Winter Competition Fiction Winner: “Philosophy of Snow” by Gary Hardy

It was 6 am. I sipped from a mug of hot coffee while I looked out our bay window. Night lingered in the air and held down the colors of dawn from blooming. Glowing streetlights made the dim snowflakes glisten as they turned in their slanted fall and windows of flurries were held in suspense before their humid orbs. The lights commingled into a glowing field above the neighborhood where the snow dazzled like a swarm of mayflies. Below, street-level, in the dark, unlit shades that colored the air, the falling snow could be hardly seen except in a patch of light that drooled out from the Cyranos’ house across the street. An opened window spilled like oil upon the white sheet of untrodden snow, eddied dimly around a tree, and outlined the falling shapes. There, through the slow snowfall, in that dim gaze of backlight, under the autumn-stripped branches of the barren, christlike tree, I first saw him. A boy, wearing nothing but running shoes and a pair of shorts, stood and trembled in the snow.

I assumed the boy was the Cyranos’ fifteen-year-old named Anthony, a normal boy with normal attitudes. I met him once; he was terribly shy and hid behind his parents while we exchanged phone numbers. Other than that singular interaction, Anthony has been a passing figure seen through the window in mornings and evenings, going to school, coming home, taking his bike to the park, always moving parallel to expectations. He seemed to fit perfectly inside his life, and moved in a way that promised a pleasant future with the modest comforts that already surrounded him. His unconscious fidelity to the minuteness of his role to local normalcy made the present disruption so much more shocking than if the person standing outside had been a person like Kevin, the alcoholic, or Cynthia, and her unpredictable dementia. Instead, the boy shocked the way of life he typified, deformed our placid neighborhood by making it surround him as his oddness took dominion.

Immediately, I swooned under the belief that his aims were transcendental, and that I was becoming a witness to a religious act. Without any effort of thought, I was utterly convinced that he was not some unwatched sleepwalker or someone that ran from some danger and froze where he hid, but a person who chose to test their capacity to endure pain by stripping himself bare and letting the severe elements wash over him. But a large part of my mind is devoted to the imitation of popular judgement, which forces its influence upon every thought, deforming it until its shape can pleasantly pass through the ears of others. I conjured thoughts of pity and worry and vainly considered going outside to check on him. I did not. I sat in thought.

Enamored and paralyzed, I watched him for signs of death. Snowflakes pawed at his nude shoulder with the gentleness of a needy cat and seemed to retain their cloudborn form longer and longer upon his skin. Then, as though he heard my prayer of doubt, a nasty twitch besieged his palm, and his face grimaced into an expression of willful defiance. As I fell under a wave of grandeur and looked upon the boy as a salubrious Siddartha may have once looked upon hungry monks, Emma, warm in the incense of sleep, startled me from behind. She held a cup of coffee with both hands and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “What are you doing?” She asked.

With some reluctance, I pointed him out through the snowfall. “He’s been standing there since I came downstairs.”

I watched her searching confusion mutate into grave concern as she spotted him. “Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking at her. “I imagine if he felt too cold he would go inside.”

“It’s negative five, of course he’s too cold.” There was some silence as we both studied him. “Have you checked on him?”

“I’ve been watching him.” 

“Have you gone out there and actually checked on him?”

I hesitated and said no. “I can see him breathing,” I said after a pause.

Emma intensified her gaze. “I don’t see anything, Paul.” An undue panic grew in her throat. “Would you check on him?”

I nodded and went to the closest to retrieve my coat, looking back at her as I put it on. She leaned her weight upon the window sill and studied him with an infrangible worry, her face stressed in a breaking mixture of panic and sadness. The force of her concern almost irritated me, as though her gestures were intentionally combined to shame me and my awful inaction. As I began to turn the knob, I added to my errors by turning from the door and attempting a joke which I hoped would restore an element of the original levity Emma woke up with. Receiving a smile would tell me that the severity of her concern was compelled by prudence, not by a real fear of his death, and that I was not being thought of as some neglectful murderer. In other words, I decided to tell a joke based on a variety of social compulsions rather than on the basis of possessing one. Thus, I stood at the door, looking at my feet, and muttering in silence when Emma noticed my hesitation and snapped my name. I looked up, feeling like a little boy as I saw the expression of wild incredulity transfixing her face. “What are you doing?” She asked. I paused and failed to respond. “Nothing, sorry.” Then, awkward with shame, I went outside, and approached the boy with caution.

