Crash Season
At night a snowstorm turns orange.
When the streets and lawns and roofs are covered, and the sky becomes an infinitesimally detailed checkerboard of snow and not-snow, then the sodium vapor streetlights reflect off the white and dye the world a deep orange.
In childhood, this particular shade of orange is happiness broadcast city-wide, at least where you grow up. An orange sky means the exhaust pipes in the school buses freeze, and frozen pipes mean your school shows up in the ticker tape during the nightly news. It means heavy mouth breathing through a landline as you sit in silence, interconnected with a dozen friends, watching the small TV in the kitchen rocking back and forth on a chair not meant to be rocked back and forth on. The ticker runs alphabetically. Your school starts with a D. It doesn’t take long for nights like these to become the happiest nights of your life.
For energy efficiency, low pressure sodium lights are replaced by LEDs in the mid 2010s. This happens after you leave. One of the many ways a place changes in your absence.
****
You forget to put Antifreeze in the car, so once it starts snowing the windshield wipers scrape helplessly against frost. Sunlight in the mountain pass refracts and expands through the ice on the windshield. In a confluence of angles and light that insurance companies call an ‘Act of God,’ you lose visibility completely and slam into the back of a car. Then another car slams into you.
It’s what Coloradans call ‘Crash Season,’ says the cop who leads you and Mari to the tow yard as you try not to cry. You can’t stop thinking about how disappointed your dad will be, your dad who never got in a traffic accident and received his first ticket at 40. Mari doesn’t know why you can’t calm down.
Could you see it?
Yeah, she says.
The car in front of us?
Yeah. I saw it.
Why didn’t you say something?
I thought you saw it, she says matter-of-factly.
I was yelling, I said I couldn’t see.
She doesn’t understand why this bothers you more than it bothers her.
It’s nighttime and still snowing when you arrive at your parents’ house in the bubblegum blue rental car. You and Mari are ill-suited for public consumption in crumb-covered pajama pants and sweaty t-shirts. Tissues litter the floor, a byproduct of a monstrous fight. One of those fights that unspools like yarn, pausing intermittently as your bodies are hit by gales of laughter and gorged on gas station chips; that re-emerges on the side of the road like a lost fawn, triggered by a passing thought that might not even be yours. One of those fights that splits you in two.
You don’t want your parents to see that you’ve been crying. You don’t actually want them to know that you still cry at all.
****
It’s the middle of the night when you first notice it. Mari is asleep in the double bed from your adolescence. She’s snoring, which is new. You’re awake because your brother’s voice carries up the vent from the office downstairs where he plays video games and fights with his friends on Discord. The insulation in the house is poor; it’s a historic house and alterations aren’t allowed by city law. The windows in your bedroom rattle for this reason. They are made with glass that’s aged over 300 years. When glass is that old it looks like it’s melting.
What you’ve noticed is Mari’s chin.
The skin on the bottom of her chin - the spot you’d only see resting on someone’s chest or in the crook of their arm and looking up at them - is completely smooth, covered in the lightest peach fuzz.
But Mari has always had a scar there. A crescent moon just underneath her chin, mostly flat and pale pink, a tiny indentation pressed into the skin in childhood that never bounced back. You’d discovered it back when the two of you consumed every inch of each other with boundless curiosity. It had something to do with her mother and a sliding shower door.
You ask her about it the next morning.
Where did that scar go? The one from the shower door.
Mari frowns.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You know. The scar on your chin. We’ve talked about it.
How do you get cut from a shower door? she asks.
You don’t have an answer for that. You hadn’t asked when she first told you. You hadn’t questioned anything.
I’ve seen it. So many times I’ve been laying on your chest and looking up and seen it.
Maybe you imagined it, she offers kind of unimaginatively.
I’m an observant person, you insist, also unimaginatively. She doesn’t care. She wants you to fuck her. But sound in the house carries and that idea fills you with so much shame that you almost can’t breathe, so you settle for showering together in near-silence. You avert your eyes from the misshapen figure that passes before the mirror and instead focus on hers. You touch her quietly, a compromise that satisfies neither of you. Your parents cannot know that you cry and they cannot know that you fuck. What they are allowed to know is that you are fine. You can’t stop looking at Mari’s chin.
