Gary lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and sons, where he works in a hospital as a therapist. His stories have published stories in TQR, Antithesis Common, Green Silk Journal, and Daikaijuzine.

"Why don't we suck helium from the balloons and make phone calls, while we're waiting." My twelve-year-old son Charley says this from the window, where he's watching his breath fog and crystallize. Next to him a life-size balloon replica of Jack Nicholson stands guard. Jack's the only one we're not going to maim.

"You guys are bad," says Debbie, the day nurse, and giggles. She giggles a lot, not because she's particularly young or goofy, but because she's flirting with fear. We're out in the snow country with an old man who's exhaling his life away, and the house is haunted to boot.

My father's in his rented hospital bed, nose pointed in the air, slits of his nostrils collapsing while looking for oxygen. A thin feeding tube snakes under the blanket. He used to have the body of Jack Lalanne, but now he's deflating. He hasn't been awake for four weeks and three days, for 535,680 breaths, and Charley's counting. Not to be mean, he just likes to calculate, because he's brilliant. He's in school limbo right now, and I'm in work limbo, so staying in my father's house suits us.  Plus we're all the old man has, with my mother dead and his second wife remarried and Mary Jane a ghost.

"You could use a little helium, Debbie," I say.

"Helium," says Charley, fingering the frozen pane, "atomic weight 4.002602. One of the noble gases."  Since his mother left us he's anchored himself with knowledge, with trusted things that can't change.

"If I take some and scream, will it scare her off?" Debbie asks. She's shaking a little, but she's a brave soul. She's starting to like it, even though this wasn't in her contract.

On cue, we hear the squeak of the bathtub faucet upstairs. "It's worth a try," I say. "I'll go." I snatch the Orson Welles balloon and head up the stairs.

I recall the steps of my first house, covered with my father's balloons of all sizes, drifting up and down as if carrying on lives of their own. My mother (who was never allowed to kick them, but did secretly) called them the children of his obsession. But these poor kids couldn't rise, filled with only his breath.

Maybe our ghost Mary Jane is like that, drifting around, trapped within a membrane of my father's making, and we must set her free.

Outside the bathroom door I poke a little hole in Orson with my pen-knife. I fill my lungs with Orson breath and swing into the room. "Mary Jane! You must leave this house at once! You are free to go! Free!"  My squeaky voice bounces off tiled walls. Ironic, Orson's voice so high. I see stars and fall across the old-fashioned tub, where the running hot water steams my face. The steam changes to snow before my eyes and flies out the open window.  Maybe that's her. I turn off the water and quickly close the window, shivering. I hear Charley cracking up at the foot of the stairs. I open my mouth but it's someone else's helium giggle that echoes around me. I toss the dying Orson in the tub and tear the hell out of there.

∞

My father is Robert Hardy, founder of Party Hardy, largest balloon supplier in the area. While other party centers had spread themselves thin over napkins and tablecloths and favors and whatnot, my father stuck with balloons only. No karaoke machines, but if you wanted a balloon that looked like a karaoke machine, he was your man. He could probably replace every object on the planet with a balloon, and then the Earth itself.

When I was growing up, he personally tried to resemble a balloon. He wanted to bulge and stretch and hulk around in cartoonish ways. In the days before fitness centers he would pump iron in our basement, often banging the rafters with the free weights so hard my mother would yell down. He shaved his body, too, so he could work the springs across his chest without worry and rub his skin until it squeaked. He had a little booklet he referred to, which he had sent away for from the back of one of my comic books: You too can have a sculpted 44- inch chest! Simple exercises, guaranteed results! He got the promises and I got the X-ray glasses.

He developed his great lung capacity by, of course, blowing up balloons. Sometimes he blew one after another in quick succession and got so dizzy I had to hold him up. Sometimes he would still be dizzy when he went upstairs, and would crash into the kitchen table, destroying my mother's perpetual game of solitaire.

When I looked at him with my X-ray specs, there was nothing inside.

∞

After dark Debbie is still here, even though her shift ended at four. It's not because of the snow this time; she just wants to stay. She's just ended a relationship with a jerk that roughed her up, and she's hungry for shelter, even if there's a ghost involved. Earlier she hid her car in the garage, and now she's hiding herself in the study, sipping wine and a little noble gas from Mel Gibson's left ear, gazing at the fire. Not that her replacement -- an older, quiet woman named Joan, who never leaves my father's room or speaks to me -- would ever catch her. Debbie is intrigued by our situation, and I am intrigued by her. I think even Charley has a crush.

