Issue 32.3

by Annalie Buscarino

Snowfall

There is no applause during the President’s speech.

He rests his hands on the podium, gazing out over the crowd. A breeze strikes his face and he grins against it, lips crawling over his teeth into a smile. He inhales the echo of his voice that slithers around the bodies in the square, expanding into the town as if it belongs in the air. The rows and rows of faces that watch him are so pale that they are almost translucent, as if they are a part of the air too.

The President sweeps the tails of his jacket away from himself, a sharp white layer that makes his age look intentional. His family wears white behind him as well, blending in with the brilliance of their house that frames the stage. Against the gray of the town, they look like puncture wounds in the skin of the world.

A man kneels at the foot of the podium, trembling. His clothes are the color of the earth. They stand out against the white of the President as if they are a stain on a virgin canvas. The man’s body slumps in the way that bodies do when they want to cave in on themselves, but the tightness of his arms behind his back forces his shoulders into stiffness. His hair dangles in front of his face, and even in the shimmer of the spotlights, you cannot see his eyes.

A crow calls from the wreckage of some broken building. The gunmen who line the streets bristle like fur, their eyes scanning for movement beyond the stiff shivering of the spectators that rock the crowd like a silent sea.

A guard shifts in a window, quiet in the echoes of the President’s voice. He falls away from the rifle between his gloved palms and thumps back against the wall. He shakes.

The house is one that has not been inhabited for a while, like it is a shell of something that once was. A reminder. The room he is in is entirely intact, however, save the missing panes in the window and the bullet holes through the walls. A child’s bed is tucked into the corner, its yellow, polka-dotted comforter browning from the city’s dust. The guard could use the bed as a better vantage point, if he wanted to.

Instead, he does not even look at it.

The guard swivels back to the window, breathing hard. He lifts the scope of the rifle to his eyes, the view of the world shaking in his hands.

In the glow of the spotlights, the President shines. He wears the white vicuña jacket that never seems gather dust, not even as he stands behind a man whose sweat cleanses the dirt that clings to his face. No, it is never dirtied from the debris of the executions, not even when the President steps over warmed puddles in the street as if they are nothing but pockets of rainfall.

The guard’s first execution was only four weeks ago. Afterwards, he was told to follow swiftly in the footsteps of the President, tiptoeing over the bloodied cracks in the ground. His rifle was still hot. He sidestepped the body of the boy, jaw shaking with the effort of trying not to look.

But the boy’s blood curled under the guard’s feet like a prayer, carrying the gravel of the street as if it was cleansing the cobblestone. Breadcrumbs speckled the pavement, and the guard couldn’t help but think of the meal he shared the night before with his own boy, his youngest son. He couldn’t help but think of the food that they could now afford to buy, thanks to his new promotion. But every night since the execution, when he watched his son tear into his pieces of bread, the guard couldn’t help but think of the way the brother of the boy in the street pleaded with him not to shoot.

The guard felt the weight of the memory pulling at the ground beneath his feet as if the blood in the street was clay.

The scope shakes in the guard’s hand now, hovering between the President’s body and the perimeter of the stage, both white and glowing under the spotlights. There is a pin of a flag over the President’s chest. The guard hesitates there, just for a moment.

Then, the rifle slips, magnifying the back of a woman’s head in the crowd. In the stillness among the townspeople, she hugs a baby over her shoulder, the slight mother’s bounce rocking her body back and forth. There is something wrapped in the folds of the infant’s blanket. The guard does not have to see it to know.

The guard clasps a hand over his mouth and pukes into the corner. He collapses on to the mattress of the polka-dotted bed, chin slipping in the puddle of his own vomit.

The woman shifts in her place on the ground, tucking her child tightly against her shoulder as the wind sweeps through the city streets. She clenches her teeth to keep from shivering. From her place in the crowd, four rows back and seven people in, she can see the white, firm bumps of the President’s knuckles, poking through the fabric of his gloves as he grips the podium. The silk of the gloves caresses the back of his hand, dipping into soft valleys where one finger shifts into the next. From this distance, with the spotlights kissing the President where he stands, his hands could be the careful hands of a father.

