Snow Angels

They only bury their dead in winter.

From spring to fall they keep them cold, refrigerated in their homes beneath the floorboards. They’re exhumed as the first of the snow starts to fall. The village takes the second day of snow off altogether and they head to the graveyards on the edge of the town and amongst the headstones they dig new graves and bury in silence proper their loved ones.

Overnight, the snow falls again and the town recedes for just one sleep into a simple village free from the magical weight of the past. 

What matters is the snowfall, its heft and depth, and the plunging temperature outside that seals the roads and rivers. It blankets all you can see in a white frost that feels always like it will last forever. Through misting breath, through eyebrows crusting over, through cars frozen over, the dead begin to rise from the ground as their souls press up through the powder and return to life in perfect, empty shape.

Some of the villagers gather for this in the earliest part of the morning. They assemble amongst the graves and wait for the wraiths to rise. With gloved hands they hold each other again and retreat together, with stolen glances from snowed over eyes in scandalous, barely noticed, directions, back home. For everyone else this occurs in the regular course of the day and the town’s families return from work, school, or abroad to find their deceased again at the dining table with the doors and windows wide open to keep the cold air in.

The spirits linger in these homes, sleeping in their old beds stripped down to just cold wood for the season. They return to the lives of those who loved them for as long as the snow holds. They help with the work out of doors, cleaning homes, scraping off car windows, even driving ski field machinery in the early hours before the tourists arrive.

Their mouths do not work. By the ancient magic there remain though motor skills to nod, gesture, cross arms, and resist the melting warmth of an embrace. Knowledge, unspeakable, put to manual outdoor service. By the same witchcraft they cannot after death lie. 

The village took up this practice longer ago than anyone can remember. What it cost them they cannot recall except for the extended grief that becomes in time what they wished they hadn’t known. Generalities unvoiced but specifics about regrets, about lovers, about what there might have been or not been answered in the coldest, voiceless truth.

They cannot help their curse to break hearts and rend apart the unstable. Yet they’re always welcome. Decay frozen in place for the winter and, when the first flowers break through the frost, the town leaves the magic behind and at the same time seems to leave too behind the pain.

No one in the town would, even if they knew how to, forsake the practice for fear of losing their own honest seasonal afterlife. Spirit with ice as bones and leaving behind them trails of snow and water and loss where the heat doesn’t hold itself at bay.

When the ground begins to melt and the crunch of snow underfoot starts to turn to muddy squelching, hearts thaw and are rekindled as the dead retreat to their graves for the second and final time. Life springs from them in the summer heat and those that remain endure. Those on the precipice, fading from us, begin to wonder what they can leave behind and what they would prefer to silently, heartlessly, tell frozen.