Transience

By: Marie Foulk
Word count: about 350 words

Snow piles up outside the windows, glistening in the moonlight as it tumbles through the air. The house is warm and smells like ginger and clove. She’s been baking all afternoon and now the gingerbread is finally cool and hard as brick. She takes the cookies and the candy and the icing to the table and she nestles her toes under the soft belly of her dog who curls up at her feet. And then she gets to work.

She assembles a modest house by pressing the rugged edges of the gingerbread together, holding them for ten endless minutes until the sugar-paste hardens into cement. This will be the foundation, the canvas, for the emergent winter masterpiece. 

She slathers icing on the roof, a covering of sweet snow, and lines the edge with gumdrops. Around the window frames, she pipes some more, trying to sculpt it into shape as it sticks and drips and clumps. She embellishes the house with festive sugar pearls and, piece by piece, creates a wreath to adorn the chocolate door.  

To guide the way, she lays a mosaic of bright candies and plants miniature candy canes along the path which settle into a rustic tilt. And to complete the scene, a little marshmallow snowman on the lawn and three little gingerbread children playing in the icing snow with smiles that stretch across their faces. 

And then it’s done; the last piece is placed. She flexes her hands which are sticky and encrusted with sugar. The dog stirs as she extricates herself from the mess to take a picture of her creation. But the idyllic winterscape is solidifying into a nightmare. The foundation is crooked, the icing is cracking, the candies are slipping, and the roof is sliding down, down, down… 

Thud! The table leaps; the house falls. Her beloved companion emerges, looking slightly affronted, and stretches before trundling upstairs to bed. The gingerbread children smile up at her among the rubble, eyes staring into the abyss. She sighs, takes her picture, and follows the dog soon after.