Fiction
The Snowman
A Winter Short Story
He opened the curtains on this cold winter day. The outside was a beautiful swirling storm of snow.
“Beautiful,” thought the man.
Putting on his down jacket and winter gear, he headed outside into the blinding whiteness. On his way out, he grabbed a carrot from the kitchen.
He started to build a snowman. After two hours, he was finally done. He completed his masterpiece by setting the carrot into the face of the snowman.
The man had fun, but somewhere deep in the recesses of his heart, there was still an abyss that would not be filled.
He was still an unhappy man.
The troubled man muttered to the snowman.
“I am fucking depressed. I have thoughts of ending my own life, but I cannot. What’s fucking wrong with me? I thought that creating you would help me but I still feel like shit.”
He went to bed that night, feeling not any better than the night before.
The man slept, but it took him a long time to fall asleep.
Deep asleep, the man who had built the snowman was annoyed. He was feeling a coldness seep into the air.
He usually didn’t use any kind of heating — he was too ecologically minded for that. But the unnatural cold was too much for him to bear.
Jumping up suddenly — as if in fright — the man woke and turned to the remote control on his bedside. He turned up the temperature, and went back to sleep.
Moments later, he woke up again.
“Fuck, why is there a puddle of wetness all around the bed?!”
He was feeling a cold wetness seep into his normally warm winter sheets.
The man rose and threw aside his sheets. To his horror, he was looking into the melting face of the snowman he had built yesterday. It was staring back at him with a disfigured smile. The smile, previously carved into the snowman’s face, had melted into a distorted and awkward shape in the warmth of the house.
That beast that stood in front of him looked like a misshapen monster.
The man screamed.
“FUCK! No — just get away from me!”
Puzzled, the snowman started to speak. The voice seemed supernatural and otherworldly.
“But you wanted me to help you? That’s why I am here!”
“NOOO, this can’t be real, why is this snowman talking to me?! I must be going crazy!”
Confused, he grabbed the gun he always kept inside his bedside drawer — he was paranoid like that.
The man fired two shots at the snowman.
Since the snowman was made of snow, the bullets just went right through and got lodged inside the belly of the snowman.
The snowman grabbed the gun from the man. The man tried to wrestle with the snowman, but it was no use. The snowman had inhuman strength.
It wasn’t human after all.
There was another loud bang, and then the man spoke no more.
The next morning, police officers surrounded the house of the man.
A neighbor, who lived next door, peered in. One of the police officers on site approached him.
“Sorry, there’s been a suspected suicide case, you cannot enter.”
“But I knew Fred, what’s happening?”
“It seems like he took his own life by putting a bullet through his brain. Doesn’t seem to be a murder case. There were no other prints found on the weapon. The records seem to show that the gun belonged to him.”
The police officer continued.
“We checked his clinical records. They show that was suffering from a very bad case of depression and schizophrenia, and we think he could have taken his own life. What was the last thing you saw him do?”
“Well, I saw him building a snowman — there!”
The neighbor pointed to the snowman at the side of the road.
“Thank you. We’ll like to record your statement separately.”
The policeman took a look at the dirty-looking snowman. The snowman’s eyes seemed to glint in the glare of the winter sun, almost as if it were alive.
The end.
This is an experiment in fictional writing as the author usually doesn’t write fiction. He writes mainly on Japan, work, culture, society, and cryptocurrency. Discover his most-read stories here.