“The house was quiet, empty, dark. As she made the coffee, Renee Owen looked through the window to the frozen black morning in their backyard. The thermometer outside the window, itself caked in ice, read nine degrees. She looked away from the red vertical line and back to the dark snow. It was an odd thing to think, but it didn’t take much to see the cold. It was supposed to be invisible, but there it was, right there. You could hear it, too, in the wind, and maybe even smell it in the heat... blowing from the vents in the floor. Without the sun, she guessed the waving foot of snow in their backyard had turned solid. She imagined walking across the top of it without breaking through. She imagined being barefoot, feeling the hard ice on the bottoms of her feet. It was warm inside, but she imagined herself out there, freezing, stepping gingerly. For an hour she sat alone in the big chair in the den, reading. Bill wandered down the stairs at 6:45, the hair on the sides of his head sticking out horizontally.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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