you wait for your car after school, cradling you softly when you lie down and spread your arms to become an angel. Your lips turn blue. Light refracts of crystals too small for the eye to see properly. Bare trees creak.

The human footprint moves slow and heavy and it crushes the untrodden snow. The blizzard flls it back in. The blizzard downs a power line.

Frostbite turns the skin white before it turns it black, did you know that?

Snow wafts in from under the door. A mother hands her child a coat and tells them to play outside. The child hesitates on the front step.

Death is not as grand as the ministers and imams and rabbis say.

Death is a child and a backyard of untrodden snow.

Matteo Brebbia

Shooting Palm Tree

Digital photograph

Grade 7