'Snowflakes' by Lisa Lermer Weber

Snow. Winter's here. But you're not. You've been gone forever. I don't count the days. I can't let grief swallow me. You made me promise to continue living. So here I am, living in our cabin. Here I am, living alone with trees and ghosts. I don't count the days, instead I count falling snowflakes. I count them the way I used to count your freckles. Each one as different and beautiful as stars in the night sky. You used to point out the constellations and tell me their haunting stories. Sometimes I try to count stars, but there are too many and I quit. I don't count the days, instead I count the times I think I hear you. I count the times I reach over to your side of the bed and touch emptiness. I promised to continue living, but instead I'm counting all the ways I can't live without you.

'Last Dance 1-2-3' by C.S. Bowerman

Snap. Footsteps stop. I cringe back. They must be close. I breathe into the wall. I need to make a decision. I stretch my ears to find them.  Desperately scraping the silence for warnings of movement. The night air is thick with anticipated snow.  Bulging clouds lighten what should be a jet black sky. The faint barking of German Shepherds trickles into my cold strained ears. Before I realise my body is up and streaming away between the containers. My trainers almost silent as I try to run like a dancer through corridors. I have done nothing wrong except to be unable to prove I've done nothing wrong.  It's true that I cannot remember exactly how all of this started and where the pieces go.  Like an impossible jigsaw there are so many parts that I can’t fit anywhere but must fit somehow.  How strange it is that something as invisible as knowledge can wreak such a final havoc onto someone's entire life.   Just to know surely shouldn’t be a material enough thing to mean a bullet at dawn or a gibbet at dusk.   But apparently we cannot escape our fate and all roads lead to Rome and I’m running out of solutions as I trip gracelessly forward.   Held tenderly by the crisp concrete, my head feels hot and warm and I see him again radiating understanding and compassion, like a night-time sun.   Through all the lies I see he is real, no matter what the law dictates or the populace want to believe and he was here.   As the first flakes fall I smile in renewed tranquility, hear the dogs as they pass, and understand finally my way out of this life's mess.

 

'Wreckage' by Sheila Scott

Carpet. Thick pile. Both feet now. She struggles to stand. The crash has stolen months. Time, hope, lives, taken so fast. It’s her first time, upright and alone. She can’t, mustn’t, remember what alone feels like. Medics, family, carers, she’s been surrounded by unwanted company. Just one misjudgment broke her body and too much more. The blue flashing light marked her, alone, as the sole survivor. She stands and her blood pools too low, too far, to sustain. Her body folds, takes her to her knees, drops her on the floor. This wreckage from which she feels she should never have been allowed to rise. She lies and waits, waits to be alone no longer, waits to be no longer.

'The Snow-Devil' by Amanda Jones

 

Snow. By the time they’re seated, it’s full-blast. When Sophie swiped right, she hadn’t envisaged this. Dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant, miles out of town. He offered to pay for cabs so she could travel separately. She said they would go together, so he collected her in his Daemon.

 

The restaurant is one she would have conjured herself – paneling gleaming in the lamplight, crisp linen, smiling staff. He orders Bloody Marys, shrimps and turbot for her, oysters and rare steak for him, insists she tries the dripping meat when it arrives. When he goes outside to smoke, she follows him for air, breathes in the bitter aroma and coughs, even though he has put the cigarette out. They take their time over dessert and coffee, and, when they go back to the car, it is entirely white, a coffin-shaped hump amongst more rounded ones.

 

He says that they are stranded, he’ll get rooms, don’t worry, he’ll pay and, of course, they will be separate, but she still goes with him to check. The receptionist smiles knowingly and offers them two separate keys, saying the numbers under her breath, and they have a final brandy and go up in the lift together.

 

When they get upstairs, Sophie realises the numbers are meaningless -  they are adjoining rooms with a connecting door - and she sees his smile and wonders if he knew. At least there is a key to the connecting door, so she locks it, thinks about moving something in front of it, but decides that’s overkill,  that it will be fine.

 

Next door, he blows lazy smoke rings and laughs, glad there’s no cigarette, glad he doesn’t need one, because devils don’t, and he decides to wait an hour before going next door.

 

 

'Mirror-Surface' by Tilly Greenland

Look

Look there

Do you see?

Do you see her?

There, trapped within the water

Caught in the shimmering mirror-surface

Someone that looks like me; but isn’t

Her eyes are black sockets; she can’t see

Her voice doesn’t carry when she tries to speak

You can see she cries too, but you cannot hear

Her form wavers, dissipates when I reach out to touch her

She looks so sad and lonely, trapped alone in the mirror-surface

She makes my heart ache, my stomach knot, my tears burn my cheeks

I wish I could reach her, comfort her, hold her, tell her it’s OK

But that would be a lie, so I turn away, and I leave her, alone

Trapped in the water’s mirror-surface, she will be there when I return, always the same

'Betrayal' by Irene Lofthouse

Snow.

Falling heavily. As I had. Sweating, running from her. Me, mirror-caught in action. Red drips, seeps to watery pink. Ragged breath, ankle wrench, my choked howl. Knife lodges in ribs piercing my broken heart. Thrumming through my blood anger, memories, leaving no trace. Fading, I catch a bark; my beautiful traitorous husky, Snow.

'Hiraeth: Homesickness or Nostalgia; A Sense of Longing or Desire; Or Regret' by E. E. Rhodes

Hiraeth.
Our home.
Lost forever now.
A stone lichened halt.
This place of echoes silenced.
The brambled path, sharp with stories.
No swallows make their eaved homes there.
With scant water collected in slime rotted barrels.
Yellowed curtains at the windows, rotted by the sunlight.
Paint scabbed door jambs, broken steps and an uneasy porch.
Would anyone lean into the doorway, to check the ghosts within?
Why would you seek this reminder, when no one goes home again?

