Short Story: "The Snowman" (2006)

My hands aren’t looking the same as they used to. They look short-nailed and scraggly, dry. It’s all part of this bodily decay that’s happening I’m told. I’m going to start shrivelling up now that I’ve reached my twenties. You grow up and then you grow down. But that minute, that less than millisecond of time, that tiny significant fragment that is barely anything at all – a speck of dust on a speck of dust – that’s where the story begins. The moment when you reach the peak and you start to fall. We’re not always hurtling toward death from the moment we are born – no, no, no – there is period of time when the body really does want to live. It wants to live so much that it grows like a sunflower toward the bright blue heavens, you’re arms and legs get longer, you’re torso gets longer, you’re brain gets bigger, everything working together to make you the strongest being alive. Your body begins with a preconception of its own immortality.

Then you realize – you have to, you’re forced to in some way or another – that death exists and that it will get you too. You don’t fight it anymore, maybe you’ll accept it when it comes, maybe you’ll scream and wail and barricade the doors, maybe you’ll give it a run for its money.
Or maybe you too will disappear like the rest of them.

A man kisses his girlfriend goodbye, walks to the train station and has a coronary heart attack, just shy of the whooshing train doors.

A woman says “good morning” to her neighbour as she lets her dog out for its morning pee, and then has a stroke in the kitchen. The dog barks for an hour.

A child catches pneumonia from a day at the swimming pool and dies a week later. People spontaneously combust. Aeroplanes fall on houses and bears get hungry in the woods.
We have every right to be afraid.

But man has found a way to stave off death, to make its bite less swift, to make its call less unexpected, by putting the Welcome mats out.

And you thought that this was going to be a story about man’s insignificance in the face of death – the Romantic Movement that Nature is, like God, spelt with a capital letter, and we are mere – mere – mortals who have nothing to give and everything to take. But who’s thinking about that when you’re seven years old, building a snowman?

I was.

Yep. I admit it. I was one of those kids. I spent a lot of time staring at things – the grass, the moon, a puddle – I would spend all day just staring and inspecting all the elements of my landscape. I don’t know what was going through my head when I was seven, but I remember it being very silent and very hopeful. I was waiting for something and looking for an appropriate scene for it to be unveiled to me. I thought that if I stared long enough at something beautiful, something massive and triumphant, I would be shown something that no-one else knew but that everyone wanted to. Life was filled with waiting and looking and keeping my mind focused in case anything came through. I would watch the fish, analysing the movements they made in the Land of Pond, the colours as the light painted their scales and ricochet off the water. I would watch the clouds – for hours sometimes – I’d lie on the grass and play with the clouds, twirling my fingers around them like ribbons. And then I’d watch the moon. And that was the focus – the homeland of images – for me. The moon. Big and round and fat, tiny and slithery, winking, smiling, crying, red, silver, pink, blue, open, closed, ominous, invisible, incorrigible, enduring. My eyes always returned to its face. As a kid I was like a moon-goddamn-radar. Even during the day – that part of the day when you can see it up there in the sky looking out of place and apocalyptic – I would point and cheer and feel safe, like meeting an old friend who knew me as well as I knew them. And I knew everything about that moon. I still do. We grew up together.
At night, when the curtains were closed and the room was bathed in the half-light of my red lamp, I would look at my hands. I would inspect them. I would turn them this way and that in the light and make sure that I knew them really, really well. I’d play games with them and make shadow-puppets. My hands were an awesome toy that was attached to my body and with me all the time. I felt very joyous about that. No one could take them away from me, even if I had been bad or sulky or just plain annoying, I could always look at my hands and they would say “hiya buddy! Wanna play?” and I would say sure, I’d love to, and we’d live happily ever after for that evening. There was so much to do with them! At times, I must say, I felt almost overwhelmed. I dabbled in Origami, I took up Violin, I baked bread, I did handstands, I picked up bucketfuls of red clay from roots of upturned trees in the woods and made sculptures, I did all of this – and infinitely more – with those amazing tools that God had attached to my arms.

And then there was The Snowman, and I realised that not everyone else in the world wanted to create things with their hands or make beautiful music or shadow-puppets. And I knew that life was going to be a bit of a struggle then and that I would have to toughen up or forget what I was looking for. One Friday night, at 10pm, I was looking for my Snowman’s hand. His nose, mouth, eyes and other hand were all in my pyjama pocket, but one hand was still out there somewhere. I had to move slowly and silently across the double-baked snow which was frozen and thawed and frozen again so that it was more like freezer snow than sky snow, and louder too. It wasn’t packing under my feet like fresh snow – the new snow that makes a delightful sliding ‘pop’ under the weight of Wellington Boots – it was breaking like shards of white-painted glass. And I had snuck out of the house with absolute, brilliant deviance, and I wasn’t about to blow it by treading too heavily. Rosie – my pink-cheeked doll with three toes missing since the dog had chewed them off – was keeping the fort safe. She was packed into my bedding in the exact same manner I would be sleeping, with just her hair – the same colour and texture as mine – poking out from the covers and draping across the pillow. It was foolproof, despite the fact that she was one-eighth my size. I imagined that if trouble came, Rosie would spot the hall light as it came drifting through the slowly opened bedroom door and she would grow momentarily. Perhaps she would even snore. She would never do this to my face, but she would do this to save me. Toys have to keep a secret pact that they will never show their powers to their children, but Rosie – the smart, blue-eyed scamp – would have found the loophole and would use it to save me.

