Blanket Of Snow Quotes

The snow was endless, a heavy blanket on the outdoors; it had a way about it. A beauty. But I knew that, like many things, beauty could be deceiving.

Pressed against her I can hear eternity -- hollow, lonely spaces and currents that churn ceaselessly, and the fallen snow welcomes the falling snow with a whispered "Hush".

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.

It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died.

He shifted over without comment, lifting the blankets, and I scrambled into the warm sheets beside him. He smelled like soap and sleep and bare skin. He smelled familiar. Not the deja vu familiar of Guy or Mel. Familiar like...the ache in your chest of homesickness, of longing for harbor after weeks of rough seas or craving a fire's warmth after snow--or wanting back something you should never have given away.

The sensation reminds him of the first snow of winter, for those first few hours when everything is blanketed in white, soft and quiet.

Kindness is like a warm blanket of snow, softly covering and gently touching the heart.

Her sadness makes her impossibly beautiful, like snow blanketing a barren landscape.

We always know before the change comes. When a storm approaches, we feel it in the thickness of the air, the tension in the earth awaiting the blanket of snow. We feel the moment the wind changes direction. We sense a shift of power when it is coming. Tonight

The wind crooned softly as it dusted the snow against the windows, wrapping them in a thick and fluffy cotton blanket.

I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.

The white noise from the old Walkman enveloped them both; like a blanket of new snow, it draped itself over them, shutting out all the curious looks. And the world under the blanket was - surprisingly, wonderfully - absolutely, quiet.

Have some nice hot chocolate, something to eat, cuddle up under a blanket..." Under any other circumstances, I would have assumed that that last sentence meant, "Cuddle up under two separate blankets, spaced several feet apart, possibly with a lightly chained wolf between you," because that's what parents always mean.

You don't waste October sunshine. Soon the old autumn sun would bed down in cloud blankets and there would be weeks of gray rain before it finally decided to snow.

There's something uncontaminated about her, and I don't even mean sexually or whatever. I mean the way she is, at her core. Like when you wake up and the world has been blanketed by snow overnight, and not a single footstep or tire track has spoiled the untouched perfection of it.

Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket

And with that, Kat closed her eyes. She didn't see the first flakes of snow fall outside her window. She didn't feel Hale cover her with a blanket. She was already fast asleep.

Snow freezes time, so the constant pressure of life is briefly suspended in a blanket of snow, and for one day, it’s like you can catch your breath.

God did not enter the world of our nostalgic, silent-night, snow-blanketed, peace-on-earth, suspended reality of  Christmas. God slipped into the vulnerability of skin and entered our violent and disturbing world.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.

Waking up to a blanket of snow is like a morning lullaby, a soft dreamlike state that is almost magical.

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off.

It was the first morning of the first day of the new century. Snow blanketed the ground. Anything was possible.

As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.

The Garden Under Snow " Now the garden is under snow a blank page our footprints write on clare who was never mine but always belonged to herself Sleeping Beauty a crystalline blanket this is her spring this is her sleeping/awakening she is waiting everything is waiting the improbable shapes of roots my baby her face a garden, waiting.

The snow had ceased, and the sky was a soft eggshell color, the mountains dreaming under their woolen blankets. There was a loveliness in the forest's absence of color, its haunted dark framed by grey-white boughs, as if the snowfall had winnowed it down to the essence of what a forest is.

I miss the snow. I miss looking at it, walking in it, tasting it. I used to love those days when it was so cold everyone else would be tucked away inside trying to stay warm. I would be the only one out walking, so I could look across the fields and see miles of snow without a single footprint in it. It would be completely silent -- no cars, no birds singing, no doors slamming. Just silence and snow. God, I miss snow. The stars, the moon, the wind, and blankets of pure, pristine snow.

And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children's constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier. ...Nothing fits together anymore.

And it’s… real snow, like this… big snowstorms… they have the power to stop the world for a minute. Snow freezes time, so the constant pressure of life is briefly suspended in a blanket of snow, and for one day, it’s like you can catch your breath.

It is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without cloaths or blankets.

Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.

Her true heart, however, was buried so far inside her, so gone beneath the vast blanket of her lies and deceptions and whims. Like her jewels now beneath the snow, it lay hidden until some thaw might some to it. She had no way of knowing, of course, whether this heart she imagined herself to have was, in fact, real in any way. Perhaps it was like the soldier's severed arm that keeps throbbing for years, or like a broken bone that aches at the approach of a storm. Perhaps the heart she imagined was one she had never really had at all. But how did they do it, those women she saw on the street, laughing with their charming or their ill-tempered children in restaurants, in train stations, everywhere around her? Any why was she left out of the whole sentimental panorama she felt eddying around her every day of her life?