She curls into a white, kittenish ball on the sofa. "So, how did this Mary Jane die?" She curves a hand over the bruise on her temple.

Charley fingers my father's globe while sneaking looks at her toes in white nylon. 

"That's another story of balloons." I take a sip from Dolly Parton's left breast and my Dolly voice says, "Or should I say, BAZOOMS!" I give Dolly a kick and she veers dangerously close to the fire, but her sandbag, resembling a jeweled saddlebag, saves her.

Charley snickers, emptying part of Liza Minelli's head.

(These are the balloons sent by House of Celebrities, run by my father's ex-partner and nemesis, and we are going to torture them. Except for Jack.)

"My old man wanted her to get a boob job before he'd marry her. She was twenty years younger than him. She was against it, but she loved him. He gave her the money. But when she came back he decided she needed her face worked on to go with the new boobs. She called me and cried to me. She was drunk. He's cruel, she said. I told her not to let it get to her, that he was a self-centered ass. She went out driving the new car he'd bought her, and crashed. But what killed her was this—and I kid you not: air bag failure."

Debbie squeezes Mel's neck and his smile collapses. "No. Get out. That's like a punchline."

"I swear."

"True story," Charley squeaks, stomping Liza into the rug like a giant cigarette butt. "Start spreadin' the boobs," he sings, in canary falsetto.

"How do you know it's her in this house?" Debbie hugs Mel and he hisses.

"Charley, bring out the item."

Charley opens a closet door and returns with a bra waving from the end of a coat-hanger.

"Size 34-a," I say. "The before size. Every morning it's hanging from the fireplace and we put it back in the closet. Once we buried it in the back of a kitchen drawer. It doesn't matter where you put it. It always comes back."

"Ooh, can I try it tonight?"

∞

My father was always disappointed in me. I didn't want to be like him. I was his opposite. I admired deflation.  I wanted to read and go unnoticed. I wanted to be the umbilicus of a busted balloon with the mysterious bit of string attached, leaving someone to ponder. So after a while I got my wish: he didn't bother with me. He was no ponderer.

He did show up in a big way at all my events, though, if only to supervise and admire his balloons. On birthdays the balloons crowded the house top to bottom, fun at first, then terrorizing kids with their insistent presence. They advanced with the years: red-faced pirates, clowns with bubble noses and dangling paper accordion legs. My father wouldn't dabble in the twisty shapes: that was blasphemy, something for hated magicians and clowns, those who would inflict pain and punishment on his babies.

On film they mugged our sweaty bodies, bopped us and stuck with static, stealing our air, our lives.  In pictures: balloon, balloon, balloon, kid's face, balloon, balloon, half a kid's face, balloon, kid's startled eyes. Always a kid crying, afraid of the crazy father. 

 Same at my wedding. Just substitute drunken grown-ups. And Charley's birth? Wet dark crown of head between blue balloons, red face of angry obstetrician.

Eventually he cast off from my mother and me, like some master of ceremonies rising in his hot air balloon, chuckling at the figures growing tiny below him and tossing out limp balloon bodies to be blown-up to inherit the earth.

∞

After Debbie sheds her uniform she's still white. Her soft glow rivals the virgin snow in the moonlight. On the bed, her curves and slopes match the surreal landscape outside.

 With a sly look she hides Mary Jane's bra under her pillow. "Now, that's scary," she says, shivering in my arms. "Hold me."

We don't make love -- we just cling, shrinking yet aroused with fear, waiting for the door to open, or something ... we'll wait all night. But of course we can't. We wake to brilliant light, icy lips, the windows wide open. Our covers are dusted with snow. And of course the bra is gone, hung on the mantel with care. A tiny icicle hangs from the clasp and refuses to melt. Something is inside the icicle, and Charley gets his magnifying glass. "It says, ‘Get her out of my house.'" He looks at Debbie ominously, eyes looming. Then he says, "Just kidding. It's just soot or something."

∞

This is how my father got into his present state: a contest. Seventy-years-old, still a physical specimen, he decided to organize a balloon-blowing-up contest. Any and all takers, five-thousand dollars for anyone that could beat him. All balloons supplied and inspected by disinterested third parties. Most balloons in five minutes wins. If needed, a one minute tie-break. My father was four times older than some of the contestants. His business competitors were there, along with the hated Jack Johnson, his ex-partner who had stolen his second wife.

