Outside, it is snowing. The wind makes a sound like a lowing ghost. My brother and his girlfriend dress to go sledding. The girlfriend comes from a place where it never snows. Her skin is sun-dark and she smells like ocean sand. When flakes land on her mouth, she licks them away, swallows them down. She says: This is beautiful.
My mother likes this one; my mother liked the last ones too. Series of placid, soft-voiced girls who watch me doing dishes at the sink, who want her recipe for lasagna, who don’t eat like this at home, who say okay when my brother suggests things like sledding, little hush voices, okay, okay, okay.
Outside, it is snowing.
My brother and his girlfriend have found the old childhood sled. It is purpler than I remember. I watch them from the window, write your name into my fog-breathed frost, wipe it away with the back of my suds-wet hand.
My brother and his girlfriend fly down the hill, mouths going open wide, they could be laughing or crying or something else. And they go down and down the hill, and fall away into the white and white and white.
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Cathy Ulrich washes a lot of dishes by hand. Her work has been published in various journals, including CutBank, Wigleaf, and Passages North.