Kayse Elmquist
Hour 5
Creative Writing
Wonder
She painted a dazzling smile onto her face, though she doubted it was enough to hide the bitter disappointment that was lurking just beneath the surface. Every human being in the world was born with a sense of pride and dignity, and a good portion of them probably end up going out with it. At the ripe age of five, she was old enough to realize when she was being gypped. And this most certainly reeked of a scam.
There was a snap as the shutter button was pushed down, followed by a flash, and that moment of false euphoria was captured forever.
“Good job, girls! Your snowman looks fantastic.” She watched through eyes squinted in suspicion as Hayley’s mom pocketed the little digital camera and retreated into the house, heedless to the dreams she had just built up and then successively destroyed in the span of an hour. Was it even good parenting to show a movie that portrayed such deceitful scenes of joy to a child? Frosty the Snowman, what a bunch of –
“So whaddaya wanna do now, Rocky?” Hayley twittered brightly, peeking around the snowman with wide, sparkling eyes.
Rocky looked at her for a long moment, and then answered, quite simply: “I wanna make this work!” And she swatted the snowman’s swollen abdomen for added emphasis.
“But we already tried everything we could think of,” Hayley responded in an exasperated tone.
“Not a ‘old silk hat,’ we didn’t!”
“I already asked Mom; we don’t have one!”
She closed her eyes, wrinkled her forehead in concentration, and thought back on the movie they had just watched. Two eyes made out of coal…check. A button nose…she opened her eyelids a crack to glance at the giant white face, the carrot protruding from the middle…close enough. They’d even sung the song while dancing around the yard, and yet it all seemed to have been in vain: the snowman remained as resolutely immobile as ever. It was that dratted hat, it had to be.
An idea struck her suddenly.
“Hayley, your hat!” She pointed to the yellow knit hat that was pulledlow over her friend’s long dark hair. “Maybe that’ll work. Put it on and see!” Hayley stood on her tip-toes, slid the hat onto the snowman’s irregularly-shaped head, and stepped back with uncertainty.
Rocky stood with bated breath, praying silently for some small sign of life: a wink, a nod, anything. The seconds dragged on, seeming to hang frozen in the chill air as she waited for the magic to take hold and give the snowman life. But then the seconds continued to crawl by and became minutes, and there was no sign of any magic. Hayley let out a sigh.
“Let’s go inside. I’m cold.”
“No! We have to make this work, just like in the movie.” She patted the snowman’s lumpy face with a mittened hand gently, as if in an effort to coax the features into animation. But Hayley sighed again, this time louder, and stamped her feet impatiently.
“I don’t think it’s going to work, Rocky.”
“Why not?” Rocky spun around, eyed her friend with wariness.
“Because…” Hayley looked down at her boots in obvious discomfort. “Because it was just a movie.”
Rocky gaped at her. “What?”
“It was just a movie, Rocky. Doesn’t make it real, ya know. I’ll bet Santa Claus isn’t even real, neither.” She said it nonchalantly, carelessly, and punctuated it with a shrug of her shoulders.
Rocky felt hot tears burning in her eyes, threatening to spill over onto her flushed cheeks. Why was she saying this?
“C’mon. Let’s go inside. I’m cold.” And Hayley turned and marched up to the house, completely oblivious to the devastation she had just wrought. Rocky stood for a moment longer, blinking up at the snowman with watery eyes. Then, with a heavy heart and one final backward glance, shetrudged toward the house, wiping at her nose as she went.
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Little puffs of fog spread across the glass as Rocky stood, face and hands plastered to the window, staring out into the blustery night. Moonlight flooded the yard, bathing everything in silver and shadow. The wind rushed through the trees, lifted glittering snow into little swirling clouds and threw it against the house. She could just barely make out the familiar shapes of the yard through the storm; there was the swing set, and beyond that, the neighbor’s house. But she didn’t need to see that far. Her gaze was fixed on a much closer spot.
Hayley was snoring softly by her feet, curled into her sleeping bag on the floor of her bedroom. Rocky considered waking her, if only for the satisfaction of seeing the astonished look on her face when she pointed out the window to where their snowman had stood only hours before. But then Hayley would tell her that it had simply been the wind, that their snowman had been destroyed in the storm, points Rocky had considered, but knew to be false.
So,instead,she slipped back into her own sleeping bag and drifted to sleep with a contented smile on her face.