Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 63214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 316(@200wpm)___ 253(@250wpm)___ 211(@300wpm)
But then the snowman whispered, “Sweet Faith.”
My head pulsed with insanity. I knew that my reality was much colder and darker than what I was willing to expose on social media.
“Faith, we have the night.”
“Leave me alone!” Terrified, I raced back into the house.
Chapter 8
Faith
N
ight came.
I sat outside.
And, they didn’t come alive.
I sat there waiting and nothing happened.
Minutes passed and then a few hours.
They remained frozen and unmoving.
Be patient. Be patient.
Pulling out my phone and scanning a few Facebook posts here and there, I gulped my wine and wondered how many people I’d have to unfriend that evening. With the election ending in doom, everyone suddenly had a political science degree. Everyone now had the ability to prophesize the oncoming of the apocalypse.
Everyone now hated everyone else.
Social media had turned into a virus, addicting and infecting us all. Even as I waited for those mystical snow creatures, good or evil, to come alive, I couldn’t put my damn phone down.
But then what else could I do? I’d been going over and over in my head what I’d say to the snow creatures, but nothing sounded logical. How could anything be logical in such an illogical situation?
Hey, guys. Sorry, you’re in jail, but I’m afraid of you. And when I’m scared of things, I want to lock them up. I’m an American. This is the American way. We could talk about it, but in the end, I’m just not comfortable with you snow people walking around my property. You’re different. I don’t think God made you. In fact, I think you might be evil.
After unfriending three people—a past school mate writing lol as he posted a violent video of four Black guys beating a white woman, my old neighbor who declared that all poor people were ignorant hicks or criminals who should not vote, and my cousin who did a two-paragraph post on how the Bible said that gay people were going to hell.
By the time I saw all those, I didn’t even care about liking the Merry Christmas posts.
What’s so Merry about it?
Meanwhile, the snow people still hadn’t moved.
They remained stiff and frozen.
And, it pissed me off.
Either come alive and move around, scaring the shit out of me, or stay stiff for the rest of this winter. Pick one and be consistent!
That unyielding pressure pushed inside my head.
What would I do if the snowman didn’t come alive? What would happen the next night and the next? What if they waited for my daughters to return?
I had to think about something else and get all of this out of my head.
This is crazy, but then the world is crazy and like everyone keeps saying, I’m crazy.
Daniel’s scent still filled the yard. Even as the fire pit burned logs and delivered its alluring fragrance of burnt wood into the air. Three empty bottles of wine lay next to the pit. I’d rolled another joint and finished it within minutes.
Each day is crazier and crazier. How do people walk around and not go crazy?
As the moon rose, I pushed away all those insane thoughts and shifted to reminiscing about the old days—Daniel’s touch and kind words, the little presents he would drop by and the hikes we’d take down Harper Road.
A cool wind brushed by and disturbed the fire. Flames danced in the breeze, twisting and turning to their own melody. They were golden orange ballerinas blazing on blue slippers that tip toed all over the logs. Smoke lifted from the dancers burning tips. Dark pieces of log cracked from their scorching pressure, broke apart, and grayed into ash.
Since moving back, I’d learned the hard way that starting a fire was difficult in the cold of winter. Granted, it was probably harder to start one in the middle of a rainstorm. Nevertheless, snow triggered problems to a fire. Heat, not a flame, caused fuel to burn. In the cold of winter, I had to raise the temperature of the fuel further, so that it would ignite.
A winter fire was just like life. To succeed one had to keep working and working at making sure the fire stayed alive. One had to put a stone floor down and make sure it was an inch or two above the ground, so that the fire sat on the stones and not the wet earth. One had to put up heat reflectors when building a fire in the snow. A big tree or large stone to keep the warmth near and the cold out.
Mom always said that to be happy, I had to keep some distance between me and the world. Not get so caught up in the day-to-day madness or I’d get sucked in.
If not, the fire inside of me would go out.
One had to clear a place to pile extra firewood. Tinder, kindling, and fuel. Sections of trunks and chunks of a tree stump.