• Introduction
  
  
• 2005 Selections
  
  
• Sarah Aclander
  • Tapes
• Katelyn Anton
  • Water Fountain
• Allison Baker
  • Two Dancers
• Patience Caprice Bona
  • Confidence
• Chelsea Clough
  • Excerpt from "The Fountain"
• Mary DiAngelo
  • Bird Man, Chapter Two
• Emily Faber
  • I Wrote a Letter
• Reed Gauthier
  • Fallen
• Amanda Nohe
  • The Sky
• Jessica Runion
  • The Age of Innocence
  • Eternity
• Mara Warner
  • Snow Piece
• Em Waugh
  • The Listener
• Teresa Yeh
  • Fireplace

The air was thick with snow. The ground was white with it. My sister and I had finished our preliminary rompings, and I stood still, listening. The tiny flakes made soft tapping sounds as they landed on my parka.

Other than that, the woods were silent. My breath hung foglike in the frost-cold air. I walked slowly up to a tree: tall, bare-branched, black as sky without stars against the brilliant snow. Slipping my arms around the trunk and pulling it close, I stared up into the tree's branches. They were black too, a stark, angular black. Their twisted lines underscored the bright gray of the sky, making shapes in the negative space. The snow fell down, pure white fairy-feathered flecks against the clouds. They whirled and danced down among the tree branches to land softly on my eyelashes. There they clung until the heat of my foggy exhalations changed them at last to dew drop tears, wetting my cheeks. The silence was solid, still, falling with the snow. It was unbreakable, indelibly marked upon me, a permanent part of my body, covering me like my skin.

And then my sister's cheerful laugh and my answering movement broke it like thin-shattering glass and we were off, leaving footprints on the clean-clear-white sanctified ground and laughing with the delight of walking in fresh-fallen snow. Our winter revelries began anew as we tumbled to the ground to make fallen angels. We dashed through thickets of snow-capped brambles, unheeding as our pants took the punishment for us.

And then we stopped again, and I stared around me at a new land, foreign but not strange. The air was cold and clear; each tree was sharp and black against the bright white, the luminescent gray. Every shape was perfectly defined, each outline crystalline in its clarity, each line razor-sharp. The clear cold perfection was heady, exhilarating. It leant us a sense of freedom, a wild, reckless abandon spawned by our sheer delight and the knowledge that nothing could harm us here. My sister and I were in our domain: our woods. Nothing could touch us here; we were immortal, untouchable, temporarily infused with the magic that filled the trees all around us. So we ran on, and the woods were black on white, white on white, black on gray, clearly defined in their brilliant, ephemeral frost.