It took place on the basketball court of the fitness center my father built.

At about minute three, with my father leaving the dizzy competitors far behind, he suddenly grabbed his head. His knees buckled and slammed the hardwood. I was watching this from the fringe of the crowd, because I didn't want him to have the satisfaction that I was there. I also was rooting for him to lose.

He had a large bleed inside his head, and was flown by helicopter to the city for surgery. When he came to his room he had a bolt in his head, measuring pressure. Doctors spoke openly in front of us, like we were invisible -- prognosis poor. Charley studied the ventilator, which delivered twenty breaths-a-minute to my father's lungs. He began his calculations. We listened to the soft exhalations from a port on the side. Charley cornered a technician. "How are those volumes measured? Heated wire? Flow transducer?" The technician fled, goose-bumps on his arms. Charley figured my father would exhale 20,000 liters per day. How many balloons was that? "He's on fifty-per-cent oxygen," Charley continued, in manic fashion. "Normal in the air around us is twenty-one percent. See that module there? That measures exhaled carbon dioxide. Twenty-eight, in millimeters of mercury." His voice rose to a shrill craziness. "That corresponds to the carbon dioxide in his blood. They like to keep it low. Reduces swelling in the brain."

"Do you need to cry?" I asked him, and he buried his head in my shoulder.

Later, on the hospital sidewalk, he shouted at a man who was smoking. "Carbon monoxide is combining with your red blood cells, robbing them of their oxygen carrying capacity! That will kill you!"  When the man ignored us the tip of his cigarette flared angrily. 

∞

This house has been a blessing for all of us. It's so peaceful. Mary Jane mostly just moves things around and closes doors; she's not a noisy ghost. Once in a while we hear her crying up in the attic. Charley's mind has stopped racing. He's still thoughtful, but within limits. Debbie, who has quit her job and moved in with us, seems content to wander from room to room. She wears Mary Jane's clothes. And even though I will lose my father, it's not like he was very real to me, so this is like a long sleepy vacation. 

He continues to breathe twenty times a minute, some primitive drive set in his brain. Charley works the numbers.

No one calls on us. It seems the old man had offended everyone he knew, ensuring his loneliness.  The snow around the house remains unspoiled by prints. No squirrels come, no birds. It seems strange. I suspect the shotgun over the mantel is to blame.

Every few days a truck delivers a balloon from Jack Johnson, the bastard. The truck speeds off, leaving them at the door. Today it's Rocky, his gloves protecting his chin. A voice chip inside him says, "Yo! Get better so I can knock you out!" We slice him from his anchor and watch him sail into the brilliant sky.

∞

One night as we're cuddling in bed, we hear Mary Jane sobbing above us. 

"Poor thing," says Debbie, pulling me closer. "Do you think it's because he didn't really love her?" Then she asks me about my wife.

"I don't know where she went. She just disappeared one day. I think she took off with a fellow teacher of mine."

"You were a teacher?"

"I was. I still am. Just can't find anything."

"Teach me something."

We're interrupted by Mary Jane's song, rising to a wail.

"Come on," says Debbie, jumping up and putting on one of Mary Jane's robes. "Let's see if we can help her."

"Maybe she's just upset you're taking all her clothes. No, really, I don't think this is a good idea."

But she's already at the steps with a hand on the door.

"That could just be the wind," I say hopefully.

"There is no wind."

"What's gotten into you?"

"Love."

Mary Jane stops as soon as we open the door. An icy current zips past us carrying dusty snow. "That's her," I say. I'm hoping to close the door and return to bed, but Debbie wants to investigate. She tells me she's been missing a lot of life up to now. She whips her flashlight from a deep pocket.

"This is creepy," she says, standing over a coffin-sized cardboard box. "It's you."

"What the hell?" I hold up one of the flat foil balloons, looking into my own lifeless eyes. There are at least twenty more of me in the box, and under me come all the Charleys.

"Who's this, then?" Debbie delves deeper into the box.

"That's Mary Jane." My jaw shivers with the weirdness of it.

"God, what was he up to?"

"Planning to replace us with balloons. His plan for the whole world."

"And look. Here's Mary Jane's obituary. And ... yours. And Charley's."

"Give me that."

