Falling Falling Snow
by Shanzay Hasan
Young Women’s Leadership Academy
Shanzay Hasan is a high school student attending Young Women's Leadership Academy. She has been crafting stories from a young age, and write as a part of their creative writing class. When she is not writing, she enjoys playing the violin. This is her first publication.
The young woman gripped the blackwood-hilted pocketknife in her sleep, her body sprawled haphazardly against dozens of tattered, bulging trash bags that were invisible in the cavernous night. Lying beside her was a dirt-stained Styrofoam takeout box—not a crumb of food left inside, yet still heavy with the guilt and adrenaline of theft. The weeks-old remains of a scrap wood fire lay coldly on the dirt ground, the first frost of winter glistening on the charcoal. The scraggly woman groaned in her sleep, her hollow stomach begging for fulfillment of any kind.
A chomp and a tug—something was pulling the hem of her soiled tulle dress, like a child attempting to get their mother's attention. The woman startled awake and swung her knife, attacking the suspect with eyes alight with fear. However, the tip halted at the touch of fur; the attacker was not a human with dubious intentions, but a dog that highly contrasted the gauntness of the woman. Should one look closely, the face of the dog fairly resembled the carving on the hilt of the pocketknife.
“So they threw my dearest doggy out, after all,” the young woman deduced.
The dog quit pulling the skirt, realizing it did not affect her, and elected to lick the hand clutching the knife instead. She weakly patted the dog’s head, its ears folding under her bony hand. Another warning rumble sounded from her stomach. The dog whimpered, nuzzling her abdomen. She could imagine both of them huddling in the starless nights, their faces only skin and bone, eyes jutting out like defective dolls from horror stories. They would become blue with hypothermia, with too little energy left to even shiver, and the winter snow would bury their skeletons, abandoned forever.
The woman had decided. All paths were slippery with ice—dangerous and deadly. She held the underside of her dog’s head with her free hand and raised it, giving its nose a kiss one last time. She raised the pocketknife, a snowflake fluttering down and lightly touching the carving of the dog on the hilt.
The knife whizzed in the air, and the sound of the stabbing of flesh frightened the stars to stow away forever.