And maybe they are.

The President’s family sits in formation behind him at the podium, their backs straight from years of practice. They smile softly, nodding occasionally. None of them look at the man kneeling before them, the man whose blood will have to be scrubbed from their stage by the time the sun sets behind the clouds. The President’s daughter, Adanna, clutches her hands in her lap, pearly white under the lights in the square. She wears gloves like her father.

They all wore gloves the day they dragged the woman’s eldest son from her house, tugging him into the street like he was a criminal. Her younger son was already in the square at the time, imagining he could stop it all somehow. There was a new executioner that day, so they heard, and her little boy thought he could do something to convince him not to shoot.

The guards took the woman’s son away and restrained her as they tore at her body, ripping her clothes and her skin as if she were made of only one layer. But the guards’ gloves are black, and they aren’t made of silk, so when the woman struggled and blood burst from her wounds, you could not see the stains on the hands that had caused them.

The woman glances over at the guards that line the perimeter of the crowd. They do not shiver. Their bodies only rotate with the guns.

The woman remembers the morning after her son was executed. She woke up to find a bundle of cloth outside her door, a blanket resting in a cradle of snow. Inside were two guards’ pistols, standing out like oil against the white of the ground. She did not know what to do with the guns at the time, but she wrapped her baby in the blanket before going outside into the square.

The people had to stand in the town square that day, just as they did now, even as blood stretched across the snow like ink. A mural of red, white, and people painted right under the glow of the President’s podium. The woman’s younger son was trembling at her side, blood and snow pooling at his feet and shaking him back and forth as the woman rocked an infant in her arms. The townspeople stood as they always must the day after an execution, standing until the sun dipped below the horizon of rooftops.

On the day after her son’s execution, however, they were allowed to leave early. When the sun started sinking in the sky, the President’s daughter started shivering. She didn’t bring the proper coat, she explained.

The townspeople had to stand there and watch the President’s family leave one by one, smiling as they waved to a silent crowd. And when Adanna, the daughter, stood up to leave and tears were streaming from her eyes, the President pretended not to see them, just as he always did.

Everybody knows the penalty for crying in the town. But nobody shot the girl that night the way they would shoot the townspeople. Nobody shot her.

The woman looks away from the guards, clutching her baby tighter against her shoulder. Her little boy is in the crowd somewhere, thinking he can stop the President now when he couldn’t before. But the woman will not let him.

Under the blankets in her arms, she feels a smooth slick of metal, swaddled there like it is a part of her baby’s body. Maybe guns were a part of all of the babies’ bodies in the town.

A crow cries out over the President’s head and the woman squints against the light of the stage.

The boy chokes back a cough, biting his sleeve to will it away. He doubts anyone will hear, not when the President’s voice booms through the streets like a heartbeat. From the boy’s place under the stage, he can feel the ground tremble with the bass of the speakers, feel the weight of each and every syllable pulsate against his skin like a breath. He has felt that voice once before, felt it as he rocked on the ground in blood instead of dirt, shaking with the body that hit the asphalt.

The boy flicks his head and digs his elbows deeper into the ground, pulling himself through the mud. He slides towards a ray of light that pierces through the floor of the stage, that connects the wood and the ground together like a taut string. Closer like this, he can hear the shallow rasp of the President’s voice, the one behind the microphone that the public never gets to hear. The boy had only heard it once before. He was there when the President gave the order, when the word “fire” slipped from the cracks in his lips. The thunderous boom of the microphone and the croaking rasp of the President’s voice fuse like octaves in the air, coating the stage in layers of speech that cut like a crow call. The boy shivers in his place on the ground. He ducks his head against the dust and crawls.

He made the holes in the stage a few weeks ago, sitting out in the ruins of the building across the street until the sun went down. When the town was absorbed by the gray of its shadows, he snuck his way past sweeping spotlights until he could fall against the wood of the stage, its edges digging into his shoulder. Rumor had it that the security was lax back there, even though the stage sat in the shadow of the President’s house. The President assumed no one would try to get that close. Not after the executions.

