A Dead Leaf in a Snowstorm

[image error]

I am on my couch, looking out my window. The snow comes down, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, like the sky and ground tumbling together in white sheets. Just outside the window stands a mammoth, gray, gnarled oak that wraps the smaller trees in its limbs. One dead leaf clings to a small branch.

The leaf is a corpse, withered and brown, like crumpled cigar skin. It flutters in the bluster and breeze, the storm trying to rip it apart.

It’s going to fall. It has to fall. It must be replaced by...