****
When Mari is asleep, you scroll through your phone, old photos of her that sneak into your mouth, suck on your tongue then suffocate your brain stem. Holding corn in a grocery store, skinned knees and tangled blue bedsheets, orange wine and a cockroach. But her face is always positioned in such a way that you can’t get a clean look at her chin. Even in the earliest pictures, when you’d photographed every inch just to be sure she’d be documented, you can’t find a clear view of the scar, and even when you can see the chin, the details look like shadows. Your eyes burn as the pixels lose their meaning.
Just before you’d left for the holidays, she’d brought up wanting to sleep with somebody else. She’d felt a connection with him and wanted to explore it. Sex with you had gone from hands and lips and tongues and fingers and thighs to a cock strapped onto your body that only sometimes felt like it fit. She went through seasons of sex, she told you, like seasons of life. Now was the season of the dick. She’s seeking real flesh and blood, you thought to yourself but never verbalized. Was love letting her have it?
You’re not the same, you had managed to say. You promised me you wanted these things.
I haven’t gone anywhere, she says. I’m not going anywhere.
You’re so far away.
I’m right here.
For a moment a quiet rage boiled inside of you that she had dared change while you had stayed the same.
****
It’s the things after the scar that start to feel really wrong. First it’s her eyes, which already started far apart. When you wake up the next morning they are farther. It’s one of those things you can tell immediately, but that grows more uncertain the longer you look. Like a word repeated ad infinitum. She’s still asleep so you snap a picture of her and send it to her sibling. Does this look like Mari to you??? Three question marks. You send it. Then you feel crazy. You haven’t provided any context.
You respond with the same picture, this time annotated. You’ve circled her chin. And didn’t she always have a scar here…from a shower door???
They don’t respond until that evening and when they do it’s just a couple question marks and the word ‘yeah.’ In the meantime, you’ve holed up in the basement and accumulated over a hundred pictures of Mari, using relative objects to measure the distance between her eyes. An ocular migraine is setting in. You find yourself wondering if scars can disappear and bones can shift. Had she broken any? You remember an article on dysmorphia and how the brain is a powerful liar.
But when she gets out of the shower that evening after dinner, you find it. The mole on her stomach - the one you’re sure has always been there, at least as long as you’ve known her, the one you can’t possibly have imagined - is gone. You watch the lines of her bare stomach stretch and contract slightly as she walks and bends and turns. She finds your gaze and, sensing your discomfort, puts a hand on your thigh.
Are you okay? she asks convincingly.
A discomfort grips your insides and refuses to let go. You look down at her hand on your thigh. The blood surging through its veins is not her blood. The irregularly bitten nails sunken into pink beds are not hers. The certainty that falls over you in her touch is terror incarnate, it’s trying to run in a dream. You find yourself wishing to go back to a time when suspicion was just a seed, when a thousand excuses could bury the lede, when doubt was silenced with a kiss on closed eyelids.
She’s good at this. She’s been watching you for days. You don’t say anything to Mari because you don’t want to let Not Mari know that you know she’s Not Mari. You force your body to behave and extract yourself from her touch, stalking to the other side of the room. You can feel her eyes on you from behind the curtain of her black hair.
What? you ask, accusatory.
What?
You’re looking at me funny.
I’m not looking at you any way.
You turn to see her smiling, as if the two of you are in on a joke. Orange wine, a cockroach, sour lemonade with the seeds still in it, heathens sucking each other off on a roof. Is it her? Is it close enough? She steps closer. Only the bottom half of her face falls under the glow of an antique desk lamp. You’d picked it out as a child, drawn to its base adorned with frog figurines in Pagan ritual. Under the amber glow they are laughing at you now. She steps closer. The corners of her mouth stretch farther than they should, a jagged gash across skin. And with each step she takes towards you it only grows wider, as if her body is splitting at the seam. As your eyes adjust, hers become deep pools of ink. You try to find the light in them. You try to find the edges.
Come here, love, she says in a whisper. She never used to call you that. She’d only ever called you sweet one, and then baby, and then, now-
I’m going to get a glass of water, you manage. Your body vibrates as you slip out the door. You close it, but not all the way. You can see the crash ahead. You can’t possibly look away.
Not Mari is still looking in the direction where you were a second ago, as if she’s ready to consume thin air.
