Life in the Snow

Doug Ramspeck

It was coming down hard enough that it was difficult to see. Some of the cold snow worked its way beneath the collar of his jacket. He knew he was on the right street, but everything there seemed out on some liminal edge of familiarity. And the snow seemed to be breaking everything into pieces, the world unraveling itself into pale ash. It was a marvel to know he hadn't been back to Chicago in more than thirty years, not since the winter he was eleven. He had parked the rental car near Stinson Park, but now he couldn't seem to remember which duplex had been theirs, which number. Shouldn’t he be able to remember at least that? He was trying to use his eyes to decide, but no place looked right. Was it possible it had been torn down or remodeled beyond recognition? What had brought him back to Illinois was his aunt's funeral, and the trip from Oak Park had been on a whim... so he could stand once more in that place he'd been so eager to leave. The memories felt like dark talismans. They included the siren that had drawn him outside on the evening his brother had been struck and killed by a passing car. They included the two times the police had dragged his father from the duplex. They included how quiet his mother always seemed when she drank, as though gin contained within it some magical elixir that transformed flesh into statuary, her expression frozen into rictus. Or maybe the duplex no longer existed because the boy he'd been back then no longer existed. Or maybe every thought was simply ceremonial, a kind of wraith. He was a lawyer by trade and knew it was possible to argue anything from any side, which meant that all the sides were rounded at their edges and made a circle. It was snowing so hard he was about to give up when two boys came toward him on the sidewalk. He could barely see them in the snow, but he was struck by how easy it was to imagine them as brothers, about the same age he and his own had been that winter Chris had died, a death which had led his mother to finally end the marriage and take him away to live in Arizona. And now those boys were holding something in their hands that seemed to glisten from within, sentient and alive. Then the boys raised the knives and pointed them at his chest, and the taller boy said, Give me your wallet. They wore skiing masks over their faces, which meant they could have been any boys at all, could have lived on those streets thirty years earlier and had been waiting all that time for his return. He knew he should fumble in his pocket for his wallet, knew he should say something or do something, but all he wanted was to ask those boys if they recognized him. Then brakes moaned loudly behind him, and he turned to see the lumbering city bus coming to a stop, the doors whooshing open. And when he turned back, the boys were gone, swallowed back into the snow, and he knew it made no sense to say he had lived there on that street once, for the boy who had lived there was, in any real sense, still living there, and the person he’d become had long since separated into someone else, as distant as the world of the dead from the world of the living. And he knew, too, that it didn’t matter whether he found his childhood duplex, that every home on that street had the same measure of being both his and not his, and he had been a fool to imagine that memory was anything more than the chaotic play of pretend. So he stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, dipped his head into the snow, and made his way back toward the car. 

Image © Europeana

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Doug Ramspeck is the author of ten poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a novella. Individual stories have appeared in journals that include The Southern Review, Iowa Review, Cincinnati Review, and The Georgia Review. His short fiction, “Balloon,” was listed as a Distinguished Story of 2019 by The Best American Short Stories. His flash fiction story, “Snow Crow,” received First Place in the Bath Flash Fiction 19th Award.