In Which it Snows in Boonetown

Early morning the Boone Boys rendez-vous at the rendez-vous. Mark Miller, still moon shiney, makes us a breakfast of champions, something that looks like grey matter and tastes ike hard tack but still, the boy worked hard. We all play in the river all day. It is the last time I will play in a river until I try and drown myself (not on purpose) into the Futalfu, down in the stocking foot of South America.

We drive many hours back to the mountain town in North Carolina and wait there for a week. There are a thousand reasons that what happened next happened. Say it needed to. Say there was not another universe where everything remained bright and blue, a perfect autumn never seized upon by the next consecutive season. What happens next is that it starts to snow. It snows all day and all the next, and the snow is blowing through the windows and into the kitchen. The snow drifts through the streets and into restaraunts. It invites itself into open car doors. It blows into my mouth, down my throat and swirls around my lungs. It covers the roads and the houses until nothing about the place is familiar anymore.

We are waiting for what is coming, as always. Charles has dubbed it the After-Slaughter Fest. Whitney and the boys up the hill dress up the house like they be expecting the Queen of England. Instead they get Slash, Oscar, Big Red, Edward, and Me. I come as Winter, because the circumstances begged it. After all, winter masks, freezes, kills, lays down dead and stays, brother, stays put.

I feel rather frostbitten about the whole thing.