Chris Edmonds, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Snow

Michael found it, in the sugarbush across Center Road, the last patch of snow. During the two weeks prior, we’d watched as the snow eroded, turning from a smooth, soft blanket into scruffy slabs studded with pine needles and dirt and scat. Most mornings, fog swirled up from the ground, what was left of the snow turning from solid right to gas, skipping liquid. Daylight brushed the fog away and made us wonder if the natural order of things had been reestablished. Puddles formed everywhere. Tiny rivers sprang up and washed themselves empty, were refilled and then washed through again. The sudden heat turned our world to water, robbed us of our snow.
          But Michael was determined. He found the patch tucked into the shade on the north side of a thick-trunked maple. Its branches jumbled among themselves and those of nearby trees, creating a canopy that diluted the sun even if it failed to block it entirely. There in a small hollow, the snow clung on, though there was hardly anything of it left under its grimy cloak, some cold slippery bits among the waste. But snow was snow. Michael came running home, cradling a scoop of it in his palms. I heard him shouting from the road and hurried meet him.
           “There’s—” he panted. “There’s—”
          He wheezed and his eyes watered. He’d been out of bed for a couple of weeks but wasn’t yet back to himself.
          “For chrissakes, Michael, take a breath,” I said.
          He ignored me and instead held up his quarry, discovering only then that it had melted on the way. His face collapsed into a frown but sprung back just as quickly. He wiped his wet hands on his thighs, smudged his pant legs filthy. He gulped down air. There was more, he managed to get out between sucking inhales and ragged exhales.
           “—if we hurry.”
          He took my arm and pulled me toward the shed where we stored our bicycles in the winter. Our father had left the padlock undone and the light on inside, before he’d rushed off to who knew where for who knew what. It took a minute to exhume the bikes, free them from among the flotsam of tarpaulins, yard tools, and fishing gear. The chains needed oiling and the tires air, but those concerns could wait. The snow, we knew, couldn’t. We pedaled out onto our road and then onto Center, turned left and after about a half-mile or so came to the sugarbush, set back from the road and solitary in a sloping field. We dropped our bikes and hurried into the stand of trees.
          “This way,” Michael said. “It’s just over here.”
          He followed his footprints from earlier, tracked his route in the soft earth as it wound here and there and, eventually, reached the tree and a dirt-covered mound that appeared to me to be weeping, water trickling out through its crust. Michael bent down. He swiped at the lump, fingers grooving its surface, dredging for but not finding what they sought. His wet hands caught the slatted sunlight.
          “It was here,” he said. “Right here.”
          I thought he might cry. I’d have understood if he had.
          At dinner the night before, he’d promised me snow as a present. He’d stood up and made a declaration—“I shall,” he began—and capped his speech with something between a bow and curtsy. I’d felt like clapping.
          “Don’t be silly, Michael,” our mother said.
          Our father looked up from his newspaper long enough to fix Michael. He took the pencil from between his teeth and placed it behind his left ear.
          “We’ll have none of that now,” he said. “None of that.”
          “But we always—”
          Our father smoothed the paper on the table then. “Michael.”
          “—for Addie’s birthday—”
          “Not this year.”
          Michael didn’t cry in the sugarbush. I squatted beside him and put my arm around his shoulder. I thanked him, told him—in so many words that a girl my age would have used—that I admired his thoughtfulness and his good sense of knowing where to look. I rocked him gently side to side, nudged him. Shadows coalesced in the branches above us, fell down to the earth, and crept out in all directions, the trees with their stick arms bare for now but not much longer. I was twelve that day.
          He’d gone looking because it’s what we did every year. We’d venture out, the two of us, into the woods to find the finest snow we could and we’d bring it home, mix it with maple syrup, and eat it with our hands. We’d end up sticky and wet and smelling of the forest, our fingers red with cold. Most of all, we’d end up pleased with ourselves.
          “Let’s go home,” I said at last. I lifted both of us, walked us out into the field, into the unbroken sunshine. We picked up our bikes. He mounted his, looked back once, and then shot off away from the village, opposite to the way home. I called after him, but as he had in the sugarbush, he ignored me, flew off up and over the rise in the road. Tires flattening out against the pavement, right on the edge of bursting, the rusty chain screeching at each stamp on the pedals, keeping time as he raced away.

Chris Edmonds on “Snow“:

“Snow” takes place in the early days of a year out of joint. The main characters—narrator Addie, brother Michael—try to keep a tradition alive. Spoiler: they fail. There is no snow, so there can be no birthday treat of snow mixed with maple syrup.

“Snow” is also a piece of a larger, work-in-progress series of stories. Winter in a northern village vanishes overnight and is replaced by a scorching heat. At first, the world melts—streams and the village lake swell, roads wash away, basements fill. As the heat lingers, the world dries out—streams disappear, mud becomes dust, the lake recedes so much that the villagers wonder if it will be lost forever. Disbelief and suspicion fester. Months later, a second dislocation occurs when the world snaps back into true. The hard work of making sense ends, and the easy work of ignoring takes hold.

Chris Edmonds’ fiction has appeared the Greensboro Review, Iron Horse, the Antigonish Review, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in Pembroke and the Worcester Review. Chris is COO of N2, a creatives-led communications company he co-founded in 2015. He lives in Providence.