The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Heads of families consulted hysterically with one another over independently powered, cordless telephones, and finally decided to appeal for foreign aid. This was the response to their inquiry over the wireless:

—Buy another five thousand jackets. New design. Ideological tiger-crest, mottled black and white. Or would you prefer fifty or so atom bombs?

It became apparent to them all that the only solution was to get the poor in motion again, get the factories operating again, and start a war.

One resourceful fellow made a bundle of sticks, fastened bent wire on the end, stuck it out through a crack in the window, and tried to hook one of the frozen pedestrians outside. For an instant, all the families in imported jackets stopped fighting and held their breaths, glued to their binoculars and cordless telephones. But the pedestrian only crumbled silently to pieces.

Then came the final, self-destructive burst of hysteria. People were undone, like toys with broken springs. Despairing, they sought the quickest route to becoming meaningless matter. Open a window, stick an arm out into the snow, and freeze yourself—this, it seemed, was the last remaining option of a rational being.

Strangely enough, just when it seemed that every imaginable creature was frozen solid, there was still one mouse whose life went on as before. She lived in the storehouse of the pawnshop where the crone’s jacket was stored. She was looking for material to make a warm nest for her five babies, soon to be born.

Unlike humans, the mouse knew nothing of poverty that could bar the fulfillment of one’s deepest desires; when she found the wonderful jacket, she didn’t hesitate a moment. Taking it in her mouth, she gnawed off a piece. All at once, blood flowed from the severed place. The mouse’s teeth had sunk in just over the crone’s cloth heart. Uncomprehending, the mouse fled back to her nest in astonishment, and promptly miscarried.

The crone’s blood spilled out quietly and spread into every corner of the jacket, staining it bright red.

The snow suddenly stopped. It is likely that the limits of cold had been reached, freezing the very falling of the snow and so making further precipitation impossible.

Then the red jacket, still glossy with blood, rose lightly into the air as if it had been donned by some invisible creature, and glided outside. Through the unmoving snow-space, where day was indistinguishable from night, it glided and swam.

Before long the crone-jacket located a young man in the snow. It was her son, frozen by the factory gate with a wad of handbills stuffed under one arm, caught in the act of handing one to a worker, who stood frozen with a hand outstretched to receive it.

The jacket stopped in front of the youth and wrapped itself around his aged body. He blinked. Then he moved his head gingerly from side to side, and shook his body little by little. He looked around in wonder, then down at his red jacket. All at once it came to him that he was a poet, and he nodded, smiling.

He gathered the melodious snow in his hands and gazed at it. Now he could touch it without freezing. Had it become even colder than the snow, then, that gleam in his eye? He scooped up snow like sand at the seashore and poured it from palm to palm, without injury. Had it become harder than steel, then, the skin of his hands? He was confused. He had to remember. How had this transformation come about?

Frowning, he tried hard to focus his thoughts. Yes, there was something that he must remember. Something that every pauper knew, if memory were not suspended, frozen. Where had this snow fallen from?

Even if he didn’t know the answer, perhaps he could feel it. Look at these crystals of snow, he told himself, so marvelously large, complex, and beautiful. What are they if not the forgotten words of the poor? Words of their dreams . . . souls . . . desires. Hexagonal, octagonal, duodecadonal, flowers lovelier than flowers, the very structure of matter . . . the molecular arrangements of souls of the poor.

The words of the poor are not only large, intricate, and beautiful, but succinct as mineral, and rational as geometry. It stands to reason that none but souls of the poor can become crystalline.

The youth in the red jacket listened to the snow-words with his eyes. He decided to write them down on the backs of the handbills under his arm.

He grabbed a handful of snow and threw it in the air. It flew up with a jingle jingle, but when it fell back down the sound changed to “jacket, jacket.” The youth laughed. His happiness escaped through his barely parted lips as a quiet, cheerful melody, and disappeared into the distant sky. As if in answer, the snow all around him began to hum “jacket, jacket.”

After that he began a precise, detailed investigation of each separate crystal. He wrote everything down, decided on his notation, compiled and analyzed statistics, made graphs, and listened again, even more carefully. He could hear it—the words of the snow, the voices of the dreams, souls, and desires of the poor. With tireless, amazing energy, he went on working.

Gradually, the snow started to melt. Having finished speaking to him, evidently it had no further reason to exist. In the order that they finished speaking, those crystals of snow so cold they had frozen flames now melted away without a trace, like the snows of early spring that vanish the moment they light on the black, moist earth.