Snowfall

No one stopped or tried to intervene at the sound of my small screams. Not because the snow dampened the sounds of the struggle, although it did, but because such was the brutality of the city. People hustled by, wrapped in their coats, insulating themselves from the cold and from the chaos of their surroundings and from each other. They went on hurried feet, churning the crystalline snowfall in their path to grey slush, and each in the crowd more isolated than they could be alone in the wilderness of the tundra.

I fought for my life there by the sidewalk, my small body hardly a match for the brawn of my attacker. I was made a thing of beauty and fragility, and they a thing of sinew and strength. And still no passer-by paused to help even the odds, to pry me from the maw of this evil, even as the steaming warmth of my life scattered in bouncing beads around this scene of battle, bejeweling the snow with tiny scarlet gems.

My final breaths rose as tiny vaporous clouds, swept into invisibility in the parade of splashing boots. My once-bright eyes still open, the substrate of a forming frost.

As my assailant fled no mitten-clad hand moved to halt them. They were gone in the swish of a cat’s tail.

A fresh snowfall hides me now from the eyes that did not see, and come spring I will be gone altogether. Nought but sparrow feathers in the snowmelt.