The Flower in the Frost

“Shhh,” She whispered to the boy, placing a gloved finger to her tiny blue lips and smiling up at the polar sky.

Around them ice froze on the tree branches like dripping candle wax, brittle and opaque, and snow danced down to the forest floor in spontaneous circles. The sky that the girl loved so much appeared transparent, shattered by echoes of the cold, and bleached their faces shades of silver and stone.

“I’m t-trying…” The elder boy stuttered, treading through the matted undergrowth towards where the girl was crouched by me at the edge of the glade.

“Come look,” She said in a voice almost as little as her, as if trying not to wake me from some kind of sleep.

 

She was fixated on a flower. I think it hoped to one day be a golden yellow hue, but for now it was a muted blonde, singular and dull.

“It’s so beautiful.”

“It’s a flower.” I acknowledged, staring around at the clearing we stood in. We were surrounded by much greater efforts of nature �" towering trees which fractured light through their leaves in such a way that shadows fell like lace to the floor; swelling pockets of incandescent mist that hugged the dew-soaked grass and billowed when the wind fluttered through them.

“No, really. Like, actually look at it.” She pleaded, tugging at my coat sleeve and dragging me down to actually look at it.

But still I couldn’t part with the idea that it possessed no exceptional beauty. Its petals were frail and blemished like pallid feathers, ravaged by the air’s sadistic temperament, and the flower’s head bowed to the frost acquiescently. It was half broken. And somehow, despite its ugly flaws and its infirmity, it continued to exist where no other life did.

 

An opalescent tear spilled down the bottle-green stem �" a cry for help.

 

“Hm,” I sighed in dismissal, sweeping the clotted crystals of snow-draped soil from my knees and standing again, “It looks like a dog that’s begging to be put down.”

“You wouldn’t.” She whimpered.

“What the big deal?”

I didn’t feel anything when I trampled it beneath my boot, sentencing the flower to lie, perpetually limp, in the hollow of my footprint.