Free The Sudden Weight of Snow by Laisha Rosnau Page B

down.
    “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home,” Rob Hanshaw repeated, his arm draped out the window, hand adjusting theside mirror. He inched the truck at the speed of my stride. “Come on, no nonsense this time.” I turned to him and he winked. “I promise.”
    It was his gall made me get back into the truck, the offer of a ride home enough of a truce. Later, when I thought about that afternoon, I tried to look for clues to my own lack of anger or indignation. My compliance seemed like something simple. I was hungry for dinner. He was offering me the fastest way home. I felt like larger things were holding me down.
    The sky was glowing with impending snow when Rob Hanshaw dropped me off. Right before the first snowfall, the whole valley glows a washed-out, smoky red. I had noticed this every year since we arrived but had never bothered to ask anyone why this was or if they had noticed. I had read that in the Antarctic the sky flashes bright green the moment before the last slice of sun retreats into the horizon. That in Southeast Asia it rains at the same time every year. Even better, in a part of Mexico it rains at exactly the same time each day for exactly forty-seven minutes. I considered the red sky before snow in Sawmill our own climatic sign, something that linked us with the rest of the world, rain falling like clockwork, skies flashing and glowing in preparation for something else – a sunset, snow.

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    Peter insists it’s different in Arcana. You hear him say, “This is where it’s really happening,” and of the people you left behind, your mother, Susan, included, “They’re in denial up there. Think they’ve escaped but what they don’t know is you have to come back, we have to come back and resist from within now.” Of course you don’t remember these exact words but ones like them. You’ve pieced together your father’s tenets by what he’s said to others.
    Peter gets a job building sets for a local theatre company. You and he sleep in the van behind the theatre, shower in a stall off the dressing room, eat in a place called the green room, which is, in fact, green, the shade of cut grass. The theatre supplies endless adventures. You crawl through the spaces under the seats as though burrowing a tunnel underground and discover that parts of the stage open up, an entire dusty mystery existing under there. You have a small red padded suitcase of Hot Wheels, each car with its own slot. You send the tiny cars down the slope from the back of the theatre to the front toward jumps made out the oddly shaped pieces of wood that Peter has given you. They rarely make the hurdles but you try again and again. You do what you have always done – keep yourselfoccupied, keep out of trouble. You hear other people say to Peter, “Well, he’s the opposite of a handful, ain’t he?” and “Quiet little guy, hey?”
    To you the adults here seem similar to the adults at the farm, except they speak differently, louder and with more enthusiasm. The other kids, well, “Kids are kids,” as you heard someone say. You don’t know how it could be any different and apply this saying to everything: milk is milk, dogs are dogs. Sometimes, you repeat this over and over throughout the day, naming everything you come into contact with. It fills something in you, some kind of space in your head, which you’ve recently begun to think of as the inside of a bubble of Bazooka Joe. You know other people do this too when you hear a woman say, “Let’s call a spade a spade.”
    There is even a woman at the theatre who looks like your mother, small and blonde, soft and bony at the same time, the way birds are. Her name is Anise and soon you and Peter are living with her in the basement of an old house. The people who own the house are old and German and lure you upstairs with fat sausages and sauerkraut. The inside of their house is coated in plastic – plastic walkways down each hall, plastic on the couches, over each