Snowbound

   The snowy fields rise to an alabaster sky. The union is seamless, the effect blinding and disturbing. It is like the bright light of the near-death experience, but there is no one there to take us home. We are alone. No word from the county. No phone. No electricity. No way out. We fear we have been forgotten. We wait. In another room someone is playing Tchaikovsky's Winter Dreams on Grandmother's wind-up Victrola. Grandfather, who has been dozing in fits in his chair by the window, wakes.

   

   "Do you remember when Ala and I made love on that snowy mountain in Colorado?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "You've been dreaming. There is no Ala and you've never been to Colorado."

   "What? But aren't we in Colorado as we speak?" he asks.

   "No, Grandfather, we're in Kansas."

   It is snowing again. Saucer-sized portions of the sky tumble straight down, intensifying our sense of claustrophobic isolation. The snow-mantled cedars, outposts of the world as we know it, are now lost to the horizon. The barn, the silo, the broken-down windmill are easing toward us and risk being sucked into the black hole that is this old farmhouse. God help us, we say, for it appears that no one else will. It has been nine days since we last saw the sun and it is madding. Even Grandfather, mad for more winters than we care to remember, appears agitated.

   "Kansas, you say? Kansas?"

   "Yes, Grandfather."

   "Well . . . is it possible it was Dorothy that I was thinking of?"

   "Hush, Grandfather," I say. "Anything is possible. Anything . . . and sometimes nothing." But he is asleep again and not in Kansas anymore.

                                                                                             glwarren 2008, 2014