A Kiss for the Foot of the Effigy
A Short Story
ABOUT THE WRITER
Ogden Nesmer is the author of the novels Eggplant, I Pray To The Hungry God!, The Yokai, and Silkworm. You can find him on Twitter and on Instagram.
To Katy’s surprise, the two white dots she’d been focusing on were focusing back. Among the swirl of snowflakes sparkling before her headlights, two that seemed to flutter in the blackness just where the horizon would be froze. She stopped breathing. In unison, the lights swelled and burst into a sheet of pure white light. Katy squinted, and a semi-truck flew past her, sucking the light away, speeding in the other direction down the highway and disappearing behind the screen of falling snow. She gripped the wheel tighter. Last winter, a woman had lost control of her vehicle on this highway, veering off into the barren fields of sleet in the dead of night while she was alone for fifty miles all around. She died. They found her overturned car weeks later, after the mounds which had been hiding it finally began to melt. Katy thought of the upside-down Nissan that had been pictured in the newspaper, eerily like her own, and the image she’d fabricated over breakfast of the driver’s frozen body: skin black like tar paper; eyes wide and fearful, the fluid within become solid ice; fingers frozen in a desperate grope toward the sun-roof she had believed in her delirium to be facing the sky. The entire time thinking she was reaching out for oxygen and sun, she’d been struggling in the other direction, toward abyss, the depths of the Earth hungry for her return.
Katy raised her thigh and delicately removed her right hand. Her breath was coming out in little clouds, but the hand was hot. The old shirt she’d used to wrap it was crisp with dried blood. Freshly out of compression, she could sense the intricate mechanics in her palm begin to flex and ooze new blood. It was too dark and the road too slippery to unwrap it, she wasn’t even sure she was ready to see the damage. She summoned a wiggle from her fingers and was relieved to see them respond, their pink tips poking out of the brittle red folds.
“Stupid,” Katy whispered. “Stupid stupid. Idiot. Fucking embarrassing.”
That was just the word, she decided, stuffing the hand back under her leg. Embarrassing. She was not a klutz in the kitchen; she’d never injured herself like this. Her knife skills were impeccable. She had no fear of the mandolin or the pressure cooker, handling overfilled pots of hot oil or rooting blind around the blades of the garbage disposal. Why, of all things, had it been an avocado?
Katy prayed: please, please God, don’t take my hand.
The rush of a truck at 95 mph passed with a bonebreak pop, sparks scattering against Katy’s window. She stifled a scream, righting the car with her left hand. The other driver had clipped her mirror clean off. Katy checked her breath (was he drunk or am I?) but noted none of the sauv blanc she’d been cooking with. Would the emergency room nurses be able to smell that single sip on her breath? Would the doctor send her away? Maybe the blood loss would kill her before any of these questions demanded answers. Her tongue began to click, her father’s gesture of disapproval rising up spontaneously in her.
An avocado?
The hospital intersection appeared in the black before her, unfolding from the storm like a newborn constellation. She pulled into the parking lot and settled for the only available spot she could find, far from the entrance and the cycling of ambulances. Outside, sealed entirely within her long, padded coat, the snow swooshed gently around her, lazily adhering to loose strands of her hair. The storm had been an illusion, it seemed. People were pushing wheelchairs and hobbling along on their crutches undaunted. A man with a gauzy eyepatch stopped and raised his head to the sky to catch a snowflake on his tongue.
The automatic doors slid apart and an overhead fan showered Katy in tepid air as she stepped into the main lobby of the emergency room. All around her, the timid moans and whimpers and pained sobbing accumulated in a tidal wave of sorrow that threatened to push her back out the door. Row after row of plastic folding chairs, each containing some new tragedy: a fat woman nursing a plastic grocery bag full of her own bile, a mother too ill to stop her children from pulling her hair and pinching one another, a young man with his face obscured by bruises, crumpled in the corner. Many of the waiters were cradling bloodied limbs like Katy. When she set her mangled hand on the counter before the receptionist, no alarms went off, she was merely asked to sign in with her good hand and have a seat. She floated to the back, avoiding the eyes of the broken and ailing moaners surrounding her. We shouldn’t even be alive, she thought. If a meteor flattened the building it would be no great loss to the world. Only the expensive equipment she could hear vibrating on the other side of the wall would be missed. Precious MRI scanners, EKG machines, all manner of bizarre probe and swab and syringe, an overwrought infrastructure vainly constructed to spite death itself. Katy missed the warmth of her kitchen, the aromatic assault of her pantry, her assortment of tools and utensils that would be useless in the hands of anyone less practiced than herself. In the kitchen, a machine did not think, it served as an extension of the user. But in this place, behind locked doors, the machines did the thinking while educated professionals paced nervously in anticipation of their instructions.