Debbie reads with her head tucked against me, trembling. "Says you and Charley died ... of carbon monoxide poisoning ... from a bad heater ... no working alarm..."

"How do you think he did this? It looks just like hers. It even looks like it's from a paper. Oh, that sick bastard. Planning to do us in."

Debbie suddenly holds the bruise on her head. "Oh, my God. Oh, my God!"

I grab her robe and pull her face to mine. A frigid breath sucks the papers into blackness beyond us. "Listen, we're perfectly alive, you and me and Charley. Do you understand? If we weren't we'd be able to see Mary Jane, right? Here, slap me. Ow. Not so hard. I'm not your ex."

I pinch her ear, hard. "See?" I slam my head into a rafter and the hollow sound echoes through unseen spaces. Above us, snow slides on the roof. "See how real we are?"

She cries. "Why haven't I left here?"

"Because you want to stay. Isn't that so?"

"I thought so."

"Sure. Now let's go back to bed. What we need is to get under the covers, and pull them over our heads until morning. That always helps." I tenderly kiss her bruise. "And tomorrow, I think, we should help the old man along on his journey."

∞

Charley taps Clint Eastwood's trigger finger and makes a new message for the answering machine. "We're all here, listening, so speak."

No one calls.

I don't tell him about what we found in the attic, but I tell him an idea I have.

We fill Dolly with my father's exhaled air, holding her breast to his lips and squeezing for a seal. It's time consuming. We clip the breast with a fresh-saver. The newest nurse, a colorless young woman, doesn't seem to care what we do. She just reads her magazine and shivers. Before her shift ends I call the agency and cancel any further nursing care. "Because he's a monster," I say to their answering machine. "We'll take care of him ourselves." No one else shows up, so apparently they got my message.

But later in the day Jack Johnson's truck pulls up and dumps a half dozen balloon nurses. Bastard.

∞

Debbie is curled in her kitten ball at the foot of my father's bed. "He's dying," she says. "You should forgive him."

"I forgive him," I say, gathering some more of his expired essence into Dolly. 

Charley's at the window, reciting. "Helium was first detected by Pierre Janssen, in 1868, as an unknown spectral line from a solar eclipse. Mysterious yellow emission from the sun." He turns to look at us, and seems frightened. "Unknown spectral line," he repeats.

∞

It's during one of our long delicious naps that we lose my father, literally.  Charley's on the rug by the fire, Debbie's on the sofa, I'm in the big chair. We're just coming around, it's still light out, the snow lavender. We stretch, refilling our limbs. When we finally make our way to his room we discover the empty bed. Mary Jane sobs above.

The answering machine blinks. "Yes, to whom it may concern, this is Tony from Vilardo's funeral home. There may be a problem with Mr. Hardy's final instructions."

When I call back I get their machine. "What did you bastards do, come get him while we were sleeping? Is Johnson behind this? I bet he wasn't even dead yet! Pick up the phone, you cowards!"

Later we get a call-back. It's not even a real voice this time, it's computer generated. "Please advise. Mr. Hardy wished to be skinned and have his skin sewn into a balloon and filled with helium and released from the mountain. This may be illegal or at least immoral. Please advise."

"Cool," says Charley.

I call back and get the machine. "No, he was nuts. That's going too far. Jesus, can I just talk to a real person?"

It's not long before we get a visitor, a Mr. Harris from the funeral home. I look around but see no vehicle, and notice also that he's left no prints, that despite being a short, fat man he's strangely light on his tiny feet. In fact, his feet seem to just brush the snow, to hover.  A strange hiss or wheeze comes from his head. I have to put a hand on the shoulder of his black coat to keep him from bobbing so much and making me nauseous. His voice sounds electronic. "Something quite troubling ... these instructions. I don't believe it's right. I don't think we can do it." He keeps repeating until finally I take my little knife and slit his throat. I hold the tiny chip between my fingers and it's still talking:  "It's not right ... I don't think we can do it ... we can do it ... we can..." I move Mr. Harris's metallic skin with the toe of my slipper. In the snow next to him is a paper with the time and place of the funeral.

∞

"Mary Jane?" I call out. "We're going to the funeral. Do you want to go with us? Can you?"

"How would we know if she's with us?" Debbie asks, and I shrug.

Charley's thinking about it. "I really think she's trapped here," he says.

