Onion Songs

DECEMBER

The snow accumulated slowly over several weeks. No more than an inch fell in any one evening, but the best efforts of those in charge were ineffective at removing the snow the following day. The best efforts of a brilliant and uncompromising December sun were equally useless. Each night while the city slept the snow drifted down, almost imperceptibly, like a slow fall of white dust, the powder of a dream shoved against the saw blade of consciousness. And it was so cold, despite that bright sun, that the powder stayed, collected, and grew to a phenomenal depth of numbing whiteness.

Once they realized what was happening to their city, the people became alarmed, of course. Those who remained in charge were chastised for faulty preparation. Plans and strategies were devised and adopted. Promises were made. Programs were implemented. And still the slow snow accumulated. With no end in sight.

As those who pretended still to be in charge talked and studied, shouted and divided, the people of that city—singly, then collectively—eventually accepted both the cold and the depth of this December snow. Businesses closed as employees stopped showing up for work. Downed power and phone lines went unrepaired. Families gathered around and smashed their TVs. People whispered to each other in the dark at their dinner tables. Parents made up new and startling tales to reveal to their children at bedtime.

It was during this time that those who used to be in charge—out wandering the empty streets with shovels in their hands—began discovering the bodies.

The bodies were cold and well preserved. Further investigation demonstrated that they had been dead for a very long time. The bodies were those of men and women, parents and grandparents, but outnumbering all of these by a vast quantity were the bodies of the children. Thousands of children, faces immobilized, thoughts frozen in mid-formulation. Stuck behind trees, cradled in frosted bushes, stacked along the streets like earth-filled sacks damming a flood. No attempt had been made to hide their bodies. Their small still forms lay scattered like indecision.

Those who hoped one day to be in charge again searched their records carefully: none of the families of these parents and grandparents, none of the mothers and fathers of these countless sweet-faced dead children had reported them missing.

All out of procedures, those who were again in charge (if only of a few thousand unreported dead) refrigerated the bodies until the issue could be studied further.

During the next month the temperature rose almost imperceptibly, a degree or so each day. The snow melted. The people of the city gradually grew less inclined to sleep and dream.

In the high offices of those again comfortably in charge, the officials waited for the phone calls of alarmed citizens seeking their loved ones. No phone calls ever came.

Life in the city returned to normal. Businesses reopened. Voices rose above a whisper.

And all over the city they were again being murdered: the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands. Those in charge never found any bodies, and, even if they had, they would have discovered no wounds.