The stage wasn’t really a stage–the President just called it that. Rather, it was a big chunk of wood that had some royal blue curtains at the bottom so it would look official. Every night, the boy swept past his mother with a nod and a kiss and went to the town square, where he would lift the fabric out of the way and cut a hole into the wood that was just big enough for his body to slip through. When it was done, he made his way underneath, crawling in the darkness until he found the place where the President would be standing behind the podium during the next execution. The boy made the second hole there, small and sharp. Just as big as it needed to be.

He finished making the holes one week ago. His brother was killed three weeks before that.

The boy was there when it happened. He pleaded with the executioner for his brother’s life, to take him instead, to do something, to do anything but shoot. The guard did not waver as he raised the rifle to the brother’s head.

The boy couldn’t cry, of course, even as he cupped his hands around his ears and rocked to the echo of the gunshots that were still shaking the ground. His brother in the square, a bag over his face so that he didn’t know when the shot was coming, and then the fall, the crumbs of the bread he had stolen mixing with his blood on the pavement.

It began to snow, then, the breath of the wind sweeping over his brother’s hands that were exposed to the sky.

Curled on the ground, the boy felt the touch of something warm against his back. But then it was gone with a swirling of snow and he was left in the street to gasp the way you must gasp if you cannot sob.

The townspeople told him that it was the President’s daughter who had held him in that moment. They said that she had hopped right off the stage, made a show of pulling off her gloves, and placed one, dainty white hand against the boy’s back. As if she were blessing him. As if she were resurrecting him.

Adanna. That was the girl’s name. The girl who the boy thought he could smile at because he always felt brave when he was with his brother. The girl whose eyes followed him as he slipped between shops in the market. The girl who watched as his brother raced from a vendor and grabbed the boy, shoving loaves of bread into his hands before shooting down the street like a bullet. The girl’s eyes widened, just for a moment, before the boy tore off after his brother.

His brother was arrested that evening and that was it. Apparently, the crime was too heinous to wait to execute him the next day.

You couldn’t smile at the President’s daughter when your brother was a thief. There was only one punishment in their town.

Adanna was there at the execution. She stared at the boy’s brother with shaking lips and met the boy’s eyes just as the guns went off. He watched specks of his brother’s blood spatter the white of her coat like rain. And that was it.

When the townspeople told the boy that Adanna had held him after his brother was murdered, he did not respond. He remembered nothing but the blood in his ears, the weight of the knowledge of being alone. And all he could see when he thought of Adanna were those glimmering, unknowing eyes that widened when she saw his brother disappear down the street, breadcrumbs scattering in his wake.

The boy reaches the splinter of light in the stage and rolls on to his back. He looks up through the hole and can see the wind rustle the hem of the President’s pants, white and silky against the slate of the sky. The boy thinks of his mother, swaying in the crowd with his youngest brother against her chest.

The boy places his hands on his hip and slowly, so slowly it is like dust falling, he presses the lips of his gun to the hole in the stage.

Adanna clutches her coat around her like a prayer. The wind is harsh today, the stinging kind that burns your cheeks if you aren’t careful. Snow decorates the sky like stars, spattered softly across the gray of the clouds. Adanna ducks her head and watches her father from under her lashes.

He does not shiver at the podium, even as he opens his arms to the crowd as he speaks. He smiles, and if Adanna were anyone else, she would never know if anything could hurt him.

She watches his hands as he settles them back against the pulpit, his knuckles curling around the edges like they belong there. It is proper for the royal family to wear gloves, he once told her, closing her hands between his.

But now she knows why he hides his hands beneath a gloss of silk. She knows why he cannot touch the world with his flesh while he destroys it.

His hands rustle when they caress the podium, like a whisper.

She tucks her own hands between her knees, her gloves doing little to shield them from the cold. Curling into herself, she feels a slick of metal crease against her dress from the pocket of her coat.

When she was younger, she wanted to be like her father. The way people ceded to his every demand; it was magical. And he would wink at her as he led her out of his office by the hand, leaving the cries and protests of some desperate townsperson in his wake. Adanna would smile up at him and click her heels together as they retreated into the safety of their home.

