The Snow Child

The snow covers my forest. It hides the leaves of yesterday. It hides the blemishes of the world.  The children in the village make men out of snow. They make men and women, children and animals. They imitate that which made them, creating something out of nothing, creating from their own imaginations.

A child dances through the trees. She wraps her scarf around her neck, the only red to be seen in this forest of white. The sun sparkles down on her, shining through her grey cloak, changing her skin to ivory. It reflects her face and illuminates our trunks. We drink in her light, breathing it through our bark, drinking deeply of her presence. We listen to her singing. She sings of the times gone by, of times to come. She sings of the life we have known and the life we have never shared with humans.

Her voice echoes through the cloudless sky. The atmosphere carries it into the air, spinning it into space where it reverberates off the planets. The planets take up her song, singing it back to her.

The sun sets while she sings and dances. It sets on her, but the planets remain. They shine down and illuminate her sparkling skin. Her skin glows in the night, glowing with the light of the moon, the light of the bygone sun, the light of the stats.

Her voice wafts through the village. The villagers awake and listen. They hear her voice but do not understand her words. They hear the melody, but do not understand the song.

“Is that the wind we hear?”

They come to the windows and look out. They look out and see the branches casting shadows across the snow, deep blue in the night. They look out and watch the moon traverse the sky. They catch a glimpse of the snow child as she dances through the trees I live among.

The snow dances with her. The flakes jump up to meet her and fall around her, surrounding her in the reflections of a million tiny particles.

The blue of our shadows flows into her cloak. The darkness flows in until she is a mere shadow.

The villagers peer, their faces against the frosty glass, their candles extinguished. They peer out and watch the shadow grace the forest. They watch her dancing and remember the girl with raven hair. They look up into the sky and see her. They see her stars aligned and watch her eyes light up, illuminating the snow child’s play.

The stars shine out above, and the darkness left by the elf absorbs the light of the stars.

The child dances in between the light and the darkness.

She dances between worlds. She appears to be a human, but exiles herself. She lives on the earth, but her home is elsewhere. She races through the forest while being somewhere else entirely, somewhere no one can follow her, somewhere deep in the secret paths of the stars and the raven hair.

Her image vanishes before our eyes. The child of snow came to life for one moment before leaving again. She graced the forest I live in with her presence and took it away again. She left it colder than it was. She left it empty.

The lynx and the moose watched her, but now she is gone. They watched her dance across the snow. They brought her gifts. They watched her leave.

She danced into the sky as the prince and princess had done. She traversed the paths our feet will never travel. She blessed our bark and then disappeared.