#53 Frozen Tears

by Cindy Harris

He removed his gloves to retrieve the photo of the missing boy from his pocket. Taken on Christmas morning—the boy held up a stuffed bear for the camera as a little brown dog licked the side of his face. A cute five year old with a Jack o’lantern smile missing two front teeth.

He made out the lines of an old barbed wire fence, a lone remnant of a farmer’s field from a simpler time. In the white, gray and black of the solid frozen landscape, a flash of orange stood out amongst the gloom.

He stood and stared before the information clicked into understanding, connecting the singular pieces into a whole. The boy had made a bee line from his house through the forest and alongside Deer Creek. Scooting along the ice, tromping through the snow as the sun sparkled prisms through icicles hung from giant trees. It tricked the child into feelings of fun and folly among the glittering winter playground, but the cold closed in. Too small to maneuver over the barbed wire, the boy crawled under the fence. His orange jacket twisted in the barbs where it cemented his fate. His face set in a horrid state of terror, his mouth wide open from screams for his mother drown out by the north wind. Thin lines of frozen tears snaked down his cheeks. His blue eyes now an opaque gray stood wide open, a final stare up at the Milky Way before going to God.