My granddaughter shows me how to draw a snowflake. First draw the letter x. Then split ear the ex with a sharp stick—* I never realize till that moment the asterisk, that little star of cognitive connective light, has six sides like a snowflake.
Look close, she says. Each one is different. I see no difference at first. But her human hand made slight variations. Subtle variations of angle, ink usage, more linear to less linear, centering of the X bars and where the stick intersected. Some had a few pen lifts to give the snowflake more of a running form, as if blown in by a gale and flowing and swirling about me. I feel cold. Some lines of flakes connected with loops and formed heavier flakes of snow.
She says a bit of dust lies in each flake of snow. The snowflakes are small, small things. The dust grain is much smaller in the center of a snowflake. Sometimes I hear a pencil scrape the paper with a tiny snick. Mostly, each flake with its dust speck falls without sound. I can’t feel my legs or arms. I am drowsy. I feel no bigger than a dust mote lost within a massive hill of snow.
My granddaughter stops the snowflakes when she sees I’m invisible. I sleep in the snow. I am not frozen. I am not dead. I hibernate. I am an old lonely bear with a fading memory that somehow I once had a human granddaughter. About me there are shadows of wolf pups, mammoths, peat moss, cane lions. I sleep. I wait. A year. A century. A millennium. An eon.
A long season nears its end. Granddaughter draws a round burning sun with long lines of warmth. Warmth sparkles on each unique snowflake, radiant in infinite number. I am no longer grandfather. I do not remember that creature. I’m so small. Winter is over. The bangles of light soften the snowflakes heavy upon me, to curl the Xs and sticks till the lines connect to form drops of water in the thaw, to warm till I wake with a rush as a dust mote unbound from a single snowflake to rise into a surprise flood of radiance, brilliant as fire.
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J. Alan Nelson has poetry and stories published or forthcoming in numerous journals, including New York Quarterly, Conjunctions, The Stand, Acumen, Pampelmousse, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, and South Carolina Review. He also played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning “SXSWestworld.”