Falling Snow on Snow

Of the few people passing by, not one stopped to listen, and Beck’s fingers responded of their own accord by simply stopping. He sat down in the corner, his back against the wall, and looked out a long window opposite. The sun shone momentarily, its isolated orange rays slanting through the falling flakes as if giving a wave to remind the city it still burned. The sight was mesmerizing, and Beck didn’t think at all before he started to play a song he loved—a song of a Christmas day grim and harsh, one which, unlike storefronts and Santa photos, might harbor true compassion.
Beck’s fingers coaxed a dark, cold wind from the strings, and he felt the words of the hymn he played rise in his throat and form on his tongue. He let them loose, speaking them like a poem of loneliness, and left them hanging in the air on frozen breath.
“In the bleak midwinter frosty winds made moan.
Earth was hard as iron, water like a stone.”
He wanted to stop the words. They made the music more beautiful, more true than ever, and he wanted to listen to it, to hear what his hands were telling him. This wasn’t the kind of music to play to a Christmas-shopping crowd at Pike Place Market—he knew that. Yet where moments before no one had even looked at his happy caroling guitar as they passed—even if they tossed money into his open case—now he saw through the screen of his eyelashes that people gathered. They waited for something, a small crowd still as a deep winter night.
Despite his reluctance, his words continued to steal out into the world as if they had every right to his voice, but then he heard something else. At first he thought it an echo—the market was full of them—but it gained in strength and beauty, and he understood. Someone had begun to sing. Clear, brave, flawless as Beneventan chant.
Like an angel in a cathedral.
His own words became a whisper, his fingers grew more sincere as they traveled the strings in pursuit of a beauty that would match the singer’s voice. He lifted his gaze to search the small crowd that had gathered, but not one among the men, women, or children moved their lips or seemed to do anything but listen, perhaps as enchanted as he was by the sounds. It seemed a moment touched by something beyond the mundane, and he thought of his grandmother’s rosary hanging as always around his neck, though it meant nothing religious to him at all.
Beck wasn’t, in fact, a man of religion. And though he admitted the possibility that something more existed than what could be seen, the closest he knew to spirit lived right there, in the music. In the tones born in the body of a fine guitar, the passage of breath through the vein of a flute. In the flight of sound on the wings of a perfect voice. Like this one.
“Snow was falling, snow on snow.” The singer wove the words over and under the harmonies Beck offered up with fingers and strings, turned them into something different, something more.
The song ended, as all songs do. But this time, when the words stopped and the echoes died away, Beck felt a thrill of panic, for he still hadn’t located the person who’d been singing. What if he never found the singer, never again heard that soaring voice, never looked into the eyes of the man who sang. Yes, he thought, a man. He hadn’t been sure at first, as the alto voice had reached notes high for the range. But it’s a man, he thought again, and he knew it because of the way the voice had touched him.
He stood and again scanned the crowd. He asked an older couple standing near, “Did you see who was singing?”
They shook their heads, but the woman smiled gently, as if the soul-deep need he felt could be seen on his face, heard in the phrasing of his question. He tried to smile back.
As quickly as he could, he gently laid his guitar in its case and ran. He rounded the corner of the shop and looked up the long, dimly lit hall that sloped up to the next level of the market. A slender man in jeans, with long, curling hair and a loose flannel shirt trailing behind him like a cape, strode quickly away. It’s him!
“Wait!” Beck called, and the man half turned as if to obey, but instead spun back around and kept moving. Away from Beck. He turned a corner at the top and was lost to sight. Beck warred with himself—he wanted to follow and find him, needed to. But he also needed to eat and pay rent. If he followed his heart, the money people had tossed in his guitar case wouldn’t be there when he came back. Nor would his instrument, his livelihood, his only means of staving off damp cold and gnawing hunger. So he turned back, picked up his Seagull, and began a catchy rhythm for “Up on the Housetop.”
He didn’t care about “Up on the Housetop,” and though people were smiling and tossing money in the case, he had never been more certain that Christmas was nothing more than hype and a good sales strategy. “Bah,” he muttered into his instrument. “Humbug.”
Except. Somewhere out there was a man with an angel’s voice.
Gone. Like everyone else. I’ll never see him again.