The tale of a winter night, blanketed by ice and snow

Rose-Zeta Mosen
Rose-Zeta Mosen
By Rose-Zeta Mosen - Year 12, Queen’s High School

The white barren land had been blanketed by the ice of the Snow Queen’s kiss.

She, who embraces lost souls in a frozen death stood among thorns of ice, prickling the trees and stinging the air, recalling a memory from a time long since passed.

The party was grand in its splendour.

Couples were seen laughing and soaring on the marble floor.

Women adorned in greens and reds like tiny little bells.

The men, staunch and proud in their blackened attire, waddled from one to the next, asking of the fair bells a dance, or perhaps to gift upon them a sweet ruby kiss.

Candles lit the room from high, crystal chandeliers casting a golden glow within the room.

The scent of roast beef and eggnog lingered through the room from the red oak table mingling with the sound of bursting laughs, and the orchestra’s jolly tunes kept out the winter chill.

What fun they were having in their folly and yet, what lies they hid behind their smiles of ignorant bliss.

For just outside, peeking in through the frosted window panes, stood a small child.

There was nothing significant about this child, with brittle bone hair and charcoal smudged eyes.

Hanging from his skeletal frame, grey tattered rags.

He was the perfect painting for an orphan beggar, left to roam the streets quite alone in the world.

Whether he stood watching the party for hours or minutes, he couldn’t say.

He was captivated by the sight of these funnily dressed bells and penguins twirling on by.

It wasn’t so much the party but the people, with their bright smiles, that held him prisoner to this window.

Darkness had long since submerged the streets.

With the music coming to its crescendo, the little boy wandered from the town to the snow-covered plains, out of reach from the town gates.

With snowflakes dancing around him, he thought back to that place of warmth, thinking to himself how lucky were those tinkling little bells with their penguins, being embraced in the warmth he could never touch, only ever to be observed from afar.

Gusts of wind sent him sprawling into ivory snow, startling him from the memory.

He did nothing but lay there, for he was done; he could go on no longer.

Looking up at the stars, he could think only of how beautiful the snow looked, falling down from the sky.

As he closed his eyes, flashes of his life appeared before him — visions from a life that had not yet come to be, but could be.

It was here in this frozen plain, among the howling winds and biting frost that he knew his end had not yet come.

How foolish he realised he was being — of course it was not the end.

There was still so much he had to see and do.

With a smile that lit up that brittle little face, he danced and he danced, with the wind as his partner and the stars as his audience.

Dancing with more grace than those tiny little bells with their waddling penguins, he laughed loud, then more loudly still, so that all the world may hear and join in his exuberance.

Slowly coming to a stop, panting from elation, he looked out to beyond the plains, and there in the distance was a woman, cloaked in white, sitting atop her sleigh.

It was then he whispered, so quietly into the air, “Thank you”, as he looked to the Snow Queen who refused him an end.

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