A typhoon brings the false snow it didn't create. 

Off the coast of Hong Kong, gales provoke the ocean swells into walls of stone, and at 4:57 am, one of these walls shatters against the stern of a transport barge and sends several of its steel rigs tumbling. Forty thousand pounds each, they strike the waves. They split open. They bleed synthetic poison.

It isn't normal snow. It's false snow. Normal snow melts. False snow doesn't melt, unless you take a torch to it. And then it becomes poison smoke. 

As the capsules sink toward the abyssal plane, false snow pours out of them in deadly plumes of white, leaving serpentine trails. Lightning flashes aquamarine above, causing the trails to glimmer as they rise to the moiling surface like clouds of fairy dust. But they are synthetic, not supernatural. There's a difference between the two.

Scoop up false snow in the palm of your hand and you'll realize that it's really just round pellets of resin. Like real snow, it's transparent up close. It only looks white when you step back and see the light refract through it. 

But false snow is crude compared to real snow. The light slips around its contours like liquid, for there's nothing distinct written into its fabric. No snowflake is like another. No pellet of false snow is any different from the next. 

It's molecules line up in rows. Like pale soldiers. A heavenly host of crystal. But these angels of death come from below, not from above. They ride the tide to the coast. They scatter everywhere. It's 6:30 am, and the false snow lies in blight patches upon the sand. The translucent pellets bunch together amidst coppices of crab grass, glowing amber with the sunrise. 

They sparkle like real snow. A family of seagulls mistake the pellets for food, and they devour them in clusters. They gulp them down. The false snow slides down their throats, and it lodges in their stomachs, and each pellet fills them up tighter like velvet bags of marbles. 

The people of Hong Kong act quickly. On shore, men tear off their shirts and rake the sand with hoes and shovels. Students act ingeniously. They sift the sand through metal grates. They toss mounds of false snow into plastic bins and cart the bins away. An old man named Lie Jie spends all day at the waterfront, clearing the false snow. He returns home after dark and empties out his trash can and hurls a cluster of plastic bottles into a recycling bin. 

Two months later, three hundred miles away, a seagull starves to death atop a grassy bluff. It collapses in a mangled heap, and its carcass decays quickly in the sunlight. Four months later, it's chest is a grill of yellow bones, and a stomach-sized mound of pellets peeks out from beneath. They're smooth. Translucent. Like pale embryos. They haven't a mark on them. 

A thousand years will pass, and they'll still be there.