In the meantime, I had to do my part and try my utmost to keep her from having to break the rules or even bend them. I didn’t want her to get into trouble when it was me who should take the rap. So I tiptoed across the snow in just my socks. Pyjama-clad and freshly bathed, I slipped quietly down the stairs – ignoring the 3rd, 5th and 6th because they squeaked (and boy, that 5th/6th dilemma was hard to figure out. I couldn’t jump two entire steps without falling and disrupting the silent world with a God-awful clattering, but if you knew exactly the place to stand on the 6th step – a little to the left and as close to the wall of the previous step as possible – you could make it with only a few seconds delay to your overall stair-scaling time. I, of course, knew how to do this and had practiced many, many times – sometimes even, during the day in full view, without anyone knowing what the hell I was doing. I was a quiet, good kid and they had no reason to suspect me.) I shimmied across the hallway wall, staying carefully out of the light cast by the ajar living room door. I spent a full five minutes opening the back door cautiously, slower than it might have seemed physically possible and utterly noiselessly. A mouse, asleep in the letterbox, would not have stirred. Then I’m off – out – into the night. I had to be careful not to let myself get too excited. I had to remember that, as successful as that part of the mission had been, it was only a part of the mission. Celebrating now would be devastating. It would be foolish to let the triumphant yelp in my stomach come flying up to my mouth. I put my hand over my potentially treacherous lips and swallowed the excitement down, like a spoonful of syrupy, banana-flavored antibiotics.

Now, I guess I need to explain the miraculous something that had happened earlier in the day. I had been cooped up in school, hands cradling my sleepy head, listening to Mr Warthrop explain The Water Cycle, when a stirring beside me from Katie Prichard and Isabelle Basingstoke attracted my attention. Both their heads had turned toward the window and they were now staring fixedly outside. When I followed their gaze I was immediately struck by a feeling that I can only explain as the inner turmoil of silenced yelp. My stomach bubbled joyfully and I could almost feel my pupils dilating, swelling like cotton, to take in the entirety of the scene. On the other side of the dusty-grey windows was a magical world of whirling whiteness. Snow was falling so thick and heavy that it had already carpeted the playground and the “nature trail” in an immaculate, even spread. More heads began to turn, and a low mummer started to rise. I knew that by break time we would be in a state of collective hysteria, quite literally breaking through the classroom door to be unleashed upon the world. I could not feel sorry for the immaculate snow, waiting so peacefully beyond the confines of the scrap-book walled classroom. It wanted us to come and play with it, to wreak un-self-conscious havoc, to set it free from natural order and stain the blank canvas with our tiny footprints.

When the time came, and Mr Warthrop dismissed the half-standing troop before him, we burst outdoors into the Narnia of our dreams. We stamped our feet and pressed our footprints deep into the luminous floss. By the time school was out, we had completed the second miracle: we had transformed the clean sheet of blankness outside the window into the black, slushy aftermath of uninhibited fun. Chunks of mud and grass attached themselves to snowballs and coated our snowmen like a wild fur. My wet toes were numb inside my shoes, my fingers burning and my face flushed with cold. My trouser legs were wet and clumps of ice hung in my hair. As my classmates and I flooded through the gates with our parents, we breathed the collective sigh of a job well done. It had been a successful day.

Home was warm and my skin tingled. My mother had nurtured the fire to an invitational level, and while it danced in oranges and blacks I could hear it expel a satisfied ‘ahhh’ as it eased into a steady flow. But a child’s work is never done. The playground may have been a corrupted space by this time in the afternoon, but the back garden – my back garden – was completely intact. It was my own, private world and it had waited for me all day. I yelped when I saw it, bouncing from foot to foot and pleading with my mother to hold dinner off for later and let me straight at it. As I bounded out the back door, knowing that time was short, I couldn’t help but pause on the final step and admire the glow.

That perfect image of even, bright whiteness was with me as I stood out there once again, in my pyjamas, in the darkness, in secret. I recalled the afternoon’s exertion, starting at one of the garden’s fluffy sheet and rolling it up, rolling, rolling, rolling until my fingers were blistered beneath my gloves. Then to another corner, rolling again, picking up clumps of mud and stray hairs of grass, tweezering them out with my frozen pincers, until I was left with a ball of snow the size of a bicycle wheel. Up went the smaller ball onto the larger, my red face puffing for air as I lifted it, and suddenly, the first semblance of life appeared. A body, good and fat, ready to become my best friend.

When the darkness came and I was forced inside, I sat on the sill of my bedroom window, inside the curtains with the heat of the radiator below, and stared at my snow man. His bottle cap eyes stared back, glistening with sentiment unsaid, as he waved up at me with arms made from twigs and hands, real hands, wearing my gloves. The snow stuffed inside them had turned to ice by now, but I could still see the shape of his fingers, the curve of his thumb and the fleshy pouch that was shaped like a chicken leg. They were my hands, inside those gloves, forever waving. I pressed my face against the window and stayed there until I heard the creak of the sixth step and my mother’s voice, calling for me to brush my teeth.

When I came back, the snow man was gone. No face stared up at me, no arms, no hands waving. Just a muddy mound in the darkening garden, footprints across it like the afternoon playground. My eyes felt spicy with tears. I wanted vengeance, I wanted justice, but mostly, I wanted my snow man. I wanted to see him waving up at me, just long enough to wave back a goodbye.
It was here that I first knew loss, at seven years old, standing in my Rainbow Brite pyjamas with a trembling lip and red eyes. It was this moment that separated the world for me into creation and destruction. Every day afterwards, I would see the people around me fall into one sphere or the other. I would mourn again, and continue to feel loss throughout the years of my life. But I would always remember that hands could create hands in the snow.

That night, I chose not to lay out my welcome mat to death. Instead, I vowed to fight it, to plot against it, to sneak into the darkness and defy its awful grin with a grin of my own.