Under the buzz of the tube lights, in a corner all by herself, Katy proceeded to unwrap the hand. What she found made her retch, sending hot tears rolling down her cheeks. From the base of her fingers to the hilt of her wrist, an ugly, viscous gash glistened in the fluorescent light. The scabs which had started to form were unstable, like a par-baked cake, crumbling and unplugging vibrant streams of blood. She pinched the wrist to stop the blood flow and caused the entire wound to splay out slightly. These gentle movements sent violent stabs of pain up Katy’s arm and along her spine. She begged everything to please be okay, and the gash seemed to whisper back reassuringly. That damned avocado, Katy grimaced. That bastard fruit she’d cradled so tenderly and stupidly in her palm, trusting it, looking softly into the brown gem of its eye and winding her knife arm back. Her tongue clicked: the proper way to slice an avocado is with a butter knife, drawing a cross-hatch pattern in the flesh and pressing the skin inside-out to present the sections in an easily accessible manner. Obviously. She knew this. She’d done it thousands of times before. But it was different this time. Where normally she might remove the stone with a spoon or simply knock it to the side, it dared her to do more. The unbreakable sheen of its slick shell asking for the knife, Katy’s perfect knife.
A tongue clicked somewhere behind her, but no one was looking when she turned to investigate. She wrapped up the hand again and brought it to her chest, as if hiding it from her father’s prying eyes. It is curse, he would mutter in broken English, before returning to his post at the stove. Katy would shoot back: “Everyone is cursed. Everything is cursed. Can’t you come up with another reason to dismiss the world?” But he would respond with nothing, and Katy would feel ashamed. She’d dry her tears, and prepare a bowl of the soup her father had been making to bring down the hall to her grandmother.
A nurse brought the Xray eye at the end of a massive robotic arm slowly down from the ceiling to halt inches above Katy’s hand. She scurried off behind a shallow wall, and a buzzer signified the Xray working. Every hidden facet of Katy’s nightmare recorded and exposed. Soon she’d be waiting with the doctors to hear the machine’s diagnosis reported.
Katy laid her head against the wall behind her, defeated, feeling the hum of the Xray machine’s body reverberate through her skull. It was somewhere built into the room, she realized, wired up through the walls to computers and other machines in the hospital, a collective composing a lifeless brain with unreadable thoughts. She wondered if it harbored any memory of uncle Ani, imparted from the monstrosity which killed him (all machines share the same brain!)
Katy hadn’t thought about uncle Ani in years. It must truly be getting dire, she concluded. In her real life, Ani represented a sort of terminal dysfunction—an inability to impact anything for the better, if at all—that his memory could only signify dark omens. Every responsible adult advised Katy to learn from his mistakes. Still, she smiled. She had loved Ani very much, and, being just a child, she was fortunate enough to not-present any trouble to him, thereby not-incurring any of his misguided rage. The same couldn’t be said for Katy’s grandmother, who was the first tongue clicker with her disappointment in her oldest son. And Katy’s father, who wanted to protect Ani, but lacked the warmth to convince his brother that he meant well. Katy would understand none of this as it was happening. Only later, through reminiscence could she adequately discern the circumstances of Ani’s life and her own family.
As a child, he’d scoffed at the notion of a family curse and chose to live dangerously. His love for life took him all over the world. By the time he made it to Katy’s home to sleep on her living room couch, his arms were littered with pinprick scars and faded tattoos. He was knowledgeable when it came to dirty jokes and games, but he couldn’t be relied upon to work or clean up after himself. He fought with Katy’s father but couldn’t survive on his own. Maybe the memories aren’t good, Katy considered, the smile fading from her face.
Uncle Ani would have despised this place, she thought.
The nurse took her last photo. She raised the arm high above her head to where some innate mechanism sucked it up fully against the ceiling, waiting for its next victim like a cat in repose. Katy noted the black orb of its lens, slick like the pit of an avocado.
