The Last War
A Short Story for STSC Symposium: Risk
This story is my submission Soaring Twenties Social Club's Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month we create something around a set theme. This month, the theme was “Risk". Consider joining us.
The neighborhood on Box Canyon Road had 150 lots. Six lots subdivided the crown of the canyon, and four of those had houses built. The boy’s family lived in the second house from the right, facing North. The boy stood outside the house, facing East, staring, glaring, pushing his vision into the snow.
These were woodburning stove days. The smell of woodsmoke and snow had its own unlabeled petrichor, and the heaviness of this late afternoon snow bundled the scent and the silence into a distinct atmosphere, as if the boy lived in a candle.
This snow was the first time the boy realized that snowfall muted sound. This realization is why the boy stared into the snowfall in the direction of his neighbors’ house. The boy was impressed upon by the limits of his hearing and sight. He knew somewhere inside him that the feeling he had all over of the snow and his senses and the cold air and warm bundling of winter clothes pushed against his skin was something worth remembering.
Not long after it was dinner and his family received a phone call. The neighbors’ house had been broken into. The thieves had entered through the son’s bedroom, stolen the son’s Super Nintendo and TV, the larger TV in the living room, a radio, some jewelry from the parents’ bedroom, and some cash from the office.
The boy wondered if he had been watching the thieves steal from his neighbors the whole time he was staring deeply into snow.