Because Everyone Likes Spring Better

We've had a very odd spring this year. Unseasonably warm in the late winter months, only to get unseasonably cold in our early spring. Pretty much all my friends are desperate for the warmer weather, and have been quite vocal about it. No doubt the weather patterns of the Midwest are abashed to find out, but there has been no small amount of disapproval among certain circles.

That said, I was driving to work right after one of our last ice storms, and it looked like every tree I passed on the road was melting. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and its reflection off the ice as it melted was spectacular. And I realized that the changing of seasons could very easily be seen as a violent event. A war of sorts, between parties of fathomless power. This story is my attempt to express this idea.

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Winter Spring

A rotting green and brown hunched beneath a sky and wind that promised death and joy in protracted breaths. A chill mud stretched its fingers upward, giving the weary winter blades a brief chance to burrow.

He moved his sole, and the earth heaved a sigh, oozing water into his footprint like pus into an open wound, only to buckle beneath the giant’s mass of synthesized rubber crushing onto its saturated shell.

The boy picked up a rock with gloved fingers while branches sheathed in crystal witnessed the theft and wept. Slowly falling showers of a heaven’s wealth and a forest’s greed fell on the child, seeping into his coat and jeans. His eyes squinted against the refractions of each dead brown arm stretched over him, a paradise of morbid splendor.

A thin moat dwindled his forward motion, and separated him from a vast shelf of white and grey balanced uncomfortably over the fury of water pushing it upward. He threw the stone, and it landed with the others. A cairn. Cracks had been steadily spreading all day, and the boy was optimistic. The shelf strained beneath the weight, sweating its life’s blood into the water; the sun and wind indifferent as they taunted and tortured.

The boy sat down, his jeans soaked through and the skin beneath exchanging its color for a pale shaded blue.