She felt herself to be the void of a footprint as she stumbled
stubbornly on through the rubble, unsearchingly but unceasingly, though she
would pause periodically to dislodge a stray pebble from one of the many
openings in her prematurely disintegrating boots or, in the odd moment of
reflection, wonder what structures, now ruinstrewn and pummeled into a fine,
homogeneous ballast, once stood there, when, following the cold tap on her lips
of some fragile falling thing, she discontinued her mimetic affectation of telic
motion and turned her face upward to see that snow was beginning to fall, or
if not snow some sort of meteorological event that could be likened to snow,
given that the largely dissipated clouds merely seemed to rid themselves of
what detritus they could, as if to say they were no longer able to bear the
strain of the continuous production of any form of precipitation, before
unfurling into an ever gauzier, untraceable vapor, leaving behind them the final
few discolored flakes of snow in the world that, after an arduously long fall
in which they drifted this way and that, despite the fact that there was no
wind, finally landed on the ground and just as soon dissolved, leaving the
faintest trace of moisture, rendered vaguely translucent by the trembling light
of the sliver of silver moon that was pitched hauntingly and haltingly above
her, until she had observed the very last drop of snow, which affixed itself
calmly, like an ephemeral pendant, to her fraying coat, at which point she
began to walk again.