Why did people shrink away from winter, he wondered, safe in their blankets, hiding by their fires? If they knew how beautiful winter really was, they would walk out naked into the snow, walk and walk, until their frozen hearts split open with joy.

Not want you?” His voice was rough. “Everett, I'd lay you down right now in this thin blanket of snow and take you.” Everett's eyes widened, but Alex's mind was racing, the images coming at him too quick for him to hold them back. “The cold air would touch you and then my mouth.” He moved back into Everett's space, and Everett groaned. “My hands. Naked, Everett. I could bite your long limbs and lick the grace from your words and shock the neighbors with what obscenities I'd drive from your lips.

Seasons Haiku Summer sleeps cozy spooning Spring. Winter needs a blanket of snow.

If you've ever stared into a campfire, or the woods, or a blanket of snow, you understand. Your brain gets bored and starts doodling.

..the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer...

He cleared his throat, very carefully, to bring the stillness to a more bearable level without breaking the unwritten rule that governs both churches and freshly fallen blankets of snow.

Colder than the winter wind howling its dirge through the Southwest Forest. Colder than the snow blanketing tree, rock and earth in its silent shroud. Colder than ice that lay on water and hung in shards from branches and bushes. Colder than these was the smile of Ferahgo the Assassin!

No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the frozen forest itself would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

And then I saw him. In the snow. Behind the trees. A white wolf. Black on his back and chest. His eyes burned red. He said chase me i love you chase me. I said, “Daddy?” because I was just a little boy again, and my father, my father was there, and he was never going to leave me, he was never going to leave me again. He ran. I chased after him. Tree branches slapped against my face and chest, sharp stings as the blanket flared around me. I almost dropped it. I almost let it go. PackLoveSon to me to me come to me

For him, Max was the early morning sun, a cool springtime breeze, and a blanket of fresh white snow. His warm eyes were a guiding light in the dark, and the love they held was the only thing Jed would ever need.

A wolf wasn’t cruel when she killed for her meal. A nighthawk wasn’t cruel when he ripped his talons through the still-warm body of a mouse. Winter wasn’t cruel when it blanketed the land in snow and stole the warmth from your bones. Sunder and Bane might be cold, but they weren’t cruel. They were merely as nature made them.

It occurs to me somewhere in the background of my thinking - like the way the snow falls, quiet without you knowing, and then you look behind you and your entire backyard, everything you thought you knew, is blanketed all white.

A snowball formed between her palms, surrounded by a blue glow. "Ready?" she asked, feeling the rush she got when she was about to use magic. She threw her hands up and flung the snowball high into the air. Snow started to fall from the ceiling, washing the floor in a blanket of white. "This is amazing!" Anna marveled, her giggles of joy filling Elsa with pride. Anna, more than anyone else, loved Elsa's gift, and she begged her to use it often. Their parents, on the other hand, wanted her to keep it private. But if a gift like this could bring such joy, shouldn't she share it?

it was nearly dawn, and the hill was white with snow. She was covered with a thick blanket of bees, and the snow lay upon them in bright broken spangles. She sat up in distress— bees cannot survive hard cold outside their hives— but they seemed to shake themselves...

December 29, 1946: Snowing this morning. The year seems to be dying in a light white blanket. Only three more days of this year, then comes a new one. Then, what? No one knows. -- Diary of Bertha Kate Gaddis who passed away 6 months later, age 78, West Lafayette, IN.

She remembered the way it looked at sunset, with the island winged cats perched on the rooftops, and the way it smelled at dawn of fresh-baked bread. In spring, wildflowers sprouted everywhere-the roofs, the cliffs, the fields. In winter, snow blanketed everything in thick white fluff.

I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way.

In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine's time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles.

Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago’s richest and most powerful men, the tombs’ bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow […] Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.

Black Mona Lisa My umi's face is the most beautiful in the world Skin like sleeping in on snow days beneath thick blankets black Smile like an eighty-degree summer day in April bright Eyes like long subway rides looking out windows watching nothing and everything go by in the dark and letting my thoughts swim deep

Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.

But the shrieking went on and on, primal, almost glad—this protest was righteous. I couldn’t make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage. The kid didn’t like its blanket, or its rattle, or the lap it was sat on, or the world . . . the time had come to demand quality.

