Rigor Frostis

Friday night, almost a week ago someone rolled a few snowballs together in the park, and conjured him up...three frosty spheres sprinkled with round pine seeds and skewered with two frail limbs triumphantly ushering the first blizzard of a doubleheader.

Six days after the snowman appeared, he died. This is what was left of him today, as I walked through the three feet of snow in the park.

He didn't melt, but seems to have keeled over. His body mass, those powdery lumps created an outline of a corpse. I didn't think much of the snowman the day I met him. He was only a few hours old, and seemed a natural part of the landscape. But today...somehow the gruesome lumps, their unnatural arrangement--a mass of snow prostrate, limbs torn from his torso, conjured a disorienting sense of pity.

I wondered why, in death, the snowman seemed to have been so full of life.