Free 33 Snowfish by Adam Rapp

if it might make her ribs go back down, but she just looks away and stares off with them big froggy eyes.
    I even told her about this skinny little snowfish I seen swimming in the Crow Wing River, way over by where Boobie hides the Skylark. I told her how it was doing somersaults and flipping its fins around. And I told her how I was going to catch it and give it to her so she could gut it and clean it and cook it up, but she just half-smiled so you could see how her teeth is turning gray.
    It don’t help that it started snowing sideways.
    Every time Curl coughs it sounds like her lung bubbles is tearing. Boobie keeps her wrapped in this sheepskin coat he stole from a Wendy’s when we was still back in Wisconsin. We was just about to cross the border on Highway 2 and big-ass Lake Superior was all huge and icy-looking off in the distance when he saw that rest-stop sign and pulled over. He walked into the Wendy’s in his plain white T-shirt and walked out with that sheepskin coat and a big bag of French fries.
    Now Boobie wears this old softball jacket that he found in the trunk of the Skylark. It’s blue and it says “Elliot” on the chest.
    The baby wears this little puffy snowsuit that Curl stole from this big outlet store off the highway. It’s pink and it’s got a hood. Sometimes we put this McDonald’s napkin over his face so it don’t get frostbit. We make sure to poke a hole in it so he can breathe. It’s weird cuz it makes the baby look like a doll that never got finished. Sometimes I have to look under it cuz I get this spooky-ass feeling that his face has disappeared. It’s always there, though.
    We’ve been keeping a coffee can lit in the back of the van and that fire gets to blazing pretty crisp sometimes, but Curl just keeps shaking and coughing. And she picks at her hands so hard it’s like she’s trying to pull the moons out of her fingernails. The only time she leaves the van is to shit and piss.
    Boobie taped newspapers to the windows to keep the snow out. We found some old yellow curtains that was in the trunk of the Skylark, too, but we only put one of them on the window. Curl uses the other one as a blanket.
    We all sleep in our clothes. My pants feel like they’ve growed right over my skin. And I got a bruise on my leg from my gat.
    Even though she knows she ain’t supposed to get no colder, every night Curl wakes me up and begs me to pull one of them newspapers back cuz she thinks there’s a big black turkey hopping around outside the van. She says it’s got monster wings and that she can hear it dancing on the roof. She says she can feel how that black turkey wants to reach inside her chest with one of its long greasy turkey toes and steal her heart.
    But every time I pull the newspapers back there ain’t nothing there. Curl says it flies away when I look cuz it can read my thoughts or some shit. I know all that black turkey stuff ain’t nothing but maybe some dream Curl had, but I still play along with the newspaper game almost every night just to make her feel better.
    After the first sideways snow all the birds that ain’t tough flew away in big boomerangs. Then the trees died. Curl says the trees died cuz birds got medicine in their wings that keeps the trees alive. Sometimes at night you can hear them dead trees breathing.
    Yesterday Boobie scraped some cough syrup from a Amoco station in this town called Oylen, but all that did was make Curl fall asleep twice as long. And she slept so hard we was afraid she wasn’t gonna wake up. She was so still shit got kind of scary for a minute. That froggy heartbeat in her eye almost stopped like four times. Boobie had to draw on her with a marker to make her wake up. For some reason he drew a fish. He drew it right on her face, too. That shit looked kinda spooky and dead to me. Maybe it’s cuz he gave the fish a X instead of a eye. For some reason it made Curl wake up.
    When Boobie wasn’t looking I tried to wipe that fish off of