It was freezing, but the cold effortlessly numbed my feet and aching hands. I walked quietly, barefoot, to the end of the block, leaving my shoes behind to remind me how to find my way home. I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. As I turned and looked back toward the hotel I noticed that my footprints leading out into the city were mismatched. One side was glistening, small and white. The other was misshapen from my limp and each heel was pooled with spots of bright red blood. It struck me as a metaphor for my life. One side light and magical. Always seeing the good. Lucky. The other side bloodied, stumbling. Never quite able to keep up. It was like the Jesus-beach-footprint-in-the-sand poem, except with less Jesus and more bleeding. It was my life, there in white and red. And I was grateful for it. “Um, miss?” It was the man from the front desk leaning tentatively out of the front door with a concerned look on his face. “Coming,” I said. I felt a bit foolish and considered trying to clarify but then thought better of it. There was no way to explain to this stranger how my mental illness had just gifted me with a magical moment. I realized it would have sounded a bit crazy, but that made sense. After all, I was a bit crazy. And I didn’t even have to pretend to be good at it. I was a damn natural.

Christmas is like softly-falling snow that covers the world in a blanket of white so flawless and brilliant as to make us pause to ponder the miracle.

In the hush of December's snow, whispers of magic blanket the world, where each flake is a story waiting to be told, and every silence is a promise of new beginnings.

I frowned, staring into the eerie blackness along Route 33 truckers always complained about. It is odd how we rarely encounter true darkness. Somewhere, there is always light; a house, a town, headlights. Not here. Just total and complete darkness. I had been on the night run for months, long enough to get accustomed to total darkness if not entirely comfortable with it. What concerned me was the silence. I'd often had to pull over and take a pee along that godforsaken beltway. There were crickets rubbing their legs together in the cotton and wheat, grasshoppers jumping through the corn stalks, and June bugs flittering above the fields. Occasionally while relieving myself I'd even hear a lone armadillo burrowing. Tonight, however, I heard nothing. Less than nothing. Always there existed a strangeness here the truckers talked about, but tonight something had inexplicably hushed the sounds of night and made it stranger. The silence itself was dead; the kind of silence you get high up in the mountains when it snows, hushing the entire world beneath a white blanket. The blanket along Damnation Road was black, and it felt…unnatural." - NIGHT RUN - Bobby Underwood

Snow, endless snow, snow as far as the edge of the universe, snow forever; snow in her nose and between her claws and melting into her scales and sticking to her talons and weighing down her wings; snow on the rooftops, burying the palace, covering the world; snow everywhere, always falling, always underfoot, always sneaking through the windows and under the blankets and WHY WAS THERE SO MUCH MOON-SPLATTING SNOW?

Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.

A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.

It looked like it, too, remembering the blanket of white over everything outside. How water kind of had a habit of quieting the world around me my entire life, and in one form or another, I sought it out and reveled in hiding behind it. Looking over her shoulder, out the window, the snow fell, charging the air with a little more beauty, the animation making the Earth look alive even when everything else was still. A little more pretty. A little more peaceful. A little more cover.

She reached back and pulled my head forward to plant a tender kiss on my cheek. I finally let her go. We drove away from the sun and laughter, toward the snow-covered mountains behind Nice where death had stained the blanket of white with red.

Who trusts the Bridge Builder when you wake to snow on your blankets and winter blasting through cracked walls and dinner for four is a fifty cent box of Kraft Dinner rationed in half and your dad tells you every single day that he just doesn't know how there is ever going to be enough? How do you count on life when the hopes don't add up? A morning in late November, joy shimmers. The hopes don't have to add up. The blessings do. ...count blessings and discover who can be counted on.

The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its “flamboyant” style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is “intellectual” and not “dramatic”, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of “omnipresence” (“God is everywhere”), which coincides with that of “simultaneity” (“Truth has always been”); it aims at avoiding any “particularization” or “condensation”, any “unique fact” in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of “unique fact”, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is “everywhere center”, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it “decentralizes” and “universalizes” to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any “personalist” mysticism. To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islam—in art as in theology—as a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an “association” (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against “centralizing” images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a “Christic uniqueness” and is “decentralized” by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islam—or the Koran—which is similarly integrated in a universal “fabric” and a cosmic “rhythm”, having been preceded by other religions—or other “Books”—which it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points. If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere.

The snow will cover me like a thick white blanket. It will be warm under the snow, and if they speak of me they'll have to say I died a man of the NIght Watch. I did. I did. I did my duty. No one can say I foreswore myself I'm fat and I'm weak and I'm craven, but I did my duty.

She stayed out there, staring into the snow until the chevelle's engine noise faded into the distance. He was gone, and she was alone up there, alone and apart from the city so peaceful under it's snowy blanket. The buildings spreading from the edge of her roof were full of people, full of lives. Inside them lovers huddled together against the cold. Inside them families laughed or fought or whatever it was families did together. And here she stood, invisible, trapped, alone. And for the first she can remember alone didn't feel very good. And that was the scariest thing of all.

