a queer literary/historical fiction piece, likely to be somewhere between a short story and a very short novella.
david is a grown-up boy, or a young man. when he is nineteen, he goes to heaven in an alleyway in new york city, boxing day, 1944. before that, he loves intensely, he goes to war, he gets a new face, it shatters. he remembers a snowstorm.
you are david. you are afraid. you are dead. you are intense-faced (read: you could have been gentle).
You are a very small fox in a very small hole, which is to say you are a man in a dirty uniform, which is to say you are a boy who is afraid. Above your soft body, bullets swing through gray-green-yellow sky, a sideways rainstorm, and every panting breath is so thick you think the thousand million bits of air moving through your throat could be a crowd of people on a street, pushing and shoving against each other. If you’re still on Earth, you can’t begin to imagine Hell, except that it might feel an awful lot like this August.
On Christmas when you were ten, there was a blizzard. It had come in on the 23rd and hadn’t left; the snow kept coming down in sheets and sheets, silent downpour over the city. If you were older you might have been concerned about the dangers of it, about if people would die, but you were only ten, and the only people who ever died were your mother and Jesus, neither of whom had anything to do with the snow. It kept snowing regardless of whether you liked it or not, but you did like it. You liked that it didn’t stop.
You are thinking of the blizzard, now, because you are praying for it. You are panting and firing your gun and sweating and the whole time you’re wanting just an inch of snow. Something cold, something that makes bodies fall quieter, something turning the night indigo blue instead of black. You are, unspeakably, praying to be home for Christmas, and if you can’t have that, then you’d like it at least to feel like Christmas, snow and silent nights and all.
1formerly titled dead-alive man, which i mention just on the off chance theres some insane person actually following this.
it's now 3374 words. i thought i was in a more editing phase but i'm actually now just heavily in a nonlinear writing phase. i'm going insane. hopefully it will be around 10,000 words when it's completed.
for every project, there's a playlist to which i write. when i don't just listen to this i listen to either 1940s radio or old bing crosby christmas songs.