If the temperature were one degree warmer this acrobatic snow would be mist but as it is you can see the swinging white bits it’s how it looked when I used to try on my father’s glasses, the way they lent everything bubbly curves.
He left them in the kitchen when he was on the whiskey as my mother said, her blue eyes extra stormy, warning me the way everything – the food on our plates, the plates on the table, the table on the floor – was at the mercy of my father’s drunken arse, and later, in bed, listening to the music of the ice cubes I’d wait for the end, always waiting, anticipating the descent, what’s grunts what’s bones, before the crumple of his body I imagined at the bottom of the stairs, the glass still in his hand, unspilled, the raucous ice.
The couple next door must have heard through the wall – our street was all duplexes – and they invited me over those nights, a timid knock on the front door and there was Audrey, my Florence Nightingale.
She took me through the dark down three stars across the thin lawn through the gap in the hedge through her thin lawn and up three stairs into another world.
Every bender my father came back a little less himself – does that make sense? – his decline was hardly discernabe like a slice of these little snowflakes so infinitesimal but eventually you have to shovel it don’t you, and I changed every time, too. When I went to Audrey and Phil’s I’d take something with me and leave it there until I was, in my way, like one of those kids at school who had cottages and so two lives, two sets of everything.
There were nights my father drove home so drunk he parked in driveways similar to ours and staggered into houses with mirror-image layouts, passed out where the couch should have been, woke up on the floor and snuck home before anybody knew.
But everybody always knew.
I’d sleep those nights in my mirror-image room, Uncle Phil would open the door, smile in and say roll ’em, which was his way of saying light’s out, Audrey’s bobbing head above his, she’d laugh every time he said it, and I felt sorry about those suckers other side of the wall.