SNOW BY KAI HOLL

“i’ve never seen snow” she tells me i tell her “it’s like dandruff falling from an overused brush, tossed aside” she says “that’s very poetic” and laughs it sounds like a crow, maybe a murder of them… did you know they eat rotten flesh, like a vulture? during the winter they repose, go into torpor, where they lie on the ground, their bills half open looking to all the world as if they are about to succumb to some abysmal malady

i look up at the asbestos ceiling tiles of my eighth grade classroom pencil shavings litter my desk like wind spinners hanging above a shaded porch the teacher is rambling on about world war one did you know over seventeen million people died then, bestowing it with the honour of being one of the deadliest conflicts in human history? those bodies, imbued with bullet holes, languor-like… do you think there were crows there?

even though the air vents groan as they push out the recycled, dull air the heat still penetrates the room, a harbinger of the tropical punch that awaits me and my prepubescent sweaty thirteen-year-old armpits. just in case you were wondering: i didn’t know hair was supposed to grow there, i thought all women were hairless like mole rats or sphinx cats or like that bald patch pets develop when they get spayed

i itch at the base of my scalp with my chipped pink glitter nail polish i think the colour was called china doll, or something dumb like that bitten to the quick quickly, i rake out two, maybe three, a group really, of dead skin that fall from my blonde hair silently like the morning of christmas day dusting my grey middle school desk with tiny specs of white white snow