She crawls onto the bed, and for a moment it seems as if she’ll get under the covers and go to sleep. She lowers her head to the pillow and inhales, smelling you. Your breath catches.
She seems to feel your gaze, then. Her spine straightens.
And then her head swivels, turning to look straight at you through the fissure, and you run.
****
You remember the feeling; it’s lived in your body forever. When you were the one who had to turn out the lights downstairs before coming up for bed. You flipped the switch and you ran, heart pounding, and you refused to look back, taking the steps two at a time, because you knew if you looked back you’d find things in the corners, coming alive.
You’re running the opposite direction this time - gripping the railing so you don’t slip - and before you know it you’re plunging yourself back down into that familiar darkness.
The kitchen has windows on three of its four walls. You walk backwards into the dense snowglobe. You don’t dare turn on the lights because you aren’t yet prepared to see what you don’t want to, what you know is there. Instead you feel behind you to the counter where the knife block sits and you unsheath one, which happens to not be a knife at all but the sharpening steel. The kitchen grows twice its size in the dark. The 300 year old glass rattles in its wooden cage.
The last time you held the sharpening steel was the summer after eighth grade. You had used duct tape to position it, standing up, on the kitchen floor. Then you stood like Jesus and attempted to fall on your sword so that the world could see you through the kitchen windows.
Something shifts at the other end of the kitchen. The cadence of footsteps is unfamiliar; one foot steps neatly on the wood and the other drags across it, almost like a limp, almost like the two halves of the body hold different weights entirely now. You pull your voice from somewhere deep.
Who are you?
Baby…come here. I love you. It’s just me.
They feel like lies. They feel cruel. They are designed to hurt you.
What do you want? you whisper. What do you want from me?
Turn on the lights… she says. You’re scaring yourself.
You can smell her now.
You can feel the weight of her in the air as it ever so slightly displaces around you. Your skin prickles. Your heart won’t stop moving. Your hand grips the sharpening steel, this little thing inadequate to destroy you back when you so wished it.
Not Mari grabs you, but her body is much bigger than you remembered, and stronger too. You're in quicksand as she wraps around you, gripping your trembling body, forcing it still. You can feel her breath in the vibrations her skin makes against your own. Your choice is in the hand wrapped around the sharpening steel.
She takes that choice as hers. Her grip on your hand is soft, but forceful. It would be possible to break. But it’s easier to follow, like an ocean current that transports you in space without your feet ever leaving the ground. You let her make the decisions for you. She guides the steel through your hand. Metal kisses the skin on your neck.
The pain takes longer, the delay of a thunder clap. You’re not even sure what you’ve done until you hear the sharpening steel clatter to the floor. The first thing you notice is hot liquid pooling in the slightest contours of your body as it makes its way down, leaving its container, burning as it’s exposed to the open air.
And now you understand. She brings her lips to the wound on your neck and she drinks. Her teeth gnaw at your flesh, a want for more. It’s a promise. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got all of you.
All of the ugly things come out of you then, in a rush, and they land in her mouth, dripping down her chin. She sucks them off of her fingers. She inhales them and revels in them and licks their stickiness off her teeth. The things you’ve held just behind your skin, in the corners of your mouth tucked behind your ears and under your tongue. She goes in again, this time with her hand, a child in a toybox, hungry for what lies at the bottom. She scoops you into her hands where you come alive, and you feel her throbbing as she drinks from the well. She pulls away to catch her breath and you put a hand up to touch your neck. Your flesh lace, cascading away. In the darkness, all you can see is that your hand is slick with something. It looks like crude oil. Like you’ve dipped your arm into the earth.
****
What’s inside must come out. You stumble into the snow, bringing with you the silken train of oil, bubbling forth as if your body is the ground. Somewhere along the way you’ve lost track of Mari, or Not Mari, and you find yourself alone. The snow is coming down hard. You don’t have shoes on but you don’t care. Cold against hot burns. What should feel bad feels very, very good. The night is black and white, the sky ink, the snow exactly the color it should be, says God, say LED streetlights. Things are exactly as they should be: perfectly 100% real. That’s life, baby. 100% real. You are curled in a ball, all hot tears and hot blood and melting snow. Your eyes are squeezed tight, long enough that you forget which side your head is on, long enough that you could be upside down and the blood could be entering your body, searching for a home. Long enough that you can remember - just for a moment - a night when a snowstorm turned orange.
