Snow.

The snow was drifting as high as ten feet in some places and those who emerged to shovel only nodded to each other grimly through their balaclavas. Margaret Grayson was standing at her kitchen sink when she heard a muffled noise and looked out the window and saw her son Josh up to his neck in snow and screaming. She could not get the window open to yell out to him but sent her older son out to rescue Josh. The older son dragged a toboggan up the snowdrift, the snow coming to above his knees, lifting a leg and plunking it down, lifting plunking doggedly as Josh continued to scream and cry. The older brother stopped and buried his hands into the snow and under Josh’s armpits and pulled him straight up and out of the snowdrift. One of Josh’s boots came off in the snow, the brother couldn’t retrieve it. He put Josh on the toboggan and pulled him by its rope down the snowdrift and back around to the front of the house.The weather repeated itself the next weekend and the weekend after that. The parents laughed and poured amber liqueur into their snifters. Let’s invite the neighbors, let’s feast against the winter and so they put twelve year old Annelise in charge of all the kids. The neighbors came over on snowshoes with poles in their hands and their children strapped to their backs. Inside, they shed their gear and sent all the children to the basement with Annelise, who had never been in charge of anyone besides her little brother, Cal, before. All twelve children sent to the basement and the music was turned up loud and the adults did shots and cursed the snow and Bill Watley pissed out the back door, watching to see if his yellow stream would harden into ice in mid-air. It did not.

The snow covered the windows and blocked the front door and the adults laughed and danced and paired off while Annelise corralled the children and the babies and the toddlers in the basement. She made them all watch “Oceans Eleven”, even the baby, propped up with pillows, and crept upstairs and stole a bottle of spiced rum and took it back down and sat in the flickering light of the big screen and took little sips every time one of the children whined and little Logan crawled on top of her when she passed out and stuck her finger in Annelise’s nose and the snow continued to fall for days and they all stayed in the same house. The couples paired and re-paired and the children came up and raided the cupboards and the fridge and ate standing up, at a loss, and after awhile the snowplows didn’t bother to come and the newspapers stopped the presses and the mail ceased and the cold moon rose over the wide expanse of frozen, crusted snow every night until seven months later when it had finally melted off, and the light-up Christmas deer and the light-up Christmas angels emerged whole and undamaged and Josh Grayson’s boot lay on the cool, frightened grass but nobody looked for it and nobody cared.

*For my friends out east. Originally published in New South.