“We can see significant disruption. Obviously at the entry point, but even out here, small separations.”
A doctor ran his finger along the rounded edges of a trapezoid of light captured in celluloid. The blueish backlighting projected through the Xray slide gave every lit inch of the exam room a queasy glow. Though Katy had never seen the bones of her hand presented so radiantly, she could only see their awkwardness. Their globulous angles. Their pallor against the emptiness of everything not focused-on by the x-ray. Were these due to ‘small separations’?
“Obviously capitate and hamate are split, but over here the scaphite… and even the trapezium… And the lunate, triquetral, pisiform...”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“It never is.” He meant it sincerely, comiseratingly. “We’re all victims here. Our situation is not conducive to a long, safe life.”
“The knife slipped. My phone vibrated… in the other room…”
The doctor imposed some invisible delineation between the trapezoids on the left and the right with a wave of his finger, then swooped straight down through the middle in imitation of the butcher’s knife still lying blood-soaked on Katy’s counter.
“Can you fix it?”
“I can mend it, but whether or not it fixes is its own decision.”
“But I… I-I came straight here—“
“It’s nothing you’ve done or failed to do. The hand is simply an amazing device all full of nervous tissue and cleverly arrange musculature. Even as we are on the operating table it will be impossible to know what’s been destroyed, what’s beyond repair.”
“W-when can we operate?”
“Soon. But don’t worry, the body is already doing more for itself than we can really hope to accomplish. Look at the hand, you’ll see the cells at work, assembling their bodies into a network of DNA that will spawn new tissue.”
Katy looked but only saw a dark pit in her palm. The nurses had cleaned the undamaged areas with betadine, rendering it otherwise normal but for the bloody gash right in the center where Katy was sure, if she squinted, she could see through to the other side.
“It was… it was this avocado, okay? What happened was I was holding this avocado and—“
“Has anyone given you anything for pain?”
“No.”
The doctor grew stern and summoned a nurse, who summoned another two, et cetera, until eventually someone placed three white pills in Katy’s good hand.
“Is there any ch-chance I… l-lose the hand?”
Another nurse put a paper cup full of water in her hand and coaxed her into swallowing the pills. A third put her hand on Katy’s shoulder, and a fourth got her to stand up on off the table. The nurses took Katy’s blood. They checked her temperature and her height. They put Katy on a scale and flicked the weight side to side until they agreed on the proper measurement, the whole time fluttering about her like a swarm of moths. She reached out to take one by the collar. “You need my family history”, she said. “We’re cursed. All the first-borns in my family are doomed. My grandmother, her father, my uncle Ani, myself. So if you kill me, don’t be sad. It’s not your fault. It doesn’t matter what we do, even if we do good, it’s always coming for us. My uncle Ani, by the way—write this down—was doing good, being a good man, working and staying away from drink, and one day on the job, his shitty factory job he worked with pride, an industrial planer sucked him up and shaved off the back half of his body, leaving his bones and brain and organs and neural passages all exposed and running with blood, the cherry red kind that comes straight from the heart. Hey, are you writing this down? This is important.”
Expecting dreams, Katy found herself awake, a heart monitor clicking somewhere behind her. She was naked but for a papery gown and four layers of blanket. She shifted her body and found she was hindered by a dozen tubes passing in and out of her via IV and catheter. She blinked, and remembered everything. Her right hand lay at her side, where it belonged, swaddled tight in a cocoon of sterile, white gauze.
“Go back to sleep.”
A nurse sat in a chair at Katy’s feet. Her face was obscured by surgical mask and protective goggles. Katy brought the damaged hand to her forehead to rub her eyes, and realized it wasn’t connected to any tubes. Something was wrong.
“What happened—?”
“Go back to sleep.”
A wet snore made Katy jump. She struggled over to her left side and saw she had a roommate, snoring away in the dark, completely oblivious to her panic.
Katy started to pull the needles out of her skin. The nurse jumped up and grabbed Katy’s wrists, insisting she go back to sleep.
“The surgery was a success,” she explained in a whisper. “Everything was fine. Only you got an infection. Something on that knife got into your blood, now you’re septic. You’re going to have to stay here for a few more days, maybe weeks.”
Two more nurses fluttered in and somehow brought quiet to the room. Even her neighbor’s snoring seemed to Katy to be coming from someplace far away.
