White-Out

He'd never put much stock in the legends--how when a blizzard created a total white-out, demons would slip out of the æther to do their evil work. It wasn't the storm that kills, but the monsters of legends.

Still, no blood had ever been seen on the snow after such fatal storms. Sure, people disappeared, but a blizzard is no trifling weather. A person could be buried alive under the inches-per-minute that easily overwhelms, or a child can be blown into the quicksand snow of a crevasse.

Inuit shamans say it is the color, white, that kills. That the white is everything, altogether, all at once. Thus, absence of red on the white ground. Yet science will tell you that white is all colors reflecting back at once — a reconstructed rainbow.

The legends were gruesome, but the men, women, and children torn apart were just folklore, probably just lost, or dead from exposure.

But he had been caught off-guard, and he realized what he was in for. There were the signs: winds of ice with heavy, white dough flying horizontally; the drifts accruing by the minute. He would be OK, he figured. He was layered warmly and was further insulated by a thermal coat.

Then, once visibility reached zero, he was torn apart — horrifically, traumatically, and with finality.

It had struck again.

The blood had been covered by the instant precipitation. And somewhere further North, where the inclement weather abated, a blood-stained polar bear re-entered the visible spectrum.