The Muffled Scream

The clock read two-seventeen. Not that it mattered. Time had a way of blurring when every day felt like a repeat of the last, a faded carbon copy. Arthur sat in the dark living room, a cold cup of coffee by his elbow, the faint hum of the refrigerator the only thing keeping the house from absolute dead silence. Then it hit him, a different kind of quiet. A heavy, plush quiet. He knew, without looking, that it was snowing.

He pushed himself up, joints popping like old floorboards. Pulled the curtain back an inch. Outside, the streetlights were halos in a soft, white void. Big, fat flakes, like cotton drifting from the sky, landed on everything, erasing the jagged edges of the world. The neighbor’s beat-up sedan, the overflowing trash cans, the broken fence post – all of it was softening, blurring into a single, clean canvas. For a second, a stupid, hollow second, he felt something akin to wonder.

Then the weight of the quiet settled. It wasn't gentle. It was a suffocating blanket. He needed to be out there. Needed to feel it, whatever 'it' was. He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, not bothering with a hat, the cold already a familiar ache he’d grown accustomed to. Stepped out onto the porch, the flimsy wood groaning under his weight, and the silence swallowed him whole.

No cars. No barking dogs. No distant sirens, not even the faint rumble of the highway a few miles off. Just the whispering descent of the snow, a barely perceptible hiss. His breath plumed out, thick and white, then vanished. He leaned on the railing, the cold metal seeping through his coat sleeve, and stared into the street. Everything was covered. The world felt… wiped clean. A fresh start. But the grime, the mess, it was still there, just buried deep beneath the new white coat. Like his own life.

He closed his eyes, let the flakes land on his eyelashes, tiny pinpricks of ice. Sarah used to love the snow. Said it made the city beautiful, like God hit the reset button. He remembered her face, framed by a red scarf, laughing as she tried to catch snowflakes on her tongue. That was a long time ago. Before the silences grew between them. Before the quiet in the house got so loud it screamed. Now, Sarah was a ghost that only appeared when the world went still. And the quiet in his head, it was getting louder than the snow.

The argument. The packing of boxes. The slammed door. All of it played on repeat in the theater behind his eyes. He hadn't fought hard enough. Or maybe he’d fought too hard, too long, until there was nothing left but dust. He ran a hand over his face, felt the stubble scratch against his palm. Forty-seven. Alone in a house too big for one man, a job that paid the bills but ate his soul, and a future that stretched out like an empty highway in the fog.

He wanted to scream. Just open his mouth and let out all the frustration, the regret, the sheer, crushing loneliness that this damned, beautiful snow was amplifying. But the silence held him. Held him tight. He was afraid if he made a sound, it would shatter something, crack the fragile veneer he’d built around himself. And then what? What would be left?

A small rabbit, dark against the white, hopped across his lawn, stopped, twitched its nose, and then darted under the hedge. A survivor. Just looking for warmth, for shelter. Arthur watched it disappear, a faint envy stirring in his gut. To have such simple needs. To just exist, day to day, without the weight of all this… *stuff*.

His toes were numb. His ears burned with the cold. But he didn't move. He just stood there, a solitary figure in a world bleached of color and sound. The snow kept falling, relentless, indifferent. It wasn’t a balm. It was a mirror. And what he saw reflected back in the stark, white quiet of the night, was a man who still didn’t know how to forgive himself. He let out a long, shuddering breath, a cloud of despair in the freezing air, and watched it dissipate into the endless white.