“If the poisoned blood reaches your brain,” the nurse continued, pressing the plunger on a syringe stuck into one of Katy’s tubes. “You run the risk of death. You run the risk of becoming a vegetable.”
Perhaps there was some precedent for the accident that had since drifted out of Katy’s memory. A thumb sliced on the lid of a can, hot pepper residue rubbed into her eyes, fingertips shredded on a microplane, all cast to oblivion long ago by years of practice. The body’s natural desire for growth would be impeded by a lack of self-destruction. A corrective impulse could only surface from a state of complete, unguarded confidence. In this scenario it had been done for her own good. But, on the other hand, if there had been no past incidents and her entire life had been a stream of dumb luck, then she had stabbed herself as a means of enacting overdue punishment. The curse she’d avoided her entire life, waiting for the right moment. The glassy bulb of the avocado’s pit was too much for her subconscious to bear, the void eye concealing her own flesh, a final barrier between her and her tragic destiny. She’d cocked the hand that held the knife back like a trebuchet and struck at the center, aim true, sending the blade deep, nicking her bones and carving the flesh in a fluid, unblinking jab. Removing the knife and watching as the opening she’d created overflowed with blood. Her father stood in the doorway, silhouetted by fluorescent light. Unable to bear it any longer, he floated out, and Katy followed. The groans of her grandmother came in through the walls. She was in pain, delirious, possessed by some angry force Katy didn’t recognize.
“Focus,” her father snapped. “Peel the potatoes.”
Katy obeyed.
“Bring me tomato paste.”
Katy set the peeler down and turned the crank of a can opener, the groans turning to sobs and laughter.
“Five cloves garlic, Katy.”
“But grandma hates garlic.” The voice coming out of Katy’s mouth was a child’s.
“Garlic has healing properties,” her father explained, stirring a quart of cream into a gigantic, steaming pot. “Good for the swelling, good for the infection. Grandmother’s body is failing. She needs the help. So, we simply cover the flavor.” He dropped cumin, turmeric, star anise into the soup. The color changed. The smell bloomed into something unrecognizable that made Katy want to sneeze. The garlic was added. Her father brought a spoonful to his mouth and decided it was ready. The sounds from her grandmother’s room were becoming aggressive and rhythmic, as if every exhale were a roar. Katy cradled a bowl of soup in her hands and made her way down the hall, toward the dark end where her grandmother was waiting, the walls shaking with a tremendous cackling. Katy found she could not breathe, but she kept walking with little steps so the hot liquid wouldn’t spill. The sounds were louder, too loud to be real, and though Katy could make out no words the message was clear: help me, Katy. Please.
Katy opened her eyes. She was in the same dark hospital room, with the same snoring roommate (“I must have been hearing his damn snores in my sleep–”) but no nurse was watching over her. The same assortment of tubes were attached to her limbs, but something new was wrapped tight around her wrist. The wounded hand was bound to the bed-rail with a zip-tie. Knowing the nurse would only insist she remain calm, Katy turned in vain to her roommate, his huge body rising and falling in the shadows with the rhythm of his snores. A wet slap accompanied every intake of breath, as if he had a loose flap of skin obstructing his airway.
Katy brought her free hand up to her mouth and began pulling IV needles out with her teeth. Once untethered, she started at the tie with her fingernails, looking for a thin spot to wear away. Outside, light footsteps echoed through the empty halls. Katy kept one eye on the door. With the assistance of a ballpoint pen left on her nightstand, she finally snapped the zip-tie and sat upright. Starting with a loose end of gauze, she began to unwrap her hand, quickly, checking the door every other second. Soon the hand was free, but it was still too dark to make anything out. All she could discern before her was the murky outline of her five fingers. She slipped the rest of her IVs out and grimaced as she removed her catheter. Gripping the rails and leaning against the nearest wall, she began to hobble in the direction of the light switch. Her roommate’s snores continued unabated; she doubted he would even stir once she flipped the lights on.
Click.
