Snow

Prologue

It started with a drop.

Rain pounded on the house's windows, trailing down the glass, leaving wet fingers in their wake.

It cleansed the world, washing away the dirt and ashes.

It was only supposed to last a day.

The rain had only worsened when the digital clock flipped to midnight on my bedside table.

The musical pattering against the rooftop of my house sang me to sleep.

Night. After night. After night.

School was canceled that day. They expected it to start the day after and the week after. I remembered staring out at the darkened sky from my striped mattress in cotton pajamas, waiting for the sky to stop.

Except it never did.

I haven't seen the tiled halls of my high school since the rain started.

It flooded everything: the streets, the grocery stores, the houses. And just as the ocean was coming up to swallow the people, it stopped. Just before I would walk through a stream every time I got out of bed, just before they evacuated Manhattan and other coastal cities.

Everyone rejoiced. They screamed, threw their fists in the air, and yelled to the world that they would survive, the same world that was trying to flush them out. They shouted in victory. School was scheduled to start again. People were planning to go to work again. The world was ready to rebuild. Scientists conducted official studies of the natural disaster, giving it a name and trying to explain where all the water had come from.

Everyone had been so distracted by their joy that they didn't notice the innocent flakes of snow coming down on their heads.

They didn't notice until it was too late.

White powder drifted through the air like the rain had fallen for the past month, ice frosting the curbs, snow covering everything in a light sheet of white.

The time between rain and snow had merely been the eye of the storm.

And the worst part? The storm wasn't done. The rain was only the prequel, the opening statement, the introduction. The worst was yet to come and still is.

It started snowing six months ago.

It hasn't stopped snowing since.