Snowy Day

One winters day, a child turned around on the park bench he had fallen asleep on the night before. He didn’t remember how he got there; everything around him was white and powdery snow. He shivered and tried to walk but his legs had stiffened. All he could do was huddle inside his t-shirt and pray someone would walk by.

A man with a fur coat and earmuffs looked at the shivering boy as he passed and asked, “Where’s your mother?”
“S-s-s-she isn-n-n-n’t-t here,” he chattered out.
“Good. The more of you brats that die out here in the cold the better,” he said with a grimace that belied the lack of compassion in his empty, soulless eyes.
“P-p-please, s-s-sir,” the boy pleaded, “Hh-help m-m-me”
But he had left.

It was ten minutes later that the boy began to lose his sight. Nobody else had walked by except for the man in the fur coat. Everything around him was cold, cold…pervasive cold, numbing cold…his skin was pale like a ghost, and he was shivering harder and harder; his body’s final struggle against titanic odds. He began to look around and discover that things were getting blurrier and blurrier…he tried rubbing his eyes with his shirt, but found he could not reach it. It was at this point that he realized he had been crying the entire time.
A minute later, he died, and his corpse was buried in the falling snow.