No one heard it. There were no nurses come to lay her back down, and the snores kept rolling in like waves in the night. Katy opened her hand to the light. She screamed. It was wrong. She screamed louder. In the center of her palm was a fat millipede, its body coiling around her knuckles and legs sunk into her flesh. She whipped the hand away but couldn’t shake the thing off. She screamed until she had no breathe left to do anything but squeak. A dozen or so nurses filed in and began patting her down, holding her by the elbows and shoulders, pinning her up to the wall. She saw her roommate in the light. He wasn’t there. Instead, some amorphous bundle of stray appendages and straps of fat lay pulsating, shimmering with sweat. It heaved slowly as snores blew out of it like a bagpipe. Nurses were tugging at her clothes, pinching her, their faces hidden by paper masks. Katy screamed silence until her eyes began to swell and the room went dark again.
The snowflakes had been whipped up again. A new storm had been summoned out of the black. Katy pulled her coat tight around her and trudge ahead as blurry grains of white tore violently across the limits of her periphery. The sound of her boots scraping the pavement told her she was still on Earth and not lost somewhere in space. A yellow light flickered in the distance before her. Beneath it, a flimsy aluminum door with a mat at the base that read: BLESS US.
It was her grandmother’s house. Katy was seventeen. She was alone in the snow in her slippers, rummaging under the mat for the key because something was wrong. It had woken her up and sent her jogging out the door. A tingle in her spine that said something was wrong with her grandmother. The curse was sending a message to each of its prisoners.
It was four months after her father had died, leaving her as the sole caretaker for the demented old woman.
Her fingers touched cold metal. She plucked the key out from under the mat and brushed the ice off the lock. Inside it was steamy warm. The window at the back was fogged, emitting a damp moonlit glow.
“Grandma?”
She was hunched over something on the living room floor, something that sparkled brilliantly like a vein of diamonds. Running her fingers along the spine of this shimmering mass that projected ghostly chunks of light all over the ceiling and walls.
“Put it down—“ Katy didn’t know what to say. It was tossing around as her grandmother fondled it.
“Help, Katy.”
The thing was shivering. Katy got down on one knee and squinted through the scattered shrapnel of light.
Blood. She’d broken a mirror. Blood. Up to the elbow. A vast pool of it, seeping up between the shards.
“Please, help,” the old woman whimpered. “It’s somewhere in here.” She raised a hand in supplication, and Katy could the tattered remains of her fingers. Blood and bone and nerve. The right hand.
Please.
Katy reached out with her right hand and began moving aside the chips and splinters, shredding her fingertips and leaving hot trails of blood. There were larger plates of glass toward the bottom. She pulled them up and began to array them in their natural order. There was blood on her shirt, her slippers, her hair. There was no more skin past Katy’s knuckles. She stood up and squinted at what the collected fragments were reflecting to her from underneath the smears of her own blood. It was some cold abyss; the surface of a lifeless planet, wet and smooth, cradled in the spongy flesh of that bastard fruit. It was the avocado. The third eye, ajna chakra, peering out at her from her unconscious mind.
“There it is!”
Katy found herself awake, not knowing for how long. Without warning, the weight of silence smothering her was finally felt. She struggled to her side to find the shadow of her roommate still beside her in the dark, but it was not moving and making no sound. It was night, impossible to say if it was the same night Katy had arrived. Her IVs had been replaced, her hand re-bandaged, and another zip-tie around her wrist.
Had she ever removed them?
She was quick with the pen. When the right hand was free, she quickly plucked out all the needles and got herself to a standing position. As quietly as she could manage, she stumbled into her clothes. She heard no footsteps. Easing slowly out the door, she saw no nurses. The hallway in both directions was barren. No staff, no empty stretchers, all the patients’ room doors shut and silent. Katy strode quickly to the elevators, but found them out of order. Scouring the ceiling for an EXIT sign, she kept moving down the empty halls, expecting someone but finding leagues of nothing. Even the sound of her own steps seemed to evaporate. She’d died and become a ghost, she supposed. It was obvious.
A sound. The flutter of a thousand moths. Katy swooped around a corner to see a cloud of sterile sleeves and smocks. The nurses were crowding around something, trying to inspect it or merely press their bodies against it.
Katy stepped backward through a cracked doorway. She turned to discover a high-domed operating room, with empty spectator galleries behind a tall glass wall. In the middle, an old man was laid out in a stretcher, nude under a wispy blue blanket. Stacks of machines and monitors enclosed him.
He was awake. He turned his head toward Katy.
“What are you going to do with my leg? After you take it off?”
Katy approached the foot of the stretcher. The old man’s leg was propped up. Blue and green sores were festering under his skin everywhere below the knee. His toenails were rotting off. It stank like moldy basement.
