Secret in the Snow

Secret in the Snow

The first flake of snow dances and weaves. I watch it intently. Snow covers so many things. Sometimes sins. There’s a dark patch of earth that doesn’t match its surroundings. About the length and width of a person. In another season the earth will lighten and the grass will grow, and secrets will be forever lost to time.

Ah. The snowflake. It settles on the dark, upturned earth. I’m pleased. Let it come. If there is order in the universe, let a blizzard frost the earth. Or at least a certain forest.

Here comes more.

The small flurries have to wisp between wide aspen branches and sneak around giant, wind-breaking pine. A gust picks up, and a blast of snow barrels through, down, down, around, settling just where it should. The hump of earth will flatten by spring, or surely by fall, and all will be well.

I think of my daughter and her swelling belly. She’ll be boarding a plane by now. Crying, no doubt. But free. No one will find her now. She is safe, and so is her child.

I wonder if I should go to her. I could, you know. I could go to her and watch secretly from a distance. Watch her child grow, graduate, marry…

How I long to. How I long to whisper in my daughter’s ear, perhaps when she is sleeping, that I will love her for eternity. It is a temptation I must resist. She needs to move on, and so must I.

There is a thin sheet of white now. It’s catching on the mound of earth, emphasizing its shape. Pointing to the evidence that must not be known. I watch with trepidation. Please, universe, do your magic, I ask.

I was a scientist. I made a discovery meant to help mankind. A cure… for everything. Cancer, heart disease, aging. The holy grail. Youth—forever. At first, I was thrilled. Until I realized the repercussions. The devastation of exponential population growth, unchecked, the chaos and starvation and war that would inevitably ensue. And so I destroyed all my work. Except for the base study: me. I’d injected myself. So, my own blood carried the blueprint for the cure.

Word got out, and there was a manhunt—for me. For my DNA, which carried the recipe for exponential longevity. And so I ran. My daughter helped me, but it was too dangerous for her. She’d barely escaped a kidnapping for ransom. The government was no help—they were as hungry for the cure as the mobsters.

What was I to do? Hide? They’d find me—in time, and time was the one thing I had plenty of. My daughter was no scientist. She took after her father—she was an artist. She painted. But she would be used as a pawn to get to me. She was my weakness, my Achilles’ heel, my kryptonite. Because I would do anything for her. And she would never be free as long as I was alive.

The snow blankets the ground now. The hump is nothing more than a snowdrift. I am pleased. I look up, and the winter sun glimmers as the snowfall dizzies me with its undulations.

The air is so fresh. I look down at my blue lab coat. So thin, yet I feel no cold. Only relief and joy. Except for my daughter. I miss her already, and I have a very long wait to see her again, if I ever do.

A man came to the house in the middle of the night and grabbed my daughter in her sleep. I hit him with a shovel. I killed him.

So I’ve taken a life.

That’s why I’m standing here. Watching the snow fall.

What happens after death? You don’t blink out of existence, that much I am sure of. The man who attacked my daughter? May he burn in hell. But what about my soul? What happens in the end when one has taken a life?

I stand in the snow, numb, and ponder, staring at the hump, now camouflaged and buried in white. It glistens. It’s pretty, and somehow that pleases me.

On my birthday, my daughter carpeted the ground with fragrant flowers, and I lay down in them like a princess. I remember the smell of lilac, lavender, and roses. Then she covered me with more flowers up to my neck like a blanket. What a beautiful memory. I never felt so much love in my life. My daughter was glowing with love; her face seemed to actually radiate light.

I look at the bump in the snow and remember the intruder’s face—dark and ominous and filled with hatred. He exuded a dark aura.

I look at my hands. Do I have an aura? They look like ordinary hands. No glowing at all. I guess auras are reserved for the innocent, like my daughter, and the evil, like her would-be abductor, and not for people who kill with shovels.

The sun gleams down in a low angle, shining in my eyes, trying to get my attention. I turn away. The snow has stopped, and the ‘snowdrift’ is glistening and sparkling. It is beautiful.

I burnt my house down. My daughter and I escaped into the night with nothing but the clothes on our backs. I was lucky—I was wearing my lab coat. She was wearing her Hello Kitty pajamas. We actually had a laugh about that the next morning when we woke up in the forest.

My uncle—a retired plastic surgeon—picked us up, and he performed reconstructive surgery on my daughter’s lovely face. Just enough to make her anonymous. She was still beautiful, in the end, after she’d healed. She was still herself—she just looked different enough to blend in now. She was sad but pleased, and we both knew it would give her back her life.

It was not long after that—on my birthday, as a matter of fact—when I dug the grave. I insisted that my daughter not help. And I used the murderous shovel to do it. Then I lay it inside. My daughter’s two tasks were the one I asked her to do: fill the grave back up, and the task she insisted upon: filling it with flowers first.

And then, I lay inside as my daughter covered me with flowers, and I gave myself the lethal injection.

And so, there my body lies, under the snow. The bad man? He burned in the fire.

The sun catches my eyes again. The light is calling to me. I want to stay. I want to visit my daughter. I want a lot of things. I want to be alive.

I glance one more time at my hands, and they have a distinct glow. And I know… it’s time to go home.