Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction 4567 | Page 19

And with the whistling wind cackling through the half open door, the man was gone.
~
As mount and rider sped through the snow-shrouded trees, wind-weathered hooves drummed against the snow, kicking
up showers of powder. The man had resumed his journey, his legs and arms tucked tight against his horse, his body arched
and his eyes squinting to avoid the falling snow. The weather had grown colder once again, the wind merciless against all
who dare to stand in its path, a category which unfortunately included the man. His fingers were painfully cold, pale and
frozen like the icicles that grew on the trees. Every inch of his skin left bare was left in a painful purgatory between the
numbness of frostbite and the stinging whip of the wind. But despite the pain, the man’s grip grew ever tighter upon the
reigns. The path winded this way and that, with trees and snow alike blocking much of the man’s vision, but still the man
ushered his mount to greater and greater speeds, intent on reaching his next destination, and anxious to distance himself
from whatever was behind him.
As the man rode faster and faster, and farther and farther from his past, and pain and numbness spreading more and more
across his body, he reminded himself of the very reason he had set out on such a perilous journey, a cause that would have
warranted the wind’s cruel whip as a worthy sacrifice, a choice wherein the alternative could somehow be worse than the
heartless torture of the winter cold.
He remembered his mother’s last smile as she returned to the earth in a cradle of wood.
He remembered his best friends tears, as he clutched his final heartbeats, sent into the abyss by a mugger’s bullet.
He remembered Shue Hua, his beloved wife, lulled by miscarriage into imperturbable peace.
He remembered their faces of unconsolable terror and endless pain, the life and hope leaking through their pupils, and the
breath from their mouths turned to air, their legs twitching and their fingers stiff. Accompanied into the afterlife by the
pain of drawn-out heart disease, an unexpected bullet, or torturous miscarriage. Ushered into the unknown by a fear of
the very unknown.
Most vividly, he remembered the unnamed man, cloaked all in black, dark as a midnight shadow on a raven’s wing. His
skin, on the other hand, was a deathly pallor, like the bloodless veins of the fullest moon. His lips a shade of bleach, and his
fingers colourless twigs.
Most terrifyingly, he was always there. At the funeral of his mother, in the alley where his friend was mugged, beside the
deathbed of his wife. He was always there, as if an infallible catalyst, of the tragedy that always followed.
One day, the man noticed this ominous spectre outside his home, trailing his steps, stalking him, wherever and whenever
he may be. And the man knew, that the ghost of death was to follow him into his grave, beside his wife.
But as the man reminds himself of his cause, his horse reminds him of a low-hanging branch approaching fast. The man
tries to rear his mount, but his eyes widen when he realises his tardy reflexes.
The man lay sprawled in the snow, horse confused, eyes dazed, forearm fractured, body laying in the piling snow. The man
rose from his snowy ad hoc grave, shaking his head and limbs to regain his senses and shed the numbness.
As he blinked away the stars and swirls in his eyes, reality welcomed him back to familiar snowfall and bleached fir trees.
He exhaled, marvelling at what he once viewed as a visual obstruction. The seemingly microscopic flakes of silver purity,
carrying an intricate aureateness, rivalling man’s most expensive murals and rugs. The fir trees were the silent sentinels of an
unspoken treasure, beauty buried just beyond the human eye. Unmoving roots and waving branches provided both shelter
and company to the falling snow. And while the wind whipped him as sharply and coldly as before, his skin no longer