He did not waver a glance towards me. I came at him from an angle, worried that a direct approach would be sacrilegious or provoke panic. His eyes were still, dead in a relaxed gaze. My feeling of awe grew by the step. Concerns of death or harm were forgotten completely as I studied the still distant details of the boy’s coldbeaten skin, his lively tremor, and his blind transcendence; and, indeed, he was just a boy. His cheeks were pale and unrazored. His features were rounded and unshaped by the softness of youth. What he did— Emma does not understand this — what he did, as he pressed himself against death, was open himself fully to life. I understood the monumentality of his desire, and I envied the bravery in his pursuit. Here is a boy, truly a boy, braving — choosing — this pain, and finding victory every second he persists. He is floating, soaring, and I would be the rational neighbor, the concerned adult, the domestic dogooder, approaching to return the divine to the suburbs, and holding him to the dirt because I am amongst the majority who could not see heaven in his eyes.

Urges pressed me from both ends. I saw Emma in the window behind me, doubtlessly angered and frustrated by my hesitations. And, turning around, I saw a monk before me, for whom the imperious shoulder-tap would be a more sacred murder than murder itself. Still, I could not return to my wife emptily. And so I persisted in my humiliation and came a foot closer, still keeping some distance. “Anthony? Is that your name? Do you go by Tony? We met once. I’m your neighbor. Are you alright?”

My prayer brought no reaction, nor any change to the air. He was transfixed, utterly transfixed, like a seer stuck inside a terrible vision. I looked back at my wife in the window and shrugged. After just a minute, the cold had become unbearable. My hands could barely shut. I decided to go inside to explain my position, knowing it would fall flat in her ears. But as I turned to head inside, Emma popped her head out from the front door and yelled “Is he okay?”

“I think so!”

“Is he talking?”

“No!”

“Check the house!”

“Nobody’s home!”

“Check!”

I look at the house and the empty, normally full driveway, and walk past the frozen boy to knock thrice upon the front-door. I could tell nobody is home. Houses with life inside feel gravid; this one felt empty. I knock twice more and wait. Once more, I look back at my wife and shrug. She held herself into the warmth of her arms and began to turn inside. Before closing the door, she turned her head back around, and, throwing her voice once more across the street, told me to give him my coat.

I gave her the thumbs up, unable to signal that such an action would be pointless. He had crossed into that ecstatic beyond blind to mothers. He had risen above his body, his reason, and nature. His fingertips were scratching the divine. And, like Dionysous’s silly cell, my jacket was a laughable insult to his inviolate liberty. As such, I gave him the choice: I placed the jacket at his feet. I did not look at him; he did not look at me, and he did not flinch as I turned to head inside.

Emma was on the phone when I walked back inside. I closed the door and stood in the entryway. She looked at me and whispered a question: “How long has he been out there?”

“At least since I got up.” She held her gaze. “So an hour or so,” I said.

“More than an hour.”

Her head was cocked to the side, so that the hair around her ear fell to the other shoulder. She paced in circles, avoiding my gaze in her turns toward me, biting her lips and showing her teeth.

“I will. I hope so too. Do you want me to call you back? Okay. Bye. I will. Bye.” She hung up and typed another number in her phone. ” The Cyranos. Across the street.” She indicated towards the boy’s house with her head down.

“Oh.”

“They’re on vacation. He didn’t want to go.” She put her ear to the phone and walked away.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance, Paul.”

“Is that necessary?”