Of course, Adanna couldn’t notice back then how the eyes of the townspeople never lifted from the floor when they approached her father, how their voices trembled when they spoke his name. Nobody could look at him–not the townspeople, not the guards, not even her mother. Adanna was the only one. She used to think there was a law written about it, disallowing the people from looking at their leader. She used to like the idea that she was the only person who could break the rules.

It was only when she was older that she realized that people averted their eyes not by law but by choice. And that people made the same choice when they didn’t look at her either, not even when she wanted them to.

She used to think they were participating in a form of quiet rebellion or something like that. She used to hate it. Now she knows better, and she hates it even more.

Now she sees the townspeople and nothing else–their pale faces against the hard, wet canvas that is both the gray of the ground and the gray of the sky. She sees them crawling over the pavement, sopping up the blood with sponges that are too flimsy to hold all of it. She sees a mother in the crowd, rocking her baby to the lullaby of rustling guns. She sees a boy fall in the street, his brother’s blood streaming under his knees.

She had gone to the boy while he rocked against the ground, his dry sobs sucking up the air. She had never done that after an execution before. The crowd backed away as her feet carried her over the stage and into the square, the click, click, click of her heels echoing in the air with the gunshots.

She had only been in the square without her father once before, and it was when she had watched the boy and his brother steal bread from the vendor as if they weren’t right in front of her. As if they didn’t see her, even though she had been splayed on the stage in front of them so many times before. She was so shocked she almost didn’t tell her father.

But the brother had committed a crime. And crimes, her father told her, always had to be punished.

But as the body of the boy sank to the ground, a hole leaking from the bag over his head as if he were a machine, Adanna did not feel justice. She did not feel truth. And when the boy’s brother fell to the ground after him, screams piercing the air like he was trying to kill them all with the anguish of his voice, she knew.

She skittered over the cobblestone, her little white heels splashing through the blood that she knew she had spilled. The crowd sneered at her as she approached, but backed away nonetheless. They would not touch her. Nobody would.

And so, she made a clean path towards the boy, making footsteps in the blood of his brother. And when she reached him, so softly as if it could erase her guilt in a breath, she slipped off her gloves in front of her father and she placed a hand on the boy’s back.

The boy didn’t even look up.

And now, watching the man in front of her trembling on his knees, tears making tracts on his face that only she could see, Adanna shifts in her seat. Her hands still sting from the memory of her father drawing on her knuckles with a kitchen knife after the last execution. He told her it was so she wouldn’t be tempted to take off her gloves again.

But it was under the lights of his office after the execution that, for the first and only time in her life, she watched her father pull off his own. The silk of his gloves was too slick to wipe away the tears that rolled from the corners of Adanna’s eyes. So, after glancing around the room to ensure that no one was looking, her father pinched the tip of his gloves and pulled them away from his hands.

The gloves crinkled as he tugged them, peeling around his fingers as if they were a second skin. And underneath, under the clean, pearly layer that always coated her father’s hands was skin that was pink. Skin that was soft. Like a baby’s. Untouched.

Her father pressed the pad of his virgin thumbs under her eyes and wiped away her tears.

Adanna is crying again, her tears rolling off her face in the wind, but now her father has to pretend not to see her. His eyes must always be on the townspeople. And the townspeople’s eyes are never on her.

A guard steps on to the stage, the mouth of his gun rotating towards the head of the kneeling man. Adanna does not know what crime he committed.

She rises, white coat lifting around her in the wind. It is weighed down by something that is as heavy as it should be.

She steps forward and peels off the gloves of her family. The scars on her knuckles are red and raw against the white of the snow.

There is a glint of light across her father’s forehead as he turns to face her, his brow deepening with a look that is reserved for his daughter. The light reflects from a window across the street.

She knows to not look into his eyes. She knows what she will see.

Adanna reaches into her coat and the white of hers is tangled with the white of her father’s. Her fingers wrap around the hilt of a knife. It is still stained with the blood from her knuckles.

There is the breeze in the crowd, the crinkling of a blanket. The pivoting of bodies behind guns. There is sweat. Below her feet, she smothers a splinter of light that kisses the ground.

There is a breath, a shot, a baby’s cry. A snowfall.

And then it is silent.