“I don’t… I don’t know,” she whispered. “That’s a different department.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. But they’re the ones who take all of our refuse. Our amputated legs and arms. Our expunged gallbladders, appendices, uteruses, and eyes. They also maintain the cancerous tumors, and the aborted fetuses.”
“Is there any risk this procedure leaves me a vegetable?”
“Some of my best friends are vegetables.”
His eyes rolled to somewhere over his shoulder. He was looking for something. It was a tray full of surgical tools; chrome hooks and prods and tiny mirrors on extendable handles. Bigger than the rest, right in the center, a wood-handled scalpel with a 8-inch blade. Perfect fit for the hand, designed only to act as extension of the user.
In his final months, Katy’s father spent most of his time in the garden, perusing the planter boxes, monitoring the growth of his tomatoes and watermelons and zucchinis. By this time almost blind, tumors sprouting like weeds in his brain, he’d banished himself from the kitchen. Too many sharp objects, too easy to forget to turn the burners off. Everything about his life was new: the garden, the cancer, being cared for instead of caring for another. As in the beginning, so in his terminal stages; he was hopeless and isolated, feeble and lost. He wandered around the yard engaging in the futile war against the weeds smothering his sprouts.
He was thinner every day.
“Please eat your yogurt,” Katy begged from all fours, scrubbing the kitchen tile while her father sat motionless at the table. “Dad!”
“I don’t want…”
“Do you want me to make something for you?”
“Neh…”
“Solyanka?”
He frowned, “your solyanka?”
She turned her body with enough speed to send the brush she was throwing into the next room, instead of the side of her father’s skull. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He was wallowing. Acting as if he were the cursed one.
Katy laughed, tossing her rubber gloves into the sink and sitting across from her father at the table. She glared up at the solitary clock on the wall above his head, peering over them, ticking as slow as it could manage.
“You’ve got to eat, dad.”
“It won’t keep me alive.”
“But you love food. You won’t be able to enjoy it for much longer.”
“I loved cooking. That has already been taken from me. Now I’m just waiting.”
Katy looked at the clock and the clock looked back.
“Do you remember what you told me,” Katy asked, “about our curse? How the real curse of it was that we knew our fate. Even a man destined to be rich, suffers from knowing that’s all he can be… Do you remember? Well, I think that’s wrong. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be true. You could say the opposite: I can breathe easy, knowing I’m only destined to suffer. Don’t you think so? The same can be said for you. You’re only going to die. Isn’t that nice?”
There were blue and red lights flickering on the horizon, and a lady’s screaming cut short by the shut of the automatic doors. Katy was out in the cold again, the empty night that threatened to erase her with its cold enormity. She zipped her coat and stormed ahead into the parking lot. A commotion was breaking out behind her, crying and police, everyone asking each other where Katy could be. She knelt down at the back of someone’s minivan and tossed the scalpel underneath. In a nearby puddle full of mud and ice, she rinsed the blood off her hands.
Her car was covered in tall mounds of snow.
How long have I been out?
Katy reached straight for the handle and, after a few tugs, managed to get it open. She threw herself inside and cranked the heat, hidden behind the wall of snow smothering her windows.
She rubbed the sides of her hand and blew hot breath onto her wound. Warmth sank deeper into the flesh, and the cold fingers began to unravel out of their hooks. Still a little tight, but she could flex it and pull the fingers in and wrap them tight around the steering wheel.
She pulled out and drove straight over the snow-covered divider onto the empty road, leaving the sirens and the red lights flashing in the storm behind her. She sped down the highway with her headlights off. With no light to cascade off of them, it seemed the snowflakes didn’t mind her presence. They didn’t swarm around her windows, pecking the glass like angry moths, they floated blindly about in invisible streaks across the sky. Katy pulled the wheel right and tore through a wall of fresh snow. Everything went dark. The car rocked as it pummeled through miles of untouched sleet and the barren fields that were sleeping beneath. It began to slow. The tires were turning slick with mud and ice bogging up their tread. The car finally stopped, wheels still thrashing in frictionless puddles. Katy hopped out, walked twenty feet and turned to find nothing but snow. In an instant the land was refreshed, an entirely new valley of blue and gray, eternally recurrent beneath the timid stars and a thousand waves of the onslaught of snow.