The Snow That Fell Up

"It's going the wrong way," says Mira, pressing her mitten to the frosted window.

Her breath fogs the glass. Outside, the snow is not falling. It is rising, drifting up past the porch light, past the bare maple, past the church steeple, in lazy spirals like smoke that forgot how to be heavy.

Her mother doesn't look up from the stove. "Snow doesn't do that, sweetheart."

But Mira has already watched it do exactly that, so she pulls on her boots without the second sock, grabs her coat from the hook, and goes out into the yard, where the flakes brush her cheeks on their way up instead of down.

She has lived seven winters in this town, and every one has taught her the same rule. Things come down. Rain. Snow. The ball off the roof. Her grandfather's voice, when he got tired and sat in his chair for good. Down is what the world does, and the world does not ask you first.

She tips her head back and watches the flakes climb, and something tips over inside her too, some small weight she has been carrying without a name for it.

She follows the snow past the fence, past Mr. Alvarez's mailbox shaped like a barn, past the frozen creek where she has never once seen the water go anywhere but down. It leads her up the hill behind the school, and there, with no ladder and no wish and no rope, her boots come loose from the ground.

It scares her. She grabs the crooked pine as she lifts past it and holds on hard, because down is what she trusts, down is what is safe. The snow keeps rising without her, patient, in no hurry at all. She hangs from the branch a long moment, her arms starting to ache. Then she makes her fingers open, one at a time, and lets it take her.

She rises past the water tower with its peeling paint, until the whole town lies out below her, small and flat as the map at the front of her atlas. Smoke stands up from every chimney in silver columns. Steam lifts off the creek. Her own breath unspools out of her and climbs after it. Everything down there is reaching up.

The snow around her begins to slow. It stops climbing, hangs still a moment, and turns, and she knows it is about to carry her back down, because down is what the world does. But she does not want to only come down. She wants to send something up too, the way the chimneys do.

So she works one mitten off with her teeth and holds her bare hand open to the sky and lets the mitten go. It lifts off her palm, up past her face, up toward the low gray clouds, getting smaller and smaller, and it does not come back. It was one of her good mittens, the warm wool ones, and now her hand stings in the cold. She will have to explain it to her mother, and she finds she doesn't mind.

Then the snow lowers her down, past the water tower, past the crooked pine, easy as a leaf that has decided it is finished with the sky, and sets her in the yard, the flakes settling on her shoulders in the ordinary way, falling, the right way, again.

Her mother opens the door, spoon still in hand. "There you are. What were you looking at?"

Mira holds up her one bare hand, pink and stinging, and grins. "Everything," she says. "I gave the sky my mitten."