CREEPYPASTA

First Snow

A hand reaches down, grabs a handful and throws it into my open mouth.

Cold. A crunchy, nearly sticky feeling. A taste like iron. Like blood.

The taste of snow is mostly the food residue, slime and bacteria and dead cells on your tongue.

I can still see every moment of that day. Play. Rewind. Slow motion. It’s all there, a movie, locked in my head for the rest of my life.

It snowed today. When I saw the first snowflakes, this morning, sitting in my car, I felt a shiver. Since then the tape keeps playing. Keeps rewinding. Keeps playing.

I was eight.

Dad threw the snow boots on my bed.

“Come on.”

“But it’s freezing.”

He laughed with that deep, growling laugh that I miss.

“There’s no reason to be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“It’s just a forest. Look at all the snow, it will be awesome! We can take the sled!”

“I’m not a baby.”

He smiled and left.

While putting my boots on I called down the hall.

“But not to the graveyard.”

A forest of broadleaves. In winter each becomes its own wooden cross.

Down the corridor; down the stairs. Dad threw my gloves at me.

“Then the conifer one.”

Snow deeper than my ankles. We crunched our way forward on the sidewalk; onwards on the small dent in the snow that usually is a path.

A few steps before we reached the trees dad stopped. He closed his eyes, stretched his arms to the side and breathed the cold air deep into his lungs. He smiled.

I brushed my hat back and looked up to the sky.

“It’s not even three.”

He opened his eyes, looked up and shrugged.

“It’s winter.”

Between the evergreens the sky was barely visible. Dark green was dark gray. In the distance gray turned into black.

“Dad, is it darker over there?”

“You scare easy, don’t you?”

He reached for a handful of snow and I quickly turned around.

“Hey, I’m not going to throw it.”

I waited but nothing hit me. I turned slowly to look at him. His right glove was stretched towards me, palm up, with a small heap of white snow.

He was chewing something.

“Taste it.”

He taught me about the bacteria and the dead cells on your tongue.

What you taste, when you eat snow, is yourself. Your own, dying cells. Of course he didn’t say it like that.

Dad had always liked winter. When I was too small to walk he had pulled my sled. Later he had carried me on his shoulders. Then, someday, I had to walk beside him. It was weird for me to walk through a frozen landscape with no goal or purpose. Just to walk into the forest and back.

“This is nature.”

“I know.”

“This is real life, not like your TV.”