From the window, she watches her son make a snow angel. His little arms outstretched, arcing the snow into wings, his puffy red coat like a puckered scar on the snow. The branches at the yard’s edge fray down to the ground like fingers trailing. They remind her of a childhood game, silly, strangely intimate: X marks the spot with a line and a dot and a dash-dash-dash and a b i g question mark, someone writing on her arm with a fingertip. Trying to decipher the symbols through touch was strangely hard, like watching invisible ink fade, one shape eliding with another. Cool breeze prefaced breath on her neck that always made her shiver. Then her friend would crack an egg on her head, fingers pulling through her hair down shoulder blades to vertebrae to rib cage, circles up and down and all the way around as they giggled. It was about that age that she tried to shake snow from a cedar tree, pulling the lowest branch back with her mittened hands. She remembers how suddenly it slipped her grasp and thrashed back icy and sharp into one eye, how that eye wept for days. Now she watches the snow angel’s legs sweep back and forth until the ground shows, bits of mud streaking here and there like broken parentheses on paper. Then he lies so still that he must be holding his breath; she sees the exhalation when it marks the air, floats, suspends for a second, disappears. When he comes inside, he says he can’t feel his fingers and starts to cry as they tingle and burn. Why are your eyes watering? he asks her through his tears as she helps him pull his wet sleeves one by one from each arm, the puddles beneath them on the floor circling deeper and wider.
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Elinor Ann Walker’s recent work is featured or forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal, The Rappahannock Review, Plant-Human Quarterly, Black Bough Poetry, Northwest Review, Wordpeace, Pidgeonholes, and Ruby. A Best Microfiction and Best of the Net nominee, she prefers to write outside.