The new year rolls over, stretches, sits up, and looks around. It notices with a slight blush the bare limbs of its trees. It notices the layers of ice and snow that the old year had piled on before its departure. It is a look that the old year had the maturity to wear well, but the new year finds it gaudy.

It’s time for a change, the new year thinks, and it begins the slow process of peeling back the blankets of snow, of shaking the sleepy world out of its stupor. Out with the white, in with the green. Hello, everybody!

The old year looks back. It remembers when it was so young and thought everything was flower blossoms and babies. The new year would learn soon enough. It would find out there were more interesting things to be done with leaves, and then it would get bored with them entirely. The old year could try to tell the new one that it would all just end up in the same place, but there was little point. The new year wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t believe. It had to learn for itself.

Time marches forward. It never looks back.

“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”

“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.

On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.

At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.

Heavy snow at night always did weird things with the light, catching and refracting the sodium-vapor glare of the street lamps to make the whole sky seem to glow amber. At first we told ourselves that it was just a similar trick of the light that made the heavily clumpe flakes look so unusual as they fell, but once it started to stick and then pile up it became clear that its unusual color was no illusion.

We stayed inside, at first out of fear of contamination from some unknown pollutant… but then simply out of fear. As the strange snow continued to fall and blow and pile up in drifts, the air inside the house filled with an unmistakable coppery tang. Even with all the windows closed, the smell found its way in.

The snow had piled itself three to four feet against the side of the house already. Nobody wanted to talk about what would happen if it melted. I don’t think any of us were sure that it would. The snow had been falling for hours when the sun came up and it showed no sign of stopping any time soon, if at all.

We watched and we waited. We didn’t know what else to do. If it had rained blood, the whole world probably would’ve fallen into panic and terror. When it started snowing blood, everybody just sort of held their breath.