 Opening the garage we discover that Debbie's car is gone, as well as mine. We blame Johnson. So we climb into my father's Hummer. I get in back with Debbie and hug her. I let Charley drive, what the hell. He mows down the mailbox, a stone lion, some fence posts. The road's not plowed, and it's hard to tell where it ends and the fields begin. We go through a brook and up a steep hill, snap a wire fence and pass within inches of a barn. 

"Is this the right direction, Charley?" I ask.

"The navigation system says yes and no. There's a red light on."

We sail over a bank and end up sideways on Main Street. "I'd say red means go!"

"Ooh, do we have time for a coffee?" Debbie points to the Donut Hole, directly before us.

Charley guns it over the curb and through the hedge. He hits ice and then the building, creating a new drive-thru entrance, nose of the Hummer through glass. Customers and employees peep from beneath tables and counters at our opening doors, then scatter to every exit.

"I'm the son of Robert Hardy!" I proclaim, feeling wild and crazy. "The Balloon King?"

"This is great!" says Charley. "This is the most fun I've ever had!"

"I feel so alive!" I shout.

Debbie raids the donut bins. I kiss her mouth -- which tastes delicately of powdered sugar -- for five minutes straight.

We serve our own coffee. Charley tries an espresso. Cops come and poke around the Hummer but don't even notice us sitting there. The terrible truth begins to dawn on me. I kiss Debbie's bruise.

Charley looks around, puzzled. "Dad?"

The inevitable truck pulls up, dumping a load of balloon cops.

∞

We walk the remaining blocks to the church, where we find Jack Johnson's replica on the lawn, holding a sign which reads: ROBERT HARDY SERVICE, 10:00. "Excuse me," I say, and go stab the shit out of him.

Parked out front is a bus from the children's hospital, filled with colored balloons. When we open the big wooden door we find the last two rows filled with children who stare at us as we walk up the aisle. They see us! Many of them look frail and washed-out, ghostly. Some are hooked to IV's. There are nurses with them. One little girl coughs and smiles a sweet angel smile at me. 

Aside from the kids, there is only a handful of real people, all in the front row. The rest of the pews are crowded with balloon people, standing and bobbing and brushing together so it sounds like they're whispering. 

Johnson is up front with Anne, the wife he stole from my father. Her eyes are dry. He's running a camcorder, taping this masterpiece of his, so I summon a forceful thought and knock it from his hand. He retrieves it with a look of panic. He holds his chest for a second and pops a little pill into his mouth. Anne touches his arm. "Spasm?" she whispers.

I walk right up and open my father's casket. When I rub his cheek it squeaks, like it has a coating of latex.

"How many?" I ask Charley, nodding at the balloon people.

He squints and flicks his eyes, done counting in five seconds. "Three-fifty," he says.

"How long?"

He closes his eyes to calculate. "Eleven minutes. Half with two of us." He smiles and produces a jackknife from his pocket.

"You take that side. Go!"

We cut them from their little sandbags. The children giggle and clap as the people float up through the stained-glass sunlight and gather in the vaulted ceiling. Their voice chips are all talking at once, making a racket of echoes. I pick out some of the words: "Johnson's the man. Johnson's always been the man. Hardy is number two." The children are giggling hysterically.  

Jack Johnson is stumbling around, holding his chest and shouting, "What's happening here? What's happening?"

We're done in five minutes, leaving the place in chaos.  "Let's get out of here," I say to the kids as we're heading out the door, and they stream after us, followed by alarmed nurses calling, "Children?" 

"We're scared," one girl calls over her shoulder, and winks at me. The rest of the kids run screaming and giggling towards the bus.

"Why are you here?" I ask her.

"Because Mr. Hardy gave lots of money for us. Lots of money."

"Really? I didn't know that."

"Like a million dollars." The whites of her eyes have a yellow tint, and I think she's bald under her knit cap. My heart aches. "We're going to send up all those balloons to honor him."

One of the nurses catches up to her. "Laura? What are you doing?"

"We want to do the balloons."

"Of course. We do that at the end."

"We want to do it now," Laura whines. She winks at me. "We're bored and scared. This is creepy."

"Well," the nurse sighs, " everything does seem to be falling apart. Okay, get the balloons."

"Yay!"

They are fast for sick kids. One rides the IV pole over ice. They emerge with their clusters of red and blue and green and orange balloons. Some of the smaller ones are nearly lifted off the ground.