“He’s probably dead, Paul! I honestly cannot believe that you just watched him stand out there for an hour and did nothing.” She dried her eyes and cleared her throat then began to speak to the operator. I sat on the second stairstep, my feet on the floor, and listened spitefully as she explained what happened — what I allowed to happen. In the past, we would have crowded around the young prophet and gathered flowers with friends to lay at his feet. Our sense of religion has withered. God could come down from the clouds and Emma would tell him to put a coat on, ask if he’s thirsty. A person born in a house is not familiar enough with the murmurous voice of god hidden inside of the breeze to find meaning in his mysterious grammar, and we laugh and rebuke the people, who by paying attention to the divine within and beyond them, conduce their contesseration via honest piety and finally grow into an action which participates in divinity itself, one which seems strange and foolish to strangers and fools. My sisters and I once saw an image of a dirty, emaciated ascetic limping the streets of India with a skinny and mangled arm held up high against his head, his weak wrist bent after decades of dedication fused it stuck. My sisters snickered at the image. They thought of him as some sort of idiot for doing something so obviously harmful and apparently senseless. But I did not laugh, and I did not ask why. I could recognize that his purpose went beyond reason and that he used his body to move beyond it. A displacement of the self into a singular organ or sensation — an arm, the mind, the cold, pain, love, devotion itself — so that the self and the world could be contained and dealt with, and the eyes can see beyond themselves. It’s a lower mind that laughs and judges away higher acts. They are the enemies of our big books. They throw the stones. They whip the prophets.

But how do I explain this to Emma? How do I tell her that this boy has moved his purpose beyond her fatalistic anxieties, and that a death in the cold would be preferable to interruption? Shall we pester slovenly Buddha until he wakes so he can get on with his day? The hunger artist is looking skinny, shall we force a sandwich down his throat? Shall we donate some comedies to the monastery? They must be so bored. Shall we lay our eyes upon the goddess? No? Okay, then. This boy is a figure. He has made himself a monument to the body’s subservience, to the mind’s subservience, to the soul’s subservience — to what? What is left? Will? That God inside? Please me then: when God is in communion, do you tap his shoulder?

Blame her beauty. Deep eyes that are puddles of reflection. They hold you inside. What the boy seeks is already on her, possessing her. She doesn’t need sacrifice. It will age off her, but even then, it’ll persist in her movements, in her voice, in her history. I will look at her aged form and know that she once held something forceful and divine, like the ghost of a necklace she wore for decades that suddenly went missing, its presence still dangling invisibly. But to her it will be a virtue that fell away, as though she forgot how to be kind or how to love her children. For now, however, she does not think about what she has. Someday she’ll know, by a backward angle. Maybe then we can talk. For now, I stammer. I cannot reconcile my heart to reason. I don’t know how to explain to her what I know.

“They’re coming.” Cold. Distant. She holds the phone against her ear and stares at me. I can see her inspecting my soul and finding it odious. I feel my life press against my face. “They want us to get him inside.” I nod. Then, I go, retaking my printed path.

The boy has not moved. Still against that tree. Oddly still. Not shaking. I approach him with the same caution as in my past approach, as if to assimilate him back into the world of reason. I get into his zone of breath and study his face. It’s blue, and his open eyes look at nothing. I feel his stiff face and the stillness of his breathless neck, and when I hug him, I feel a frozen vein.

I return to the house and tell Emma. She falls to her knees. Sirens. She is crying. Sirens. She asks if he had a pulse; I say no. Sirens. They are here. Ambulance. A cop. They see him. Emma wails. They feel him. They take him. Sirens. The sirens fade and disappear into the faint birdless morning, the idling car, the long shadows of trees and trash cans, the violent white sun. I sit on the couch and listen to the sudden sounds of mobs of men speaking outside, knocking upon the door, calling my name. They do not like me, do not understand me. They ask why I didn’t help. I ask if I’m going to jail. I’m not. Not now. They leave. Emma wails. I cry but do not wail. It’s over. I cry but do not wail. Emma wails. The kids are awake. She makes the call. The phone wails. Emma wails. The kids are awake. She thinks I’m responsible. The children are awake and want to know what’s going on. They ask me. I say nothing. I sit and think.

Gary Hardy is a student of philosophy at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. When he is not studying or writing, he likes to spend time with his three cats and his girlfriend, Claudia.