Free The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

kitchen. She’s like a Victorian sleepwalker, alabaster in her white nightgown. Tyler stands, goes to her as if she’s just returned from a journey.
    “Hey there,” he says, draping his arms over the fragile bones of her shoulders, gently pressing his forehead to hers.
    She murmurs happily. They stand, embracing, for a while. This has become a morning ritual. Beth may or may not be thinking what Tyler is thinking, but she seems to know that a period of sleepy morning no-speak is important. She’s never said anything as she stands in Tyler’s arms after awakening; she either knows or intuits that conversation will take them into a different day, they’ll be two lovers talking, which will happen soon enough but is not what these first-thing-in-the-morning clutches are meant to be; is not this interlude of shared repose, this utter quiet, when they can still hold and be held, when they can stand together without speaking, the two of them, alive, for now, in the ongoing silence.

B arrett walks the snowblown street, trailing two feet of green plaid scarf (his one concession to color) that, released from the hunker of his heavy gray coat, twists and eddies behind him.
    It’s funny. When he ran through the storm an hour ago, wearing nothing but shoes and shorts, the cold felt enlivening, an ether that transformed him, like a man who falls overboard and discovers, to his astonishment, that he can breathe underwater. In boots and coat and scarf, however, Barrett just trudges along like anybody, a miniature Admiral Peary negotiating the ice field of Knickerbocker, no aspect of the fleet messenger about him, no wings threatening to burst from his ankles, just a guy leaning into the wind, putting one heavy boot in front of the other.
    The shop will be cozily unilluminated, free of trade, the merchandise orderly and promising. It will be a sanctuary, uncompromised until the doors are opened to the seekers of Japanese jeans or intentionally wonky hand-knitted scarves or an original Madonna T-shirt from the
Like a Virgin
tour.
    Twenty minutes later, Barrett emerges from the L train onto Bedford Avenue. The world is awake now. The corner deli glows fluorescent in the snow. People walk bundled, heads down. This early, Williamsburg is all commuters, men and women with regular jobs, wrapped in pricey down greatcoats, in Burton parkas, members of the nomadic New York tribe that colonizes the grim outer neighborhoods after the younger and more reckless citizens have opened coffeehouses and shops, as Liz and Beth did seven years ago, wondering how insane it was to try to sell their particular offerings in what had been a Polish travel agency, with a butcher shop on one side (now a stratospherically expensive children’s clothing boutique) and, on the other, a Goodwill store (which has, over the past decade, been a succession of failed restaurants, and is soon to re-open, at the hands of some new optimist, as what appears to be a perfect replica of a Parisian bistro, right up to its faux-nicotine-stained walls).
    Even in its waking state, Williamsburg is quieted by the snow, veiled and muffled, humbled, reminded that a megalopolis is still subject to nature; that this vast noisy city resides on the same earth that has, for millennia, inspired sacrifices and wars and the erecting of temples, in an effort to appease a deity who could, at any moment, wipe it all away with one flick of a titanic hand.
    A young mother, hooded, with a scarf pulled up to her nose, pushes a baby carriage, its small occupant obscured by a translucent plastic cover that zips up the front. A man in an orange anorak walks two fox terriers, both of which wear red booties.
    Barrett turns onto North Sixth. There, in the middle of the block, is the brown-brick sternness of St. Anne’s Armenian Church. He passes it every day. Ordinarily it’s closed up, its windows dark and its imitation-medieval doors locked. Barrett’s comings and goings don’t coincide with the