/yesod

Tag: snow

  • winterly

    winterly

    She approaches, clothed all in white and crowned with gold. 

    Her hair is dazzling white, almost difficult to look at, as with fresh snow in the sun.

    A gold chain hangs think across her shoulders, resting atop the white fur collar of her heavy coat, cinched at the waist with a belt of gold disks.

    Yet there is a puzzling detail, as she is bearded in ice—her cheeks and chin bristle with icicles that shatter and fall when she kisses me.

    “Who are you?” I ask, confused.

    “Winter,” comes a voice behind me. 

    I know her then.

    –

    I am still trying to make sense of the icicle beard. It was not unpleasant to the touch and it didn’t repel me. I am wondering now if it was some kind of muff around her next, pulled up close around her cheeks.

    It’s also worth noting that this is the first time she has appeared in white, with white hair. 

  • afternoon nap

    Mind wandering around as I waited for sleep to come, dozy logic moving from Macon Leary to Edward Gorey to Ernest Hemmingway . . . then, the image of a local highway, the flashing lights of police cars against the pale winter sky.

  • the pedestrian

    Waking up in the winterdark, I head downstairs. Cold floors and echoes of early morning dreams.

    I pass by the front door and see someone out on the sidewalk, a dark shape bundled up against the cold.

    Halfway to the kitchen, I stop.

    The dark shape picking its way along the crust of snow, another echo in the back of my head. Old, old feelings.

    The shape, slightly too tall . . . too tall and too dark.

    Not a person, no.

    Back at the door, I look one way and then the other. Up and down the street, far as I can see.

    Nothing. No one.

  • the breakfast date

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated May 15th, 2001]

    …and I am sitting there in Nate’s diner waiting for her to arrive. Finally, my time running short, I get up to leave. At the counter, the night shift waitress turns over the reign to the day shift. Nate stands, friendly and smiling wryly with his shirtsleeve pinned up to this left shoulder, a war injury I assume — perhaps mistakenly. While the women bicker over tips and time clocks, Nate hands me a bag. “On the house,” he says. Because I have been stood up yet again by my breakfast date.

    He smiles as I leave, wading through the snow to my car.

    And when I wake, it is summer and I realize that somewhere between the diner and my car, I lost the bag Nate had given me, its paper bottom stained dark and greasy from the warm chorizo and eggs he had prepared special for me out of pity.

  • home invasion

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997]

    I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob.

    On their fourth pass, I make eye contact with the driver and I know then that this is no normal robbery. They want me to see them.

    We stand there, watching the pass and I realize that we’re being diverted.

    Misdirection.

    Someone is already in the house, I know. Someone came in the back — the car had been empty? The car had been full on the first pass, but the last few times, I could see that the men inside were not so cramped; one of them was gone.

    They were already in the house.

    Through the house I go, searching.

    Passing by my room I see that the french doors have been kicked in.

    Someone is in the house.

    In a back room, my teenage daughter’s room, I find them. He is sitting at the piano, holding a gun in her face. She sits on the bed, crying.

    With a broken crystal candlestick, I stab him in the back — just to the left of the spine — before he can turn.

    Push the splintered end deep into him, glancing off the shoulderblade, scraping against the bone.

    He breathes once, heavy, and then dies.

    When the car passes by the window again, I am there — his head in my fist, raising it high, my fingers in his hair.

    I see the eyes widen as they see his glazed, empty gaze.

    I meet the eyes of one in the car as it speeds off — that is the one, I know, who will return for revenge.

    The car drives off into the night and I drop the head, realizing that — for the first time — it is snowing in the Midlands.

    [2013 Addendum: This is a odd one to look at now. In 1997, I did not have a daughter. Now I have two. And, for what it’s worth, my bedroom (four houses and sixteen years later) has French doors. That’s not going to help me get to sleep any easier.)