Fleeting Fictions, Part I

The camera, stationed at an omniscient remove, slowly zooms in on you, your body, your being, your terrestrial actualization, outfitted in a ludicrously large snowsuit, grinning stupidly, lying prone and still in a bank of soft, powdery snow, staring up at nothing in particular. You’ve just made a snow angel and you’re thinking about how wonderful this all is, this unlikely scenario, the climate cold, chilly, but tolerably so at mid-day, the clustered mounds of teensy-tiny ice crystals refreshing and new and miraculous somehow, the genuine sense of peace and precious isolation yours to treasure secretly, privately, completely, existentially; this is the moment just before the moment where you realize that it’s growing hot inside the suit, that the snow is beginning to feel oppressive against your ungloved hands, that you are in the middle of nowhere on the side of an unplowed rural road, that the fact that no-one is around also means that there’s no-one to playfully lob snowballs at – there aren’t even any trees or squirrels, for Pete’s sake – that the snow is, in fact, so loose that you couldn’t pack a snowball even if you actually wanted to, that it will be difficult to maneuver to a standing position whenever you finally want to do so, that the whiteout effect caused by the reflection of the sun off of all of this fucking snow is actually becoming unpleasant all of a sudden, even painful—