The snow had ceased, and the sky was a soft eggshell colour, the mountains dreaming under their wollen blankets. There was a loveliness in the forest's absence of colour, its haunted dark framed by grey-white boughs, as if the showfall had winnowed it down to the essence of what a forest is.

Snow is beautiful, almost ridiculously picturesque as it wafts down and blankets the ground, bringing with it a beatific quiet. Wintry mix is radically unromantic, as nicely captured by the word graupel. Wintry mix is a thoroughly Midwestern form of precipitation: practical, unlovely, and unpretentious.

I had to hide. I couldn’t let him take me to the police station, but I also couldn’t dial 911 to get them help. Maybe if I waited it out, they’d get better on their own? I dashed toward the storage tubs on the other side of the garage, squeezing past the front of Mom’s car. One, maybe two steps more, and I would have jumped inside the closest tub and buried myself under a pile of blankets. The garage door rolled open first. Not all the way—just enough that I could see the snow on the driveway, and grass, and the bottom half of a dark uniform. I squinted, holding a hand up to the blinding blanket of white light that seemed to settle over my vision. My head started pounding, a thousand times worse than before. The man in the dark uniform knelt down in the snow, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. I hadn’t seen him before, but I certainly hadn’t met all the police officers at my dad’s station. This one looked older. Harder, I remembered thinking. He waved me forward again, saying, “We’re here to help you. Please come outside.” I took a tentative step, then another. This man is a police officer, I told myself. Mom and Dad are sick, and they need help. His navy uniform looked darker the closer I got, like it was drenched straight through with rain. “My parents…” The officer didn’t let me finish. “Come out here, honey. You’re safe now.” It wasn’t until my bare toes brushed up against the snow, and the man had wrapped my long hair around his fist and yanked me through the opening, that I even realized his uniform was black.

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.

It was early autumn, then, before the snow began to fly. –(There’s an expression for you, born in the country, born from the imaginations of men and their feeling for the right word, the only word, to mirror clearly what they see! Those with few words must know how to use them.) Men who have seen it, who have watched it day by day outside their cabin window coming down from the sky, like the visible remorse of an ageing year; who have watched it bead upon the ears of the horses they rode, muffle the sound of hoofs on the trail, lie upon spruce boughs and over grass – cover, as if forever, the landscape in which they moved, round off the mountains, blanket the ice in the rivers – for them the snow flies. The snow doesn’t fall. It may ride the wind. It may descend slowly, in utter quiet, from the grey and laden clouds, so that you can hear the flakes touching lightly on the wide white waste, as they come to rest at the end of their flight. Flight – that’s the word. They beat in the air like wings, as if reluctant ever to touch the ground. I have observed them coming down, on a very cold day, near its end when the sky above me was still blue, in flakes great and wide as the palm of my hand. They were like immense moths winging down in the twilight, making the silence about me visible.

It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woodshed. A monk jumped from a window. He sank into a drift and took a long time to get up. That night, they made me sleep next to the stove. I was small, thin, like a piece of birch bark. But then the Stove went out. Father Bernard took me into his cell... It was he who first gave me chalk and paper. He was so old his eyes his eyes looked as if he was crying. But he was never sad. In winter he had fewer blankets than the others. He said he didn't need them because God warmed him. (...) But even Father Bernard was cold that night. He laid me down on the bed next to him, wrapped me in an animal skin, then in his own arms. He told me stories about Jesus. How His love could wake the dead and how with Him in one's heart one could heat the world... When I woke it was light. The snow had stopped. I was warm. But he was cold. I gave him the skin but his body was stiff. I didn't know what to do. I got out a piece of paper from his chest under the bed and drew him, lying there. His face had a smile on it. I knew that God had been there when he died. That now He was in me, and because of Father Bernard I would be warm forever.

We’ve covered ourselves with everything we own, plus a snow blanket on top. It does provide warmth. The snow is everywhere - our pillows, our hair. You stick your head out, take a deal breath, slip under the covers again and breathe out. Feels warm. The snow on your hair melts, then turns to ice. A winter hat. Silence. Darkness... The only thing visible is the snow.

Do you wonder why we wander?” Cal had asked. It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the icicles falling outside the window, beyond the wall. They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves close. And Elijah had thought, I wonder why I never kiss you. I wonder what would happen. But he didn't say anything out loud.

We looked at the fire. “This is one hell of a date,” I said. “Trapped by a horde of vampires in the middle of a snow-covered field, huddling around a tiny fire on thin blankets,” Curran said. “Drink it in, baby. All this luxury just for you.” “At least it’s not raining.” We both looked up just in case a freak downpour decided to drench us, but the night sky was clear. Nothing but stars and desperation.

