It hadn't snowed in the city for years. The syrupy cloud of super dense smog hanging over the city like a pollution umbrella, saw to it that any snowflake that was unlucky enough to fall near would wilt and evaporate back up into the cloud.
This meant that the snow gained enough toxins so when the cloud was free of the city proper the suburbs would get a covering of thick drifts of black snow.
Shit snow we called it.
When I was growing up mothers calling children back for their mittens weren't doing so to keep their offspring warm. More to stop their hands from blistering and burning from the freezing toxic wasteland that came every winter. I believe that it was one of the few places where a snowball fight was banned under the Geneva convention on Biological weapons.
Things are different now, so they tell me. The air scrubbers embedded in every tall building are doing their job. The cloud is thinning out and sunlight can be seen on the streets of Manhattan for the first time in a hundred years. This renders the street lamps continual 12 hour routine of night and day useless.
The real sunlight has us blinking and we're reaching for our sunglasses out of need, not vanity just as our great great great great forefathers must have done before us.
The fresh snow can't help matters either. Lying like a blanket of non-fat-soya-yoghurt defiantly not scalding those that are brave enough to touch it with bare skin.
It'll melt soon in the almost unbearable brightness but for a while we can remember that snow didn't always kill.
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