The Possibility Of Snowflakes

Chapter One - Christmas

  It's Christmas and the mansion is nearly empty.

  Mom and dad are always at work, ‘leading the world’s latest research into Biomechanics!’ as the newspaper headlines in my scrapbook scream, or ‘discovering a cure to - insert illness here, that could save thousands of lives!’ So I am always alone in the empty grandeur of the house, with winding staircases and scarlet, carpeted halls and halls of dusty rooms that no one ever uses.

 Isn’t it pathetic? Having to rely on impersonal newspapers for information on your own parents.

  My parents aren’t sociable people. They never allow me to invite anyone over, too suspicious that they are an undercover spy determined to steal their newest shiny prototype. Our occasional dinners are a mixture of both pain and awkwardness, and doused me with a bucket of reality.

  Their rare replies over dinner, when they didn’t deem your question ‘too imbecilic,’ were cold, curt, echoed by the sharp clattering of silverware. My face would redden in embarrassment and stomach churn in regret at having even asked.

  Until the miasmic silence gathered so thickly, that I would push away my loaded plate, mumble a half-hearted apology and excuse myself.

   They hadn’t always been this way. When I was a child, I was haunted by nightmares. Grotesque ghost and moaning, tormented, spirits whose translucent battered hands would drag me to the underworld, murdered me in my dire dreams every night.

  The memory is featureless, crammed beneath mounds of mental notes that have collected over the years, marred by nondescript handwriting – no ‘I’s dotted with tiny, cute hearts - to complete homework and study for tests. I can’t even remember what it felt like to be torn in half, intestines and heart spilling into the shadowy abyss below.

  The memory of my arms circling down to embrace me in overwhelming warmth and love, and the melodic lullaby of mumbles that ‘ghosts didn’t exist’ is clear and crisp as a piece of fragile glass, though. And I had retreated into it like a hermit crab scuttling in its shell, when times had grown dark. When my belief wavered, and tears began to drown me in a sorrowful tide.

  But I guess the fame had shot to their head, like a syrupy black liquid that corrupted everything good and bright it touched. Leaving a toxin that prevented its victims from recovering.

  Sure. Ghosts didn’t exist. But neither did love.

  Love is just one impossibility among other infinite impossibilities in life.

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  Everyone wants something.

  George Flake hasn’t asked for anything yet since he appeared and indifferently bonked an apple at my forehead. Asides from lodging in one of the unused rooms that I have offered him out of pity. But it should only be a matter of time. I know that. The endless hordes of students demanding me to ask my parents to ‘save them,’ grant them immortality or whatever were why I had quit school.

  I stretch my muscles like a cat and glance at the blinking green numbers on my clock; 10:45pm. I stare at it again, in disbelief. Had three hours flown by so fast? My stomach rumbles and I remember that I haven’t eaten dinner yet. So I close my book with thud that resounds in the plain room, and expels a gust of air in my face, and pad downstairs. Because even though my life isn’t exactly brimming with sunshine and rainbows, I don’t want to die.

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