He ducked down under the wooden slats used to separate the stalls in the barn and crawled into the adjacent stall where he began rubbing the belly of the chestnut mare. "Lay down, Lady. Please . . . it's awful cold tonight. Please lay down." The mare complied as she always did to the soothing tone in his voice. Drawing the blanket up tightly around him, he lay down beside the horse, moving in close to her side. He was careful to place his frozen feet near enough to her for warmth, but not so near that she'd protest. "They had a real purty tree, Lady, with candles. Bet it didn't look as purty from the inside, though. Weren't no snow on the inside." He snuggled in closer to the warm beast. "Merry Christmas, Lady," he whispered. The mare nickered and moved her head in closer to the boy as he drifted off to sleep, the scent of hay and livestock surrounding them.

Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard .... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees .... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.

When Hamilton, debilitated from illness, rejoined his comrades at Valley Forge in January 1778, he must have shuddered at the mud and log huts and the slovenly state of the men who shivered around the campfires. There was a dearth of gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and blankets. Hideous sights abounded: snow stained with blood from bare, bruised feet; the carcasses of hundreds of decomposing horses; troops gaunt from smallpox, typhus, and scurvy. Washington’s staff was not exempt from the misery and had to bolt down cornmeal mush for breakfast. “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp,” Washington said in mid-February. Before winter’s end, some 2,500 men, almost a quarter of the army, perished from disease, famine, or the cold. 1 To endure such suffering required stoicism reminiscent of the ancient Romans, so Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men. That

It is cold in my cell. Outside, the harsh winds of February are blowing and I am told it has once again begun to snow. I sit on my cot, a blanket draped over my shoulders, and remember how the delicious heat had enveloped us like a cloak on the day we walked the streets of Livadia. To the north of that Greek town, there are two springs which were known in ancient times as Lethe and Mnemosyne. Forgetfulness and Memory. We drank from both springs, you and I, and then we fell asleep in the dappled shade of an olive grove.

He sat with his cup of tea at the kitchen table. On the window ledge beside him stood the two bottles of cherry brandy, one half empty, the other full. Romantic thoughts stirred in the silence, touching again on unwritten novels and the past. He suddenly had the sensation of being abroad, out of reach of yesterday’s existence. This abroad was a place of tranquillity, a Switzerland of the soul blanketed in snows of peace, permeated with a dread of causing disturbance; where no bird sang or called, as if out of no desire to.

I stick to the road out of habit, but it’s a bad choice, because it’s full of the remains of those who tried to flee. Some were incinerated entirely. But others, probably overcome with smoke, escaped the worst of the flames and now lie reeking in various states of decomposition, carrion for scavengers, blanketed by flies. I killed you, I think as I pass a pile. And you. And you. Because I did. It was my arrow, aimed at the chink in the force field surrounding the arena, that brought on this firestorm of retribution. That sent the whole country of Panem into chaos. In my head I hear President Snow’s words, spoken the morning I was to begin the Victory Tour. “Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem.” It turns out he wasn’t exaggerating or simply trying to scare me. He was, perhaps, genuinely attempting to enlist my help. But I had already set something in motion that I had no ability to control. Burning. Still burning, I think numbly. The fires at the coal mines belch black smoke in the distance. There’s no one left to care, though. More than ninety percent of the district’s population is dead. The remaining eight hundred or so are refugees in District 13 — which, as far as I’m concerned, is the same thing as being homeless forever. I know I shouldn’t think that; I know I should be grateful for the way we have been welcomed. Sick, wounded, starving, and empty-handed. Still, I can never get around the fact that District 13 was instrumental in 12’s destruction. This doesn’t absolve me of blame — there’s plenty of blame to go around. But without them, I would not have been part of a larger plot to overthrow the Capitol or had the wherewithal to do it. The citizens of District 12 had no organized resistance movement of their own. No say in any of this. They only had the misfortune to have me. Some survivors think it’s good luck, though, to be free of District 12 at last. To have escaped the endless hunger and oppression, the perilous mines, the lash of our final Head Peacekeeper, Romulus Thread. To have a new home at all is seen as a wonder since, up until a short time ago, we hadn’t even known that District 13 still existed.

Rona soon picked out her own plot of land - one hundred eighty acres that stretched along the bottom of a rocky hill and only a stone's through from the shoreline. Quickly, much more quickly than natural for a man much less a woman - even one of Rona Blackburn's stature - a house appeared. She filled her new home with reminders of her previous one on the Aegean island she had loved so much: pastel seashells and a front door painted a deep cobalt blue - a color the yiayias always claimed had the power to repel evil. Then she set up her bed, made a pit for her fire, and erected two wooden tables. One table she kept bare. The other she covered in tinctures and glass jars of cut herbs and other fermented bits of flora and fauna. On this table, she kept a marble mortar and pestle, the leather sheath in which she wrapped her knives, and copper bowls - some for mixing dry ingredients, some for liquid, and a few small enough to bring to the mouth for sipping. And when the fire was stoked and the table was set, she placed a wooden sign - soon covered in a blanket of late December snow - outside that blue front door. It read one world: Witch.

