This was my original snow day piece, written in December 2012 and January 2013. I have written about snow days at different times in my life (see Winter Scene in Orange and Blues). If there’s one recurring motif in my life, it’s snow days; if there’s a larger motif that subsumes it, it’s times out of time. This is my first snow day piece, and maybe the first time describing a time out of time, though I don’t name it explicitly.

I’ve also included a second version from March 2013, though I think I’m partial to the first version, now. Gus Smith, January 2021


It snowed all day. He’s out there in bare feet, just to see how it feels.

Inside, they look out the window every few minutes—they don’t even notice, when they do it—and see him. The warmth of the woodstove and the good conversation keeps them anchored, and to him, in the low light, they’re just shadows.

Time passes strangely and the boy in the snow under the sky. All day our watches read gray and phones didn’t work. Everyone plowed their own streets. The mail never came. Today would have been the best day of his life.

He’d written about a situation like this before. He’d said that the winter night was behind him; he was walking away from something cold and unalterable yet strangely beautiful. He said that he sat in a waiting room lit with fluorescent lights; not a permanent place of residence, not pleasant yet not unpleasant, but somewhere meaningful, as there and only there do you truly know what is coming next. And in his case it was the next room, with dim, incandescent light and comforting warmth of a fireplace. What he meant by that was love, I think.

He wrote his little allegories from stuff in his life, but who was it writing his life into allegories? Him on the outside, in the snow, the incandescence on the inside, no door in sight.

Everything in life has led you to the current moment—could you argue against that?

They don’t know how he got out there. Neither does he. They see that his footprints trace a path in from the the neighbor’s yard. He knows, though, that he’s never been in the neighbor’s yard. He doesn’t have a neighbor, no one lives there. No one lives in that house, or in the next house over, and he’s never been in that yard.

Everything in life hasn’t led him here. It was not the best day of his life; it was not a day of his life. Someone has written him into an allegory, but the door’s on the other side of the house, and he doesn’t much want to be inside anyway. Tell whoever wrote it that it’s broken.

Today was an event, a time and a place, and everyone who was there will read this, and it won’t mean anything, and they shouldn’t expect it to.

His feet are cold. The door’s on the other side of the house. He comes inside. ◾


Everything in life has led you to the current moment—could you argue against that?

It snowed all day. He’s just outside the window, standing in the snow.

He’d been in the snow earlier, too; everyone was out in the snow nearly all day. Phones and watches didn’t work. Everyone plowed their own streets.a The mail never came. Today was the best day of his life.

Inside, a few people sit around a dinner table and eat while making sparse conversation. The room is dimly lit and the fireplace going, its fire set as soon as the snow started. Those too sober to be numbed to the awkward silences escape them by looking out the window. Someone keeps mentioning that, “the snow is still falling!”

He’d written about a scene like this one. He’d said back then that the beautiful, untouchable winter night was behind him, probably a now-substanceless analogy to one of his exes. He’d said that he sat in a whitelit waiting room, lit with fluorescent lights—the kind of place where it’s fine to sit, but never to stay. He’d said that there was incandescence and warmth in the next room, though. Love, was it? It could be seen through the door ahead, slightly ajar; he’d said that all he needed to do was simply open it and walk through.

He wrote his little allegories from the everyday occurrences in his life, and thought they were clever. But now, he thought, someone had written his life into an allegory that he didn’t think was quite so clever.

Someone had written his life into an allegory, and he wants to tell them that it’s broken. Here he stands, amidst the beautiful, untouchable winter night, with the incandescence and warmth on the inside, with no waiting room, no door in sight.

Everything in life hasn’t led him here. He sees that his footprints trace a path over from the neighboring yard. He knows, though, that he’s never been in that yard. No one lives in that house, and in all his eighteen years he’d never been closer to it than when he was cutting the grass on the edge of his property. No one lives in the next house after that, either, the last house before the woods. He never walks in those woods, and he’s never been in that yard.

He imagines countless conversations with the author, but he can coax his imagination into giving voice to anyone but himself no more than he can stop his imagination from escalating his unanswered half of the dialogue, seemingly unprovoked, to the point where he is standing in the snow screaming towards the window insults and obscenities directed at his silent conversational partner.

The more he imagines it, the more sinister it seems. He doesn’t understand it and he doesn’t like it anymore. The door’s on the other side of the house; he comes inside. ◾