When the streets and lawns and roofs are covered, and the sky becomes an infinitesimally detailed checkerboard of snow and not-snow, then the sodium vapor streetlights reflect off the white and dye the world a deep orange.
In childhood, this particular shade of orange is happiness broadcast city-wide, at least where you grow up. An orange sky means the exhaust pipes in the school buses freeze, and frozen pipes mean your school shows up in the ticker tape during the nightly news. It means heavy mouth breathing through a landline as you sit in silence, interconnected with a dozen friends, watching the small TV in the kitchen rocking back and forth on a chair not meant to be rocked back and forth on. The ticker runs alphabetically. Your school starts with a D. It doesn’t take long for nights like these to become the happiest nights of your life.
For energy efficiency, low pressure sodium lights are replaced by LEDs in the mid 2010s. This happens after you leave. One of the many ways a place changes in your absence.
****
You forget to put Antifreeze in the car, so once it starts snowing the windshield wipers scrape helplessly against frost. Sunlight in the mountain pass refracts and expands through the ice on the windshield. In a confluence of angles and light that insurance companies call an ‘Act of God,’ you lose visibility completely and slam into the back of a car. Then another car slams into you.
It’s what Coloradans call ‘Crash Season,’ says the cop who leads you and Mari to the tow yard as you try not to cry. You can’t stop thinking about how disappointed your dad will be, your dad who never got in a traffic accident and received his first ticket at 40. Mari doesn’t know why you can’t calm down.
Could you see it?
Yeah, she says.
The car in front of us?
Yeah. I saw it.
Why didn’t you say something?
I thought you saw it, she says matter-of-factly.
I was yelling, I said I couldn’t see.
She doesn’t understand why this bothers you more than it bothers her.
It’s nighttime and still snowing when you arrive at your parents’ house in the bubblegum blue rental car. You and Mari are ill-suited for public consumption in crumb-covered pajama pants and sweaty t-shirts. Tissues litter the floor, a byproduct of a monstrous fight. One of those fights that unspools like yarn, pausing intermittently as your bodies are hit by gales of laughter and gorged on gas station chips; that re-emerges on the side of the road like a lost fawn, triggered by a passing thought that might not even be yours. One of those fights that splits you in two.
You don’t want your parents to see that you’ve been crying. You don’t actually want them to know that you still cry at all.
****
It’s the middle of the night when you first notice it. Mari is asleep in the double bed from your adolescence. She’s snoring, which is new. You’re awake because your brother’s voice carries up the vent from the office downstairs where he plays video games and fights with his friends on Discord. The insulation in the house is poor; it’s a historic house and alterations aren’t allowed by city law. The windows in your bedroom rattle for this reason. They are made with glass that’s aged over 300 years. When glass is that old it looks like it’s melting.
What you’ve noticed is Mari’s chin.
The skin on the bottom of her chin - the spot you’d only see resting on someone’s chest or in the crook of their arm and looking up at them - is completely smooth, covered in the lightest peach fuzz.
But Mari has always had a scar there. A crescent moon just underneath her chin, mostly flat and pale pink, a tiny indentation pressed into the skin in childhood that never bounced back. You’d discovered it back when the two of you consumed every inch of each other with boundless curiosity. It had something to do with her mother and a sliding shower door.
You ask her about it the next morning.
Where did that scar go? The one from the shower door.
Mari frowns.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You know. The scar on your chin. We’ve talked about it.
How do you get cut from a shower door? she asks.
You don’t have an answer for that. You hadn’t asked when she first told you. You hadn’t questioned anything.
I’ve seen it. So many times I’ve been laying on your chest and looking up and seen it.
Maybe you imagined it, she offers kind of unimaginatively.
I’m an observant person, you insist, also unimaginatively. She doesn’t care. She wants you to fuck her. But sound in the house carries and that idea fills you with so much shame that you almost can’t breathe, so you settle for showering together in near-silence. You avert your eyes from the misshapen figure that passes before the mirror and instead focus on hers. You touch her quietly, a compromise that satisfies neither of you. Your parents cannot know that you cry and they cannot know that you fuck. What they are allowed to know is that you are fine. You can’t stop looking at Mari’s chin.