Very Like a Whale One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor. Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts, Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else. What foes it mean when we are told That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold? In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of Assyrians. However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus hinder longevity, We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity. Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold? In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are a great many things, But i don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings. No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof; Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof? Frankly I think it very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most, Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host. But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them, With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them. That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson; They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison, And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm. Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm, And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly, What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

The train company does not have that much to carry, but the rest of us are loaded down like pack animals—we carry the full kit with blanket and ground sheet, steel helmet and heavy winter coat thrown over it. We have a full ammunition pouch on the belt, on our backs the kitbag with the field canteen, and on the other side the folded entrenching tool. A gas mask is slung around our necks, resting on the chest, and the heavy rifle swings back and forth from its strap round the neck. Lastly, a ditty bag is carried in one hand, filled with clean socks, underwear and similar items. The whole lot weighs about 40lb.

Blinking and it's dripping, the wet eyes The cold tears or foggy breath Pitter patter, but the melting one The deafening silence, shining My amusement, my curtains The cold, behind the landscape The conscious of aftermath Missing, night lamp lighting A symbolic gesture, raising my arm My bewilderment, this work done The cost of life, my uneven quilts These slurks of cold air, slowly entering By and by grabbed, a handful of curtain Failed to judge, the end of same Eventually, discovered the light Flashing my eyes, my un-dilated pupil The pane partiality covered, but visible The range of Bimar Narsar, like a bride It's blanket of white, flashing everywhere It's been snowing throughout the dark

But the second one was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback going through the mountains of a night. Going through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognise. It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis. The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him. He wants only to lie down in this snow, to rest himself; his legs are tired, his arms ache. To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?

They reached the eastern outskirts of the Dimmerskog on the afternoon of the next day. Although the forest was covered in a thick blanket of white snow, it nevertheless seemed, as Binabik had named it, a place of shadows. The company did not pass beneath its eaves, and might have chosen not to even had their path lain that way, so thick with foreboding was the wood’s atmosphere. The trees, despite their size—and some of them were huge indeed—seemed dwarfish and twisted, as though they squirmed bitterly beneath their burden of needled branches and snow. The open spaces between the contorted trunks seemed to bend away crazily like tunnels dug by some huge and drunken mole, leading at last to dangerous, secretive depths. Passing in near silence, his horse’s hooves crunching softly in the snow, Simon imagined following the gaping pathways into the bark-pillared, white-roofed halls of Dimmerskog, coming at last to—who could guess? Perhaps to the dark, malicious heart of the forest, a place where the trees breathed together and passed endless rumors with the scaly rub of branch on branch, or the malicious exhalation of wind through twigs and frozen leaves. They camped that night in the open again, even though the Dimmerskog crouched only a short distance away like a sleeping animal. None of them wanted to spend a night beneath the forest’s branches—especially Sludig, who had been raised on stories of the ghastly things that stalked the wood’s pale corridors. The Sithi did not seem to care, but Jiriki spent part of the evening oiling his dark witchwood sword. Again the company huddled around a naked fire, and the east wind razored past them all the long evening, sending great powdery spouts of snow whirling all around, and sporting among the Dimmerskog’s upper reaches. When they lay down that night to sleep it was to the sound of the forest creaking, and the wind-ridden branches sawing one against the other.

The dragon's blood had changed him, he realized. Not in a magical way, like in one of Shem Horsegroom's old stones - he couldn't understand the speech of animals, or see a hundred leagues. Well, that was not quite true. When the snow had stopped for a moment today, the white valleys of the Waste had leaped into clarity, seeming as near as the folds ma blanket, but stretching all the way to the dark blur of faraway Aldheorte Forest. For a moment, standing quiet as a statue despite the wind biting his neck and face, he had felt as though he did possess magical vision. As in the days when he climbed Green Angel Tower to see all Erkynland spread below him like a carpet, he had felt as if he could reach out a hand and so change the world But moments like that were not what the dragon had brought him. Pondering as he waited for his damp gloves to dry, he looked to Binabik and Sisqi, saw the way they touched even when they did not touch, the long conversations that passed between the two of them in the shortest of glances. Simon realized that he felt and saw things differently than he had before Urmsheim. People and events seemed more clearly connected, each part of a much larger puzzle - just as Binabik and Sisqi were. They cared deeply for each other, but at the same time their world of two interlocked with many other worlds; with Simon's own, with their people's, with Prince Josua's, and Geloe's... It was really quite startling, Simon thought, how everything was part of something else! But though the world was vast beyond comprehension, still every mote of life in it fought for its own continued existence. And each mote mattered. That was what the dragon's blood had taught him, in some way. He was not great; he was, in fact, very small. At the same moment, though, he was important, just as any point of light in a dark sky might be the star that led a mariner to safety, or the star watched by a lonely child during a sleepless night

Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package. And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time. We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.

