Like any strange little girl might do, Jennifer had always wanted to die in the snow. To die and be swallowed up by it, never to to be reclaimed by the living. She did not fancy all that solemn pomp, the type that she had known at her grandmother's funeral, those teary caskets and weepy flowers that hung mortally in the church when the priest said silent prayers over the dead body. She did not want her death to belong to another, to be a public occasion, but felt it should be all for herself. After all, it was her life, so why shouldn't it be her death?

When it snowed then, one Christmas Eve when she was just fourteen, and this being the first snow she had known in years, she found her desire to die strong. Downstairs the fire crackled in the living room, and the tree was lit artificially and its lower branches hung over in a protective half-embrace all the presents she had asked for Christmas. Jennifer sat at her bedroom window in the dark and looked out over the garden at the rear of the house, all covered in a soft blanket of gorgeous white that just grew thicker and thicker with the falling flakes. How they floated so gracefully from the skies above! How pure and crystalline, how lovely and dispassionately cold they were! She opened her window and placed her little hand out in the air to catch the flakes as they fell and then brought her finger tips to her lips and felt the snow melt upon them; with an eagerness she drank in its taste, tasting of life itself, life in the midst of something far more terrible, this eternally shifting drifting world where nothing else was ever so white and so beautifully transient and perfect.

Her mind was made up. A rush of blood seared in her veins as with a giddy smile she pulled her warm clothes on and her coat, and took her scarf and shoved it in her pocket and put a warm woolly hat on her head and gloves on her hands. She looked like a little pixie as she prepared to venture out to the cold.

It was too late to ask her parents to allow her for a walk, so she climbed out the window instead and carefully manoeuvred her light nimble body down the drainpipe. The distance to the ground was not very big and she was not afraid of falling - the snow would catch her if she did.

Once she hit the ground she ran, for fear her parents would hear and come out of the house after her. She ran and ran, through the falling flakes that kissed and licked at her little body, and as she ran she held her face to the sky and opened her mouth wide to catch the brilliant white on this most holy of nights. Ah, she was so happy she cried! She cried and cried, and the warm tears mingled with the icy water of the melting snow on her cheeks.

She ran until she reached the park. Then she knew where to go. There was one tree she had always loved to climb, back from when she was young and first dreamed these lovely winter dreams of hers. She grabbed a hold of the lowest branch and climbed up into the body of the tree, and there took her perch on the old seat that she loved so well. It was magical to be above the earth and feel the flakes pound heavier and heavier on her body, barely a breath of wind at her back, and to see down below all the grass covered over with that magical expanse of purest white. Was there anything so pure in the whole world? Anything so completely satisfying, so completely in need of nothing but itself, so beautiful because it was all it ever needed to be and ever wanted to be?

Trembling with excitement, Jennifer tied her scarf around the branch of the tree and made a loop for her neck. Was this the way it should be done? Well, she had read it could be done this way, and in her dreams had already seen herself, a thousand times, hanging motionless in the thin air as the snow swirled and twisted around her, like a most angelic white dress, as white indeed as her drained and lifeless body. She was going to be consummated with it.

For a moment she held back and spared a thought for the world she was about to leave behind. 'Will they understand me?' she wondered. 'What if they think I've gone mad? What if they think I'm unhappy? Would they make that mistake? Don't they know I did this for the snow, and for no other reason? Maybe I should write down why I am doing it so that they won't misunderstand me . . . I don't want to make anyone unhappy . . .'

She searched in her pockets for a pen and paper, but she did not have any. 'Oh, what am I going to do?' she said out loud. 'The snow is already starting to fall lighter. It's not going to wait for me. No, I do not have time to go back . . .'

And so she jumped, down and down until she jerked stiff with a sudden snap, and when she was found in the morning the snow fell from her face like a veil to reveal a rosy mouth, smiling out forever on the white expanse, never to know the disappointment of another thaw.

^