Wax

Tears

There once lived a boy with candles for eyes. His mother kept him inside most of the time; the outside, she said, was where the cold wind blew and cold winds, she said, were deadly in the winter and the winter, she said, could snuff a candle out.

And so the boy kept to his mother's rules for six years of the warm, cozy inside and there, he remained—gazing out the window on occasion, watching a forever snow fall and cloak the land outside in a gentle hush.

His humble house stood at the top of a quiet hill, absent of voices and company except the lone howling of the wind that was strongest at the highest point of their snowy village. There, the air was never once without a chill and though seasons were a thing, they did not seem to exist in a place so cold and barren.

The village, it looked the best in winter where roofs were white and windows sills were dusted with powdered sugar and the entire streets appeared like white buttercream icing that tasted of vanilla.

Beautiful as it may seem, there were times when the snow was feared and those times, the boy would witness his mother returning from their garden in the backyard with half the supposed harvest and fingers that had turned purple from the time she'd spent outside caring for her fruits and vegetables. And so he'd always had the impression that the snow was something akin to a monster, ready to bite and to freeze and to scare and therefore worthy of fear and intimidation. All the more, he did not wish to go outside.

One day however, he was gazing the window by the fireplace when he chanced upon a pair of children playing at the top of the hill some distance away from his front yard, running around in circles and falling on the snow with red noses and flushed cheeks but smiling quite like he'd never imagined was possible on a cold winter morning.

They were doing something. Each had gathered a mound of snow in their gloved hands and patting it together to form something vaguely firm. A large, round ball on the ground. Steadily, it grew with every bit of snow they added to the mound and soon, it took on the shape of what appeared like an eight.

He heard a knock on his door.

"Hello! Good morning. I'm Alfred. And this is Julie. We hope we aren't intruding—we're just looking for sticks. Or branches. Two, to be exact," said the stranger boy named Alfred who was very much polite and had the manners to introduce himself despite the immense cold that was outside. His companion had bunch of pebbles in her hands that were cupped.

"I have some from the fireplace," said candles for eyes.

"That would do very well. Thank you so much."

And so the boy fetched the pair of children a couple of branches his mother would gather from time to time and waved them goodbye. Upon closing the door, he continued to watch them from the safety of the inside, through his window.

The branches, he realized, were a substitute for arms and the mound of snow shaped like an eight was supposedly a person; the top sphere as a head and the one on the bottom, a body. The pebbles were eyes and a smile.

A snow-person.

When the children were done for the day, they left the snow-person at the top of the hill and held hands on their way home to the village further down below. Candles for eyes was not expecting this to happen—for what would become of the snow-person out in the cold, where the winds blew and the winters froze? Surely, it would feel very well.

He thought, five seconds. Five seconds and he'd be back at the front door. Armed with his mother's cloak, leg warmers and three mufflers of different shades, the boy dashed out into the open, wrapped the snow-person's neck in scarves, placed a hat upon its head, and made it back into his house within ten seconds.