Snow

The furious rustling outside was not the wind but snow. It had begun by snowing softly, the flakes dancing gently on the wind, riding the air currents in a curious ballet. But now it hurled itself through the air ferociously, capriciously driving itself this way and that in some random rhythm. Great masses of it fell, blinding out the light like a sandstorm that hissed and crackled.

The wind direction was mostly southwest it seemed and it smashed the sheets of snow against the balcony wall, piling it up in one corner outside the window where she sat, in her arm chair, right at the glass with her nose pressed up against it, so that it seemed that the snow hurled itself straight at her face. A gust of strong wind driven snow attacked the window at reckless speed and she recoiled, instinctively throwing her arm up over her face and ducking to protect herself. It smashed itself against the glass, futile in terms of breaking it, but making it rattle and shudder.

The wind dropped now and the whacks became infrequent. But it still fell relentlessly and determinedly to the ground some flakes now much bigger than the others.

The shrouded cars stood lined up in the parking lot like a tame obedient herd in its stalls. One lone man struggled up the road battered by the sharp stinging pinpricks and driven back by the resistance of the flurry and reached his car. After a while she noticed that he drove off, but the zigzagging tracks showed his cautious search for the road now hidden under the uniform white. The heating in the room she sat in gurgled, another car hesitated in the middle of the road trying to make out where the road continued, it turned, the wind picked up again the flakes now defying gravity and moving in a upward swirl like confetti thrown by a wayward child in maniacal glee, the pile outside her door grew higher, the flakes fenced and clashed with each other in a deaf roar, the car now stood still in the middle of the smooth white flat stretch, its tracks behind and the road ahead swiftly hidden, lost.