The air grew colder and thinner as they rode through the mountain passes.  The sun was high and bright, but Martise wrapped her shawl tightly around her and pressed against Silhara’s back.  Gnat kept a steady pace, breathing harder in the thin air.  Unlike him, the mountain ponies suffered no effects from the rising elevation and clipped ahead at a swift pace.  Patches of snow spilled from embankments onto the rutted paths.  A brisk wind moaned a soft dirge as it whipped through the towering evergreens cloaking the mountainside. Silhara called a sudden halt.  Martise peered around his arm, expecting to see some obstacle in their path.  The way was clear, with only the Kurmans watching them curiously. “What’s wrong?” “You’re quaking hard enough to make my teeth rattle.”  He moved his leg back and untied one of the packs strapped to the saddle.  “Get down.” She slid off Gnat’s back.  Silhara followed and pulled one of their blankets from the packet.  “Here.  Wrap this around you.” She had only pulled the blanket over her shoulders when he picked her up and tossed her onto Gnat’s back once more, this time in the front of the flat saddle.  She clutched the horse’s mane with one hand and held on to her blanket with the other.  Silhara vaulted up behind her, scooted her back against him and took up the reins. “Better,” he said and whistled to the waiting Kurmans he was ready. Martise couldn’t agree more.  The blanket’s warmth and Silhara’s body heat soaked through her clothing and into her bones.  She leaned into his chest.  “This is nice.” An amused rumble vibrated near her ear.  “So glad you approve.”  His hand slipped under the blanket, wandered over her belly and cupped her breast.  Martise sucked in a breath as his fingers teased her nipple through her shawl and tunic.  The heat surrounding her turned scorching.  “I agree,” he murmured in her ear.  “This is nice.” He stopped his teasing when she squirmed hard enough in the saddle to nearly unseat them both, but left his hand on her breast, content to just hold her.  Martise was ready to toss off the blanket and her shawl.  Silhara’s touch had left her with a throbbing ache between her thighs.  She smiled a little at the feel of him hard against her back.  She wasn’t the only one affected by his teasing.

Dinner was a family affair. And oh, how she enjoyed it! Who knew there was so much to talk about each day? She loved when the men shared stories about their work in the mines, while she often regaled them with stories about life in the castle when she was a small child or about the types of birds she spotted from the window. And then there were the questions. She found she had many! After staying silent for so long, there was much she longed to know, and she was always interested in learning more about the men and their lives. She wanted to know who had carved the beautiful wooden doorways and furniture around the cottage, and why the deer and the birds seemed to linger at the kitchen window while she prepped meals. "They must adore you, as we do," gushed Bashful. "And I you!" Snow would say. She found she could talk to them till the candle burned out each night. It felt like she was finally waking up and finding her voice after years of silent darkness. And while she promised the men she would not do more than her share of the housework, she couldn't help trying to find small ways to repay them for their kindness when she wasn't busy strategizing. Despite their protests, she prepared a lunch basket for them to take to work each day. She mended tiny socks. And secretly, she was using yarn and needles she had found to knit them blankets for their beds. It might have been summer, but she couldn't help noticing they had few blankets for the winter months.

Still dark. The Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through a file of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?” “An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.” “You’ve been awake a whole hour?” “My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide out. I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.” “You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.” I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?” In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?” “Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.” I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.” She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.” “I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.” “Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.” I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.” Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?” “No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.” Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?” “Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS AND LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and the a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.” She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?” The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.” “But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.” I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.

