A little drunk, we share a cigarette. So cold and clear that stars pop like bugs in the sky and my right ear hurts with a crashing kind of pain.

The sledding hill looks lumpy and it bothers me. He tosses his coat on the snow as though it were a beach towel, plunks down, and says for me to sit.

"You," he says, "Sit in here."

He opens his legs, and I sit up against him like a wall while he warms my ear with those piano fingers curling over. I try not to dwell on my mother's breast and how they will take it off. I let my mind do things and then I stop it from happening but it happens.

He lives in dreams with me but he wants that to end. This feels like a scene in a movie which comes somewhere in the middle, when the popcorn tastes not so perfect.

He hates coming home to this, he says, he's always known how the town cancers and folds around exits. I'll follow him into a deepblue anything to get the fuck out.