It's Snowing in New York

What if it started snowing and didn't stop?

I took it as an omen at the time: the day before New York’s biggest snowstorm in years, I had this unlikely premise for a story.

The kernel was this: what if it started to snow and didn’t stop? What if the City of New York was buried under snow, inch by inch right up to the last Chrysler gargoyle and the spiry tip of the Empire State Building? What slow horror would dawn on the city as the lights of Times Square glowed and pulsed then faded altogether in the submerging drifts?

From there, I thought: well, it would be like the Flood in its way, but stranger, more unexpected, its accumulation more menacing. Implausible and inexorable.

And this got me to thinking about The Flood and the Kind of God Who Might Do That. And who might this God save if the answer wasn’t as simple as “the righteous?”

Yesterday, I finished a short story about this. The Ark. It’s the first story I’ve completed since rebranding 100 Stories. It’s the first I can’t share here because I don’t want to burn it, but, for the same reason, it’s also the first I’ve been able to ship off to contests and publications.

Anyway, I’m daring to pluck a few sentences from The Ark without raising the wrath of the Publication Gods. It’s the story/prose-poem of this God who buries New York City and the three unlikely souls it elects to save.

Here He is getting ready for the big storm, an ominous silence collecting over the vast expanse of the five boroughs and its oblivious denizens.

“I gathered: assembling on overpasses and inside the shuddering chain link of empty lots. I pooled in abandoned cars and the static of kitchen radios, in the fog of the busman’s breath.

I prickled below feathers and hair: on the slinking feral cat and the scrambling rat, the wire-strangled pigeons, the dogs bred for thrashing. I rose as gooseflesh along the smooth arms of children.

And I began to snow.”

Saving myself from the Flood.