By Laura Diao
In The First Light After The 4.542 Billionth Orbit Around The Sun:
It snows. A quiet tantrum of flurries, white heaped upon white, fragile flakes on tough ice. Blanketing the planet’s frigid harshness with a thin layer of frigid softness; it snows. Life is in a heavy slumber, crouching into its last warmth underneath hunchbacked caves, sleepy ocean trenches, and gentle pulses deep within the earth. It is cold, drowsed, resting.
While The Sun God Rises On The First Day Of Year 7 Ācatl:
It snows. A blizzard of blind, flurried confusion. Panic. Did they anger the gods? Which? Create a new one just to pray it away. It doesn’t go. Pale as lamb wool, cool as midnight. It suffocates carefully cultivated life, erasing meticulous grids and plots into an uneven white sheet. Within a palm it turns into life; a knowledge only the plants have, cupping out their leaves eagerly, waiting for it to melt and run down their wrinkles. Life.
‘Curved Obsidian’, they call him. Itztlacoliuhqui. God of frost, ice, punishment, human misery. Harbinger of death.
During The Sunrise On 1 January 1830:
It snows. A hindrance. Briefly pretty, flurrying in the sky. Grey slush under feet. Trodden over, kicked by. A nuisance, to the ten year old begging for somebody to buy his matches, hands pale enough already without snow decoloring them more. Frostbitten fingers wielding instruments of warmth, pleading for them to be taken away. A nuisance, to the thirty year old with newly shined shoes, rushing, rushing, slipping, rushing, his way to work. There was no time; he had to work and work and work to survive. Meanwhile, life fell, the only white against black skies, black skies that were darkened by the burning of life. Fossil Fuels, they called it. As if death could fuel life.
7:14AM 1/1/25
It rains.
They said it would, with record highs, and climate change, and whatnot.
It rains.
In The First Light After The 4.543 Billionth Orbit Around The Sun:
It snows. A quiet tantrum of flurries, white heaped upon white, fragile flakes on tough ice. Blanketing the planet’s frigid harshness with a thin layer of frigid softness; it snows. Life is in a heavy slumber, crouching into its last warmth underneath hunchbacked caves, sleepy ocean trenches, and gentle pulses deep within the earth. It is cold, drowsed, resting.
-Winner of the 2025 creative writing contest!
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