Johnson comes stumbling down the steps. "Wait! It's not time!" He fumbles with his camcorder. Debbie takes a deep breath and blows sharply into his face, freezing his eyelids. He falls to his knees, screaming. Debbie shrugs and looks at me with a limp but beautiful smile of resignation.

"Awesome!" says Charley, and when Johnson goes to stand up Charley conjures a formula of math and physics, an invisible Einstein mass, which knocks him back on his ass and keeps him there. Johnson struggles like a bug crushed by gravity while we watch the balloons sail away and the children cheer.  

∞

We walk all the way home, careful not to say what we're thinking, ten miles without being tired or cold or seeing our breath. No cars pass. The snow is one continuous, unmarked blanket, even though I can't remember it snowing recently. Yet when I hold Debbie's little hand it's warm, and I feel the pulse in her palm against mine. That's the only thing that seems fair, the only thing to keep us going now that my father is gone. Debbie looks at me but doesn't say it: Now what?

Later, as we're lounging by the fire, Mary Jane starts breaking dishes in the kitchen. "I guess she'll get it out of her system," says Charley.

"Maybe I can talk to her with my father's breath. Maybe she'll hear that." I unclip Dolly and draw a deep breath. "How do I sound?"

"Holy shit, that's his voice, Dad. It's him."

I laugh his booming laugh. "It is."

"Talk to her," says Debbie. "Tell her you love her, that now you'll be with her, that this time you'll be kind and gentle and ... well ... live only for her."

I stand against the door, holding and using Dolly like a bagpipe. "Mary Jane? It's Bob. I want to say I'm sorry for what I did to you. I was a fool..." suck, suck... "and hopefully I'll see you here." Debbie nods encouragement next to me. "I love you, Mary Jane..." suck... "I always did love you and always will. And you're free now."

Silence from the kitchen. After a minute we peek. "I can see her," Debbie whispers. We all can see her, standing over the broken dishes, just the wavery silver aura of her naked body, her face blurred with some unreadable emotion.

∞

Later I get another idea. I call the children's hospital, but hang up when I hear, "Hello? Hello?" They can't hear my real voice. 

"I want to sound like Johnson," I tell Charley, "but I think Dad's voice is too booming."

"Hmmm. Why not dilute it with a little helium, take it down a notch."

"You're a genius."

I dial the number. I take a hit from Dolly and a sip from one of the nurses. "Yes, this is Jack Johnson. I'd like to talk to someone about making a very large donation."

And still later, with a bit left in old Dolly, I call Johnson. Anne answers.

"Hi Anne. Bob here."

"Who's doing this?" Her own voice is shaky.

"It's me." I call her Muppet, the secret name I'd heard my father call her. She lets out a little cry. "I did love you, Muppet. I'm so sorry I was a jerk. Forgive me. Part of me will always love you."

I hear a sigh and a thump, then Jack's on the phone. "What is going on?"

"It's Bob. You know it's me." I can almost feel him holding his chest, fumbling for his little pill bottle. 

Dolly's breast is starting to crunch against my face. "This is what I want, Jack. I want my last wishes honored. Make me into a balloon, Jack. I know you can do it. You're the man. You've always been the man. I want to see myself floating through the sky. I'll be watching."

I hear his harsh breathing, his inability to speak. Then I hear him go thump as well.

I hang up and say to Charley, "Oops."

∞

So we wait, we nap. Mary Jane cries no more. Now and then we get glimpses of her. She's put clothes on. I think she sees us, too, and soon may come to us.

The next morning (or maybe it's many mornings later) Charley calls us to the front door. "Look!"

"What is that?"

"I think it's him."

Charley fetches the binoculars.

"He's smiling, at least. It's weird and stretched out, but I believe it's a smile."

His skin shines gold.  He crosses the sky with the sun, as if tethered to it.

"Helios," Charley whispers, awestruck.

∞

Each day he rises and sets with the sun.

One afternoon, after my father has set, someone comes and places a sign in the snow. We venture outside to look at it. Debbie clutches my hand. She's frightened. The miles of snow are rippled like desert sand, and some fresh stuff whirls about us in a clockwise direction. The sky grows dark but then lightens again from the edges. It seems to be stretching, expanding, turning silver. We hold one another, because it feels like we're moving faster now, our little contained world rising, free at last.

© 2007 Gary Moshimer