'Chain Reaction' by Michelle Xu

Tap-tap. The baby goat scrambles its way across scraggly grass, searching for its mother’s warmth. Its frantic leaps dislodge a pebble whose appearance, smoothed by years of trading secrets with the wind, draw the curiosity of an earthworm. The earthworm pulls on a root, whose sibling roots take in a surprised gasp of nitrogen, and after a long link of dominos through white-coat concepts like pressure imbalance, rhyolitic magma, and eruption column, the Yellowstone caldera blows the human civilization sky high, then deep underground.

Seven millenia from now a race of four-footed aliens will rediscover Earth; their X-ray sight-stalks will dissect the moondust landscape like scalpels, and they will catalog the bones of the baby goat; the fragments of the pebble; the tomes on volcanic eruption; but never find a mother’s love; a scholar’s curiosity; nor the stories we whisper to the wind before sleep.

'The Race' by Ursula Hoult

“Run!”

 He said. So I did. Far away I ran. To where the snow began.

I hoped here I was safe. That I might take a new name. That I might become blonde and hide away.

I looked around at the lay of the land. And decided that now my name would be new - Agnetha.

Agnetha, and blonde, I smiled at the man in the bar. The woman beside him did not smile back, so I turned away. And caught the bartender's eye - “a dry white wine” seemed the sophisticated thing. I struggled however with the wine, as I have always had a sweet tooth. And new person or not, some things don’t change, no matter how blonde you are.

Putting the wine aside, I thought of whether I should contact Dave who told me “run”. We had been together a long time and had many successful capers together before his final shout. I needed to think about what had gone wrong and why the police had been waiting for us.

Or whether that was wasted thought and energy, and what I really needed to do was hide the money. The money was technically ‘ours’, but in Dave’s absence I needed to keep it safe and hidden from prying eyes.

What would Agnetha do that Katie wouldn’t, I mused, as I tried to solve the problem of what to do next. She would get a job and work on being a model citizen of whom the police would show no interest, I thought. I saw a small poster beside the bar advertising for staff, and I considered if I knew enough to work as a bartender.

My name is Agnetha, a bartender in the land where snow begins, and each day I wait for the man who told me “run”.

'Attempted Isolation' by Katie Isham

Dusk.

Just me.

On my own.

Sat in a field.

Social distancing at its peak.

Soothed to be shrouded by grass.

I pick a dandelion and blow gently.

The parachutes drift across the grass like snow.

Once clumped in community, they land in lonely isolation.

One snowflake makes it further, eventually settling on a branch.

A stray branch, a long way from its tree, or any.

Now it has company as the seed nestles into the cracked bark.

Two elements of nature now joined, more interlocked than I am to anything.

The thrum of nearby crickets and distant cicadas cocoons my consciousness until I choke.

Even here, where I thought I’d be alone, I’m surrounded by life, existing and co-existing.

I succumb to the heartbeat of nature, lying down and digging my fingernails into the soil.

Inhaling the pollen as a bee buzzes my ear, I realise we can never truly be isolated.

'Deliquesce: verb, become liquid. Dissolve in moisture from air. Deliquescence: noun. Deliquescent: adjective.' by Lindsay Bamfield

Deliquescence.

I loved that word.

I used it in my first composition for Miss Tyler.

It was during my first winter in England when it snowed.

There had never been any snow where I’d lived and I’d only seen pictures of it in black and
white.

When I gazed out of my window that morning the whole world had turned black and white,
until a robin red breast perched on the fence.

Before breakfast I crept out of the back door and planted my first steps in the snow although I
saw the robin had beaten me to it.

The snow on the pavement to school was already melting into a sloppy icy mush beneath the
hundreds of footprints of those that walked the same way before me.

By the next day most of the snow was gone, leaving just a few little mounds from melted
snowmen and small drifts beneath sheltered hedges where the sun couldn’t reach it.

I was excited when Miss Tyler gave our exercise books back but when I opened mine to
discover my mark, I found she had written in angry red letters that I was not to use words I
didn’t understand.

Miss Tyler did not explain to me how I should use the word or that the dissolving of
deliquescence did not relate to snow but instead she rapped the back of my hands with her
ruler leaving behind three indelible, stinging red marks.

I am almost a century old now and know so very many more words, and have used thousands
of them in lectures to students all over the world but deliquescence remains one of my
favourites and if I wish to use it in relation to the melting of snow, that is exactly what I will
do, Miss Tyler.

'End of Summer' by Cath Barton

October. The sky has dulled. Clouds mass in the west. The wind thrums in the wires. The
cat shudders and lets out a sigh. He stretches and turns three times in his basket. Then
settles back to sleep, paw over his eyes, brooking no disturbance.

There is static in the air, presaging the storm, and I pace the house. The cat sleeps on
unperturbed, twitching as he runs in the garden of his dreams. Now the rain batters the
window and I watch the smeared shapes of the trees bend and flex under the weight of the
wind.

When the fury is over the lawn is strewn with leaves and the petals of the last roses of
summer, bruised and fading, their beauty dashed. A small sound in the quiet wakes the cat
and he and I step into the garden together to test the air for the tentative scents of autumn.

'Carnivores rule OK?' by Alyson Faye

Flesh.

He eats.

Chews then spits.

The snow reddens around him.

Above his head helicopters’ engines thrum; filming.

His face beamed live into millions of homes. 

“Wild man Bear Wolfe has taken first place in our Go Neanderthal competition.

His prize: a lifetime’s supply of raw meat from our sponsors, Boyd Butchers and a patio BBQ set.”