Written for this writing challenge http://community.livejournal.com/mad_prophecies/129792.html Many thanks to Myst for betaing!

! <3 Snowman For a race so enamoured of life, you treat the gift of giving life callously. Every winter you form groups and go out into the snow, and life takes shape beneath your fingers. You form bodies, limbs, heads, you give us features with carrots and stones or coal, and you clothe us in your own castoffs. You give us names. Children. Pets. Sometimes you tell each other of our lives. You give us life; a silent, immobile existence, and you think nothing of it. Then you return to the warmth of your homes, leaving us frozen in the garden or the park, an army of silent Snegourkas keeping watch in the wintry air. Winter is death, you think, but for us winter is life. We stay there, for we can do nothing else, and watch and wait for death. It comes slowly, though we expect it; a gradual warming up of the air, the snow softening, and though you glory in the warmth seeping into your bones, we fear it. It is achingly slow, slowly softening the packed snow that forms us, making us sag and droop. The death-rictus smiles start curving downward as our faces melt, a horrible silent grimace of pain, before the eyes and nose and mouth and limbs start falling off, sterile decomposition sped up. This seems to horrify none of you; you point and smile and talk about the coming of spring, though some of the younger ones among you may mourn us. Soon we will be nothing more than a pile of soft whiteness, surmounted by old hats and faded coats and twig-limbs; but we will be alive again next winter. Think of the ghosts of the snowmen, when you walk in your garden in the spring. Sivaroobini Kalaimani 17th/18th January 2011.

Snegourka the Snow Maiden - http://tatiyana.tripod.com/snegourka.htm