Winter Soul

A bit of flash fiction for you.

I am a drifting cloud. A sea of white. A grounded cloud. Mud.

The winter people have blue veins. No matter how wet or frozen they are, how much ice is crusted onto their skin, their veins are always a shimmering blue, like ripples in a lake as the winter wind blows.

Winter Souls, we are. The winter people. But we're too vague to be people, and so we are Souls. Birthed of I don't know what. The sky, I suppose. Patches of warm or cold up in the air that sift us like wheat before we reach the ground. And some of us never do. Some of us are related, they say. Like Winter Rain and Freezing Rain. The ground decides them.

And what am I? I ask, looking down at myself. I am a drifting cloud. Blue veins.

I don't know, says Powder. Not until you fall.

And so I fall. A drifting cloud. A sea of white. A grounded cloud. Mud.

I come back. Gentle Snow, they say. So Gentle Snow I am.