****
When Mari is asleep, you scroll through your phone, old photos of her that sneak into your mouth, suck on your tongue then suffocate your brain stem. Holding corn in a grocery store, skinned knees and tangled blue bedsheets, orange wine and a cockroach. But her face is always positioned in such a way that you can’t get a clean look at her chin. Even in the earliest pictures, when you’d photographed every inch just to be sure she’d be documented, you can’t find a clear view of the scar, and even when you can see the chin, the details look like shadows. Your eyes burn as the pixels lose their meaning.
Just before you’d left for the holidays, she’d brought up wanting to sleep with somebody else. She’d felt a connection with him and wanted to explore it. Sex with you had gone from hands and lips and tongues and fingers and thighs to a cock strapped onto your body that only sometimes felt like it fit. She went through seasons of sex, she told you, like seasons of life. Now was the season of the dick. She’s seeking real flesh and blood, you thought to yourself but never verbalized. Was love letting her have it?
You’re not the same, you had managed to say. You promised me you wanted these things.
I haven’t gone anywhere, she says. I’m not going anywhere.
You’re so far away.
I’m right here.
For a moment a quiet rage boiled inside of you that she had dared change while you had stayed the same.
****
It’s the things after the scar that start to feel really wrong. First it’s her eyes, which already started far apart. When you wake up the next morning they are farther. It’s one of those things you can tell immediately, but that grows more uncertain the longer you look. Like a word repeated ad infinitum. She’s still asleep so you snap a picture of her and send it to her sibling. Does this look like Mari to you??? Three question marks. You send it. Then you feel crazy. You haven’t provided any context.
You respond with the same picture, this time annotated. You’ve circled her chin. And didn’t she always have a scar here…from a shower door???
They don’t respond until that evening and when they do it’s just a couple question marks and the word ‘yeah.’ In the meantime, you’ve holed up in the basement and accumulated over a hundred pictures of Mari, using relative objects to measure the distance between her eyes. An ocular migraine is setting in. You find yourself wondering if scars can disappear and bones can shift. Had she broken any? You remember an article on dysmorphia and how the brain is a powerful liar.
But when she gets out of the shower that evening after dinner, you find it. The mole on her stomach - the one you’re sure has always been there, at least as long as you’ve known her, the one you can’t possibly have imagined - is gone. You watch the lines of her bare stomach stretch and contract slightly as she walks and bends and turns. She finds your gaze and, sensing your discomfort, puts a hand on your thigh.
Are you okay? she asks convincingly.
A discomfort grips your insides and refuses to let go. You look down at her hand on your thigh. The blood surging through its veins is not her blood. The irregularly bitten nails sunken into pink beds are not hers. The certainty that falls over you in her touch is terror incarnate, it’s trying to run in a dream. You find yourself wishing to go back to a time when suspicion was just a seed, when a thousand excuses could bury the lede, when doubt was silenced with a kiss on closed eyelids.
She’s good at this. She’s been watching you for days. You don’t say anything to Mari because you don’t want to let Not Mari know that you know she’s Not Mari. You force your body to behave and extract yourself from her touch, stalking to the other side of the room. You can feel her eyes on you from behind the curtain of her black hair.
What? you ask, accusatory.
What?
You’re looking at me funny.
I’m not looking at you any way.
You turn to see her smiling, as if the two of you are in on a joke. Orange wine, a cockroach, sour lemonade with the seeds still in it, heathens sucking each other off on a roof. Is it her? Is it close enough? She steps closer. Only the bottom half of her face falls under the glow of an antique desk lamp. You’d picked it out as a child, drawn to its base adorned with frog figurines in Pagan ritual. Under the amber glow they are laughing at you now. She steps closer. The corners of her mouth stretch farther than they should, a jagged gash across skin. And with each step she takes towards you it only grows wider, as if her body is splitting at the seam. As your eyes adjust, hers become deep pools of ink. You try to find the light in them. You try to find the edges.
Come here, love, she says in a whisper. She never used to call you that. She’d only ever called you sweet one, and then baby, and then, now-
I’m going to get a glass of water, you manage. Your body vibrates as you slip out the door. You close it, but not all the way. You can see the crash ahead. You can’t possibly look away.
Not Mari is still looking in the direction where you were a second ago, as if she’s ready to consume thin air.
She crawls onto the bed, and for a moment it seems as if she’ll get under the covers and go to sleep. She lowers her head to the pillow and inhales, smelling you. Your breath catches.
