Alchera #29: Snowflakes

This general option is very, very general. It has a theme and that's all there is to it, but I will offer examples to offer some sort of clarity and direction to those who operate that way. Theme: Snowflake(s). Examples: you could write a poem about catching snowflakes on your tongue; a series of character sketches of snowflakes (no two are alike); write a story about snowflakes or an essay about them. Pretty much anything about snowflakes.

A girl with long brown hair rises every morning to follow the arrow traced by a row of evergreen mountains. Blue skies fade into gray to bring water, nothing more than water. Change is an illusion, for the rain and the sun and the wind leave everything the way it was before they happened. The arrow is ever present, defined by the millennial rock monsters which seem to have told everyone in the city never to leave. Maybe the mountains don't draw an arrow but a cradle in which people dream their green dreams. As the girl gazes into the mountains, she believes she will be rocked too, right there, forever, against her will.

But nobody knows what the future is about to bring, just as she ignores what colors should and will tinge her life.

Soon she will cross the skies to discover gray and ochre on an infinite irregular chess board, and a single minuscule snowflake will fall on her coated hand as she waits for her tour bus to show her a lake as big as the sea, only smaller —it's easy to be fooled. And even then she will have no idea... for years later she will shiver as an old black car slowly lets some warmth into her body and takes her exactly to that very lake which she thought she'd never see again. As her eyes cross the beloved landscape, snowflakes will gracefully frame the window like temporary lace. Their hexagonal uniqueness will remind her of that single watery disk which melted on her green glove, green as the mountains which she thought would confine her for the rest of her life.

And even then, she will know nothing. Only when the last snowflake makes its path through the last air there is to breathe, or when the soft breeze from the greenest mountain caresses her cheek... only then she will know where her cradle was, where she was supposed to be rocked until the blackness of the soil which is hidden by all greens and whites and grays and ochres, that very universal black on which all snowflakes vanish, rocks her in her eternal sleep.