All around the town, the pixies and the Zippies were zooming, their high-pitched, tiny voices trailing behind them like streamers of sound.
The First Snowfall of the Year – which was differentiated from the constant snow of the town, from the steady white-ness of their landscape and the piling drifts, by a certain glint to it, a certain sharpness to its edges, and a certain extremity to everything about it – was coming down very late in the day, and it was coming down with particular intensity.
For the pixies, and especially for the Zippies, who were (so said the experts, who might know, although others argued) a very small sub-species of kobold, this was very important. While every person in the town wanted to read their fortune in the First Snowfall – because that was another thing that differentiated this snowfall from all the others that fell all the time; it was very good for divination – the pixies and the Zippies, being wee, were especially good at snowflake divination. And dressed in their special Cold-Weather Suits, they could handle the individual flakes without fear of melting the flakes – or of freezing their tiny selves.
The train station, especially, was alight with the tiny creatures, such that one couldn’t move to or from the p Continue reading →