She seems to feel your gaze, then. Her spine straightens.
And then her head swivels, turning to look straight at you through the fissure, and you run.
****
You remember the feeling; it’s lived in your body forever. When you were the one who had to turn out the lights downstairs before coming up for bed. You flipped the switch and you ran, heart pounding, and you refused to look back, taking the steps two at a time, because you knew if you looked back you’d find things in the corners, coming alive.
You’re running the opposite direction this time - gripping the railing so you don’t slip - and before you know it you’re plunging yourself back down into that familiar darkness.
The kitchen has windows on three of its four walls. You walk backwards into the dense snowglobe. You don’t dare turn on the lights because you aren’t yet prepared to see what you don’t want to, what you know is there. Instead you feel behind you to the counter where the knife block sits and you unsheath one, which happens to not be a knife at all but the sharpening steel. The kitchen grows twice its size in the dark. The 300 year old glass rattles in its wooden cage.
The last time you held the sharpening steel was the summer after eighth grade. You had used duct tape to position it, standing up, on the kitchen floor. Then you stood like Jesus and attempted to fall on your sword so that the world could see you through the kitchen windows.
Something shifts at the other end of the kitchen. The cadence of footsteps is unfamiliar; one foot steps neatly on the wood and the other drags across it, almost like a limp, almost like the two halves of the body hold different weights entirely now. You pull your voice from somewhere deep.
Who are you?
Baby…come here. I love you. It’s just me.
They feel like lies. They feel cruel. They are designed to hurt you.
What do you want? you whisper. What do you want from me?
Turn on the lights… she says. You’re scaring yourself.
You can smell her now.
You can feel the weight of her in the air as it ever so slightly displaces around you. Your skin prickles. Your heart won’t stop moving. Your hand grips the sharpening steel, this little thing inadequate to destroy you back when you so wished it.
Not Mari grabs you, but her body is much bigger than you remembered, and stronger too. You're in quicksand as she wraps around you, gripping your trembling body, forcing it still. You can feel her breath in the vibrations her skin makes against your own. Your choice is in the hand wrapped around the sharpening steel.
She takes that choice as hers. Her grip on your hand is soft, but forceful. It would be possible to break. But it’s easier to follow, like an ocean current that transports you in space without your feet ever leaving the ground. You let her make the decisions for you. She guides the steel through your hand. Metal kisses the skin on your neck.
The pain takes longer, the delay of a thunder clap. You’re not even sure what you’ve done until you hear the sharpening steel clatter to the floor. The first thing you notice is hot liquid pooling in the slightest contours of your body as it makes its way down, leaving its container, burning as it’s exposed to the open air.
And now you understand. She brings her lips to the wound on your neck and she drinks. Her teeth gnaw at your flesh, a want for more. It’s a promise. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’ve got all of you.
All of the ugly things come out of you then, in a rush, and they land in her mouth, dripping down her chin. She sucks them off of her fingers. She inhales them and revels in them and licks their stickiness off her teeth. The things you’ve held just behind your skin, in the corners of your mouth tucked behind your ears and under your tongue. She goes in again, this time with her hand, a child in a toybox, hungry for what lies at the bottom. She scoops you into her hands where you come alive, and you feel her throbbing as she drinks from the well. She pulls away to catch her breath and you put a hand up to touch your neck. Your flesh lace, cascading away. In the darkness, all you can see is that your hand is slick with something. It looks like crude oil. Like you’ve dipped your arm into the earth.
****
What’s inside must come out. You stumble into the snow, bringing with you the silken train of oil, bubbling forth as if your body is the ground. Somewhere along the way you’ve lost track of Mari, or Not Mari, and you find yourself alone. The snow is coming down hard. You don’t have shoes on but you don’t care. Cold against hot burns. What should feel bad feels very, very good. The night is black and white, the sky ink, the snow exactly the color it should be, says God, say LED streetlights. Things are exactly as they should be: perfectly 100% real. That’s life, baby. 100% real. You are curled in a ball, all hot tears and hot blood and melting snow. Your eyes are squeezed tight, long enough that you forget which side your head is on, long enough that you could be upside down and the blood could be entering your body, searching for a home. Long enough that you can remember - just for a moment - a night when a snowstorm turned orange.