Chapter 6

It is at the crack of dawn. Sparkling mist shrouds the hill tops covered with snow. The hills look like ice-creams: dark chocolate bar dipped in molten white chocolate, cold vapour rising from their surface condensing into water droplets. Birds chirp over my head as I sit, wrapping myself in a cozy blanket, slurping away my black coffee. I didn't want anyone with me today, the serenity is perfect to calm my chaotic mind. I smile, as a single fleck of snow falls on the tip of my nose, melts, and vanishes.

I look around at the greens sticking out their faces from the residual snow from yesterday, all slush, and water, and mud. The smell of wet mud is still fresh. From my line of sight, I see greyish flecks of graupel paving their way towards the earth. I smile as I close my eyes and stick my tongue out to taste the first real snowfall of the year. My tongue feels the cold touch just as my eyes are splattered with more. In a matter of seconds, my whole face us covered with water, and I stand there with my tongue out, giddy with laughter.

The saliva warms up the snow flecks pretty fast, but the cold is not yet so severe that my senses are numbed; I know that the water in my mouth cannot be warm enough for me to know. I taste iron and lemons in my mouth, the insides of my cheeks, and gulp down unwillingly as it fills my mouth with saliva. My mouth is frozen despite the warmth, so are my eyes, I cannot open them. In the moments I am immobile, my mouth is again filled with warm snow. I try to spit it out, and struggle to open my eyes. And when I do, I wish I hadn't.

All around me is white snow, tinged with pink so much so that the white is visible only because it is there. Most of the space around the pink snow- the mud puddles, concrete roads and even the grass, is red. Crimson, vermilion, ruby- every shade mixed together into a single hue- the colour of blood. I look up yo see the grey flecks that I had seen a moment ago have turned darker, almost black. But the red is discernible beneath the black. It is raining blood! I stare around, frantically trying to find a way out of this hellfire of blood, and that's when I see them- little hands gripping their way out of the slush. About a hundred of them, all marked with bruises, trembling, as if from cold, and perhaps, from pain. The hands claw their way out, revealing themselves to be joined with the torsos of children. Toddlers, teenagers and infants. Bodies shrunk with years of cold, covered with torn rags. As they near me, their faces are revealed, cracked and worn out masks of grey concrete, broken maroon lines painting the long-gone nerves on their faces hidden beneath tangled mass of brown, yellow ochre and rust. But these are the better parts of their beauty. I try, and fail, to look away from from the eyes of the nearest one, a girl of some five-years, with dirty-blonde hair, dressed in an off-white frock covered with green flowers that comes upto two inches above her cracked knees. She has silver eyes, just like the others,with golden eyelashes, and they seem to cover the whole of her face. She smiles, her chapped ruby lips leaking dried blood stretches towards her ears, broken yellow teeth revealed. She is pale, and freckles join the bruises on her moon-like face I stare at her as my senses fail me, and I realise somethingthing except her only when two strong and ice-cold hands hold me with brutal force, and two pulls my head back as if trying to break my neck. As I prepare myself to see the last, horrific image of my life- the gaunt, shrunken face of a teenage boy grinning at me, something worse happens. The boy puts a gnarled, moss-covered finger inside my mouth. I jerk away my head and clench my teeth together. Very firmly, the boy, or the monster, presses in my cheeks so that my jaws are forced open. Putting two fingers inside my mouth to pull away my jaws, he forces my mouth towards the heavens. The raining blood flows in, and I get sick trying to spit it out, but the four monstrous hands holding me blocks my attempts. My mouth fills with blood, the horrible taste of iron and lemon filling up, and I gag as I continue to thrash against those laughing children.