In a glowing white field, the snow fell softly and persistently, covering the sky with its milky canvas. Silence flew rampant, the only audible sounds emerging from the jaws of starving birds, their feathers damp and loose from the ashy plague falling around them. Few weeds sprouted through the walls of ice, and those that did hung low in sorrow, too depressed to even search for the sun and its shining warmth.
The snowflakes fluttered down like frozen tears, landing slowly and with a deep sadness, in piles among their equally miserable siblings. They plunged from the heavens with a vigour close to that of flaming meteorites, and they did so with such a lack of cessation that their abundance felt suffocating, almost claustrophobic. Their white mounds grew larger, and larger, and larger, each droplet of snow adding to their growing weight. They absorbed the dying yellow grass, crushing every blade to a lifeless crisp, and forced rocks and pebbles to disappear underneath their great white blankets.
All of this flattened out the landscape into an isolated white desert, enough to allow a young boy to walk among the powdery flakes, a lone figure in the endless snow-covered field. He was so small compared to the vast void around him that, from a distance, he could easily be mistaken for one of the skinny birds flapping in the air above. He wore a dirty coat, lined with the ragged white fur of a sheep, and baggy brown trousers too, that hung over his legs as though he were a skeleton. An old, grey cap lay nestled atop his head and rested above a charcoal black fringe of hair, that draped with a long shadow over the rest of his face. His ears stuck out oddly beneath the hat, and they were a horribly raw, red colour, due to the wicked weather descending around his head. The boy’s thin eyebrows had been invaded by minuscule icicles clinging weakly to them, and these glass daggers hung over his large, innocent, blue eyes, that gazed in wonder at the dead landscape surrounding them.
Though its appearance may have evoked words such as beautiful, or peaceful, the long snow-blanketed field was nothing of the sort. It hid a dreadful secret beneath its snowy canvas. One so old, so monumental, that a whole day was dedicated to it every year. One that, many years ago, had brought a terrifying and inhuman bloodshed to this field, staining its icy surface red, and bringing immeasurable pain to all the people on it.
The boy knew all this, of course, with some childlike sense of understanding, but was here today for an entirely different reason, a purpose drawing him in like a poor salmon hooked by fishing rod. The snow, so cold, so deadly, so bitter, had brought joy to this child, through creativity, imagination and pure happiness.
Unsurprisingly, in these winter months, it had done so, in the form of snowmen.
The individual shards of ice raining from above were like lightning on the boy’s face, sharp and painful, and his pale, exposed skin grew steadily colder as he slowed down to a trudge in the snowy field. Stumbling as he reached a particularly icy ditch, the small child’s crimson red nose sniffed in the cool air, with only the bitter scent of frozen water spiralling down his nostrils. In this desolate, rocky, uneven field, it was tough to find snow that hadn’t already hardened into ice, or was too powdery to be properly formed into a solid object, but the boy had taken on this task many times before, so knew exactly the right places to look.
Seeming to closely examine the ground before he began, the small child finally bent down and clasped his hands loosely around the first few frozen ashes of snow, his fingers padded tightly by a set of thick, navy skiing gloves. He gathered the snow up, then joined it together with more of its kind, first in balls, then clumps, and finally into its own mound, much taller than all the others surrounding it. With a carrot alongside a few lumps of coal tucked neatly inside one of he boy’s deep, woollen pockets, all that was missing to complete his new snowy friend now, was some form of hat. He could use his old cap as the last ingredient of the peculiar winter meal, but the child had other plans. Buried deep in the snow around him was an ancient item, one that he had used to finish off his annual snowman in all the winter months before. He had found it many, many years ago, wedged deeply between two uneven rocks, and had managed to whisk it out through pure luck, as one of the rocks holding it had cracked open like an egg, because of the severe ice suffocating it in its deadly shell. Once the sunshine poked its magnificent head back out though, at the end of January, he always buried it back into the dirt, hidden until the next year, when the time was right to begin the snow cycle all over again.
Patting the crumbling snow gently, like he would do to a dog, the minuscule child stepped away from his creation, feeling his numbing fingers ache as the icy weather slowly broke through his gloves. The snowy blizzard had stopped, leaving only a select few lonely snowflakes drifting down through the breeze, and a large patch of frozen mud lay scattered in a circle around the boy’s snowman, a harsh reminder of the dead plants stuck underneath the neatly spread, white duvet. An expressionless, peaceful face stared back at the child, its head just above the boy’s shoulder, and he began to add the final touches to the figure, pushing a small, orange carrot into its head, along with a collection of accurately placed shards of coal. It had taken him over an hour to complete the white statue, but the child had not noticed the time pass at all. A task so essential and preoccupying as this often left people tumbling through time, trying to get a decent grip on where, and when, they were.
The snow crunched like powdered bones beneath the boy’s boot, as he gently bent down to put his gloves inside the sea of ice below him, his nose only centimetres away from touching the snowy, white flakes. He plunged his protected fingers in, rummaging around like one might do in a lost and found box, until his hands grasped something metallic, a harsh contrast to the powdery softness surrounding it. He tried to find a solid position with which to pull it out, and gripped his fingertips around a rim on the metal item’s top. Heaving, and even seeing droplets of sweat drip off his head and freeze into the snow below, the child felt something give and then relief washed over him when a small helmet flew out of the ground.
It landed with a thud beside him, and the boy stopped to stare at it, it’s chipped green paint revealing a silvery metal hiding underneath, like the snow on top of the rocks beneath this field. It was small, yet too big to fit on the boy’s head, and had multiple dents on its largely smooth surface, vivid scars of battles fought many, many years ago.
He lifted its, slightly heavy, weight up and nestled the helmet on top of his snowman’s head. Stepping back again to view the snow statue, the boy smiled. His annual service was finally done, and all that he had to do now was walk away, back to his home, leaving his creation as just another solitary figure, standing loyally in a desolate field. Temptation to escape the cold forced one of his feet away from the statue, but the boy stopped himself there, turning back around to gaze deeply into the snowman’s eyes. Though they were a pure black, he thought he could see some glimmer of humanity in them, inside their endless dark space. The plainly smiling face had taken on a small part of the man whose helmet it now wore, a century after he had fought in the terrible battle of this field.
The snow that rained from the heavens above was not just snow. It held the feelings and memories of the soldiers who had died in this field, left to drift down every year and melt sadly onto the ground, now just a part of the endless cycle of winter. By building a snowman, just one snowman, these soldiers were preserved and remembered, allowed to gaze upon the beautiful icy landscape covering over this field for a whole month. Closing his eyes, the boy realised all of this, with some childlike sense of understanding, and felt the presence of all the brave men around him. A child and a snowman. Just two small silhouettes in a vast, glowing, white field.