Wanna play in the snow? I text back right away: YES! It’s really hot in here. Meet me in the hallway in two min? K. I stand up so fast in my sleeping bag I nearly trip. I use my phone to find my coat, my boots. Stormy is snoring away. I can’t find my scarf, but I don’t want to keep John waiting, so I run out without it. He’s already in the hallway waiting for me. His hair is sticking up in the back, and on that basis alone I think I could fall in love with him if I let myself. When he sees me, he holds his arms out and sings, “Do you want to build a snowman?” and I burst out laughing so hard John says, “Shh, you’re going to wake up the residents!” which only makes me laugh harder. “It’s only ten thirty!” We run down the long carpeted hallway, both of us laughing as quietly as we can. But the more you try to laugh quietly, the harder it is to stop. “I can’t stop laughing,” I gasp as we run through the sliding doors and to the courtyard. We’re both out of breath; we both stop short. The ground is blanketed in thick white snow, thick as sheep’s wool. It’s so beautiful and hushed, my heart almost hurts with the pleasure of it. I’m so happy in this moment, and I realize it’s because I haven’t thought of Peter once. I turn to look at John, and he’s already looking at me with a half smile on his face. It gives me a nervous flutter in my chest. I spin around in a circle and sing, “Do you want to build a snowman?” And then we’re both giggling again. “You’re going to get us kicked out of here,” he warns. I grab his hands and make him spin around with me as fast as I can. “Quit acting like you really belong in a nursing home, old man!” I yell.

Wind in a Box" —after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song. Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006) When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song

Why did you come back to Salt Lake?" I knew the answer before I asked the question and he knew I knew, and it was like you could see the shadow of it hanging there between us. "I needed to see you," he finally said. "It's hard to explain." "You don't have to." "I tried telling my mom once what happed that day. Showed her the hole in the window screen and Moe and even after that she said it was complicated, that my dad's a complicated man and we all needed to try harder to understand him." His voice was shaking now. "And I thought, hey, maybe she's right. Maybe he was just playing around, you know. Maybe we didn't need to run." "We did," I whispered. "That's why I had to come, see?" He didn't move and I didn't move, but in a few seconds I heard him sniffling and he couldn't stop and I knew he was crying. "Cameron." I propped myself up, reached out my arm. "Come here." He got up and came to me, dragging his blanket behind him like a child. I scooted over in my bed to make room. "Come on." He positioned himself beside me-I stayed under the covers, he was on top of them, his head next to mine on the pillow. I stroked his hair and thought of the week he'd lived at our house, the way we slept shoulder to shoulder in our sleeping bags in the living room and I got another good memory. Jennifer, Cameron had said. You awake? His voice was coming from across the room. I sat up. Yeah. Look. He was standing by the living room window. The blinds were closed, but he had his hands on the cord, a big smile on his face. Ready? I nodded, starting to smile myself. One, two, three, Cameron said, then pulled the blind up, hand over hand on the cord like someone on TV. His smile got even bigger as he watched my face. Snow. Giant flakes of it falling in front of the window even though it was only September. Now, I fell asleep with my arm over Cameron's chest, thinking of how the flakes had been slow and white in the glow of the streetlights that lined the apartment walkways, and the smile on his face and on mine, like the snow was personal, a gift he'd given me himself.

went off, without waiting for serving men, and unsaddled my horse, and washed such portions of his ribs and his spine as projected through his hide, and when I came back, behold five stately circus tents were up—tents that were brilliant, within, with blue, and gold, and crimson, and all manner of splendid adornment! I was speechless. Then they brought eight little iron bedsteads, and set them up in the tents; they put a soft mattress and pillows and good blankets and two snow-white sheets on each bed. Next, they rigged a table about the centre-pole, and on it placed pewter pitchers, basins, soap, and the whitest of towels—one set for each man; they pointed to pockets in the tent, and said we could put our small trifles in them for convenience, and if we needed pins or such things, they were sticking every where. Then came the finishing touch—they spread carpets on the floor! I simply said, "If you call this camping out, all right—but it isn't the style I am used to; my little baggage that I brought along is at a discount." It grew dark, and they put candles on the tables—candles set in bright, new, brazen candlesticks. And soon the bell—a genuine, simon-pure bell—rang, and we were invited to "the saloon." I had thought before that we had a tent or so too many, but now here was one, at least, provided for; it was to be used for nothing but an eating-saloon. Like the others, it was high enough for a family of giraffes to live in, and was very handsome and clean and bright-colored within. It was a gem of a place. A table for eight, and eight canvas chairs; a table-cloth and napkins whose whiteness and whose fineness laughed to scorn the things we were used to in the great excursion steamer; knives and forks, soup-plates, dinner-plates—every thing, in the handsomest kind of style. It was wonderful! And they call this camping out. Those stately fellows in baggy trowsers and turbaned fezzes brought in a dinner which consisted of roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose, potatoes, bread, tea, pudding, apples, and delicious grapes; the viands were better cooked than any we had eaten for weeks, and the table made a finer appearance, with its large German silver candlesticks and other finery, than any table we had sat down to for a good while, and yet that polite dragoman, Abraham, came bowing in and apologizing for the whole affair, on account of the unavoidable confusion of getting under way for a very long trip, and promising to do a great deal better in future! It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morning. They call this camping out. At this rate it is a glorious privilege to be a pilgrim to the Holy Land.