I’m adding ivory milk to instant coffee when I hear her cough. It’s one of those common gestures someone performs to create a stir in the other so you don’t have to start the conversation. She forced herself too because neither of us has said anything in over an hour. I think that she thinks I should by saying something like “oh, are you catching a cold?”
      I see her turn her head slightly to the left to catch me out of the corner of her eye to see if I’ll say something, do something, ask something but of course I don’t and just continue to blow on the top of my coffee mug instead. So she continues to wash the dishes or her plain hands unenthusiastically. When she turns her head forward again is when I turn my head to watch her straight hair sway a little when her convulsions make it quiver. It just goes left to right. Like a disagreeing index finger waving no. Or the pendulum on an old grandfathers clock. Then I remember right before one of mine died he said something like “get married as soon as possible, boy. Dying alone is worse than being buried alive.” I’m still not so sure, to this day, what he really meant by it. I was four when he told me. He had Alzheimer’s and migraines. I think an aneurism killed him at over a hundred. I ask myself, in his memory, why would you want to forget to struggle to live? And then I look in her dismal direction again.
      I blow breeze on my coffee gently again and notice her shivering and then think to myself that maybe if she wore something like a scarf or a sweater, it would make her create more of an attraction. The design. The color scheme. The style. But she doesn’t. She isn’t. Instead she turns around and stares dead cold at me. I think I start to shiver as I reluctantly agree and we both march into the bedroom. Of course I follow behind her all the way there. She asks me to turn the thermometer up because it’s cold in the bedroom but of course the lights stay on.

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      The freeze goes through the stitching in your newly knitted mittens. They’re plain black. They’re too small so it looks like you have webbing between your fingers from where the spaces between them are stretching the material. You keep seeing your empty breath escape from the holes in between your dividing lips when you exhale. You keep saying “it’s pretty fucking cold outside.”
      Kids yell down the street. The same ones are making false men out of snow. You keep saying “it’s really fucking cold outside.” The snow plows cascade more brown snow in clumps in front of your once cleared out driveway. You have to dig in to get it out of the way. Your back hurts. Aches. Irritates. Unfortunately, a new rendition of this outcome isn’t possible. You’re the only one home and you keep thinking about how a hot shower would do you well.
      Finish this and get warm.
      Finish this and get warm.
      Your boots do little good. They have velcro straps and very little insulation. Somehow the wet gets inside and stains your tiny white ankle socks blue, like the real color of the blood that seems to have paused its circulation in your feet. The edge of the shovel is curved back up from greeting the grooves in the concrete too many times. And just how well would summer feel? Is that air conditioner from ages ago still getting you sick in your room in the attic? Your heavy jacket has lost a few buttons. Your hat has snow dust stuck to it. When you get back inside it will melt into a puddle and you’ll probably have to take a towel to where it drips in the kitchen or living room, or wherever you enter from, when you actually finish shoveling. The funny thing is that you don’t even drive. Your father does. Old blue station wagon. The generic kind where the seats don’t recline anymore and the windows fog up too fast. No heat. It fits nothing useful and the hubcaps are stolen and rotted. The winters here are too cruel and sidewalk salt eats away at the undercarriage and paint job like vultures to a solitary carcass.
      Finish this. Get warm.
      Finish this. Grab warmth.
      The mail man comes. His jacket is puffy. Much more insulated than yours. You watch the impressions his construction boots leave in the padded whiteness when he walks past you with a bundle of uninteresting letters and useless bills. His feet curve a little to the inside. You nod at each other and put your wet mittens to your wet cracked lips and breathe out. It’s one of those days where you wish the sky wasn’t so bland so you had something pleasant to watch while you seemed like you were just waiting to die. But you have to finish this first. The children’s snowman down the street is hideous. You compliment them on it when you walk down the street the next day or later that day for some odd reason that isn’t really worth describing.

      Fireworks and bottle rockets have straighter paths then what I think about when she is moaning. Squealing. When we perform this activity that makes us care for each other. Or pretend to. So instead I think about that. Everything about the snow and the dismal winter daydreams. It’s boring when I orgasm other older ordinary things. Imagine human misery. It’s really not that bad.

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