Snowflake

Imagine you were walking in a mountain, desolated and uninhabited, with a harsh environment and a huge number of snowflakes. You wore a quilted coat, neckerchief, cotton-padded trousers, and hiking boots, like a snowball, rolling on the muddy, drippy mountain pass. It was snowy, and everything was kept in silence, harmony, and aesthetic bliss. You hiked days and nights, heading to the peak of the steep mountain.

After hurrying in the tranquil snow for a long period, you entered a uniquely serene environment. You looked around, wondering about the sudden change, as a roaring sound hurrying from far beyond your head. As you are consumed with wonder, piles of snow appear on your horizon.

Avalanches are rare on flatlands, but the situation is different in the mountains where it snows frequently so that snowflakes and ice pile up rapidly. Not a single snowflake causes an avalanche, but when disaster strikes, remember that no snowflake is innocent.

I’m going to tell a story. It was like a dream. It was like something floating in the rushing river, drifting to the abyss of the ocean to be buried in the mud and in the slime of the darkness. There it could be observed by the most horrifying monsters, creatures. It was like some vicious and wicked treasure in the ancient forest, with poisoned snakes, slimy frogs, barbed plants, and misty, white fog. It was known; It was forgotten. 

There was a mundane girl in a mundane high school located in a remote town on a barren plain. It was a girl who would lose in the crowd without even leaving a single ripple. She had no characteristics, no stories, and no personalities, as if she deliberately reduced her presence, trying to be a transparent person in the class. She always wore scruffy but neat clothes, with a gray backpack and glasses with thin lenses, sitting in the corner of the classroom, without any expression on her comely face. No one would talk with her as far as I could tell from going to school with her for three years; I knew nothing about her.

It was like a wildfire, the rumor, rushing through the classroom, the playground, and the small town. It appeared in the void, carrying the depth of evil, the depth of humanity. It was said that she was a thief, a robber, stealing others’ belongings, and deceiving the innocent and pure spirit for selfish desires. Children were simple, but at the same time, they were the most curious creatures in the world, and this gave them the most powerful and dangerous ability to ruin an innocent life. Fallacy and absurdity burned across the plain; discussions and censure rushed across the world. The gossip was like knives and pitchforks carried toward the shabby cabin where she lived for years. Children laughed at her, throwing apple cores, pieces of chalk, and waste papers into her neat bedroom and tidy desk. 

Changes to the situation did not take place. Teachers ignored her as usual, and parents didn’t appear to help her as we expected. She was still submerged in an ocean of loneliness and impotence, calling, struggling, trying to find a small raft, dragging out a marginalized existence. She wore a dress in chaste gray, even without an impurity;  still covering her comely face with an emotionless mask; still facing the fatuous crowded, discussing, laughing heartless. The words were just like knives and bows, and the sharp blade cut her back, and blood splattered under her feet. Arrows cut the wind, shouting across the air, tearing her pale skin, but she still turned her smiling face to the world, to the crowd, and let the wounds and blood hide in the darkness. 

I still stood aside, drawing a clear barrier between her and the antagonistic crowd; I neither talked to her nor did such things to her. The bloodlust of the crowd and the cruelty entered her and grew inside her, taking root in the deepest part of her soul. It did so in the most inscrutable and inhumane way. Something was lost, something was dead.

It was an afternoon, and I was waiting on the side of a railroad, waiting for the train to pass by. The train whistle rang, as a black cat ran away in fear from the fellow children chasing it. No one moved, no one talked, as if there wasn’t a shiny and lovely creature sitting in the middle of a giant grinder. The crowd was silent, ignoring the small cat who was about to be killed by the approaching train, awaiting the accident to happen to the poor creature. 

A gust of wind swept through the crowd. I still remember her hairpin with flowers, the uncombed, flowing long hair, the simple cloth shoes, and the faint fragrance of the hair.  I looked at the bike, bag, and books of the desolate girl who endured all those insults scattered all over the floor. Running along the dirt road, the natural aroma of grass and flowers filled the air, and her gray dress danced in the air as if freed from the shackles of gravity. 

She crouched down to hug the small, black, bruised kitten, like a would-be savior who was too late. She looked with calm eyes amid the rumbling of the train, and with her strength, pushed the kitten into the weeds behind her.

I closed my eyes, listening to the screeching brakes of the train and the whispering crowd. The smell of grass mixed with the smell of human blood creeping into my nose. The angel descended unto the world for a cat—coming from a beatific world without rumors, without pain, without blood, without death.

The small body lying on the ground like a crimson wintersweet blossoming its beauty in the white snow. The cat circled her body, meowing and scrapping against her body, anxiously. 

I was never the same, since that regrettable afternoon. People passed by the railroads without discussion for days, not even noticing her demure body. They made it as if nothing happened in the small town. The rumor went extinct rapidly, and the world seemed to lose its memory. 

My life went on as usual, as peaceful as water, as tranquil as the azure sky. I graduated from middle school, then high school. I finally went to work, far away from my hometown, from the railroad, from the cabin. Only in the quiet dead of night, I could remember a life disappear forever, the crimson-of-the-wintersweet-colored blood beside the cold, metallic railroad tracks. I seemed to forget; I seemed to remember everything.

Forgotten by the crowd, the criminal story just lied inside my heart. As I said, no snowflake is innocent.