tipped ends resting on the ground, the patio, the concrete, the gravel. And the light. The light as it
shone through those crystal palaces, revealing the city of glass hid by darkness, all those things
no one saw but all stood beside, each with its own fortresses and sanctuaries and highways and
towers—or that’s how it seems right then, looking at the tendrils of ice brought into compose, as
intricate as Rome or Paris or the American Great Plains—domed crests of an innumerable
vastness so profound that Dolt fainted and the others didn’t even notice, castles of ice, each with
its own romance, its leonine contention, a hill with no peak, at odds with the end it can’t exist
without.
The snow was still falling too, alongside rain and grey ice, but somehow hardly moving.
It occupied a gentle silence so steady that all worlds toppled to a spool, inventoried breath, then
stared for the first time into mirrors at lives. They could see for miles, across the frozen lake, in
glimpses through the tiny cloud-tufts and with a squint or two involved, this flourishing and
enormous world replaced their bare usual.
They age. Snow, even frozen at night, turns into dust. And Agriss trips and drags a cord
and turns the generator off and all the light is gone. So Marianne steps forward, into the pitcheddark, and a light surrounds her and a light surrounds Agriss, and Marianne looks to him and
speaks: “Do you remember the day we got married? How upset I was because of the rain?
Remember what you said to cheer me up?”
Holding the candle Marianne gave him, Agriss lowers his head, “I do,” he tells her. “I’ll
never forget.” Dust coils indecisive about view. A drift, a pinwheeling succession of noiseless
dormancy, like the bacteria of clouds, being missed or discovered. Dust that crowns yellowed
photographs of children from before.
Marianne, holding her candle, as she looks at Agriss: “You said, ‘Love and good
intentions, we’re in luck if that’s all we have’. Then you reminded me of that time our picnic got
rained on, our cupcakes were ruined, but we ran and hid in a phone booth. That’s when you
knew.” Agriss’s head becomes the cotton of his eyes. A breeze a lash of rives the pall.With a gust
of wind, the candle wicks recoils into smoke. Whiteness undulates through the air like a row of
tilted fences. It is too dark to see. But there are sounds. Like the sound of dust afloat. The sound
of palimpsest children, far-from-brave children with paper faces, with yellow on their shoes,
these children, fading into drafts with the quietest voices, tree-leaves shook by wind, children,
there all along, can you hear them on this night?
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