A Killing Winter

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Fresh blood is especially vivid against snow. Even on a moonless, starless night like tonight, when it spills thick and dark, like oil leaking from the rusting sump of an abandoned Moskvitch. But oil doesn’t steam. Oil doesn’t spatter red against white, until it trails back to a body half hidden under silver birches. And oil doesn’t dribble from the lips of a wound already turning stiff and blue with cold.

The threat of dawn snow hangs in the sky like ash. A few stray flakes already shroud the woman’s upturned face, a scattering of lace like a bride’s veil across her forehead. Unless a drunk stumbling home from a bar stops for an urgent piss and spots her, a few hours will transform her into yet another snow drift, unnoticed, skirted around, anonymous until the spring thaw. Only when a single boot-clad foot or a mottled hand signposts itself out of grimy snow will people wonder why no one heard anything…

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