It's a bright gray afternoon, air vivid and bristling with that light just before a snowstorm. The salt on the sidewalk sparkles beneath Alex's boots. The rush hour sounds fade as she heads north, cutting across the huge park that bisects the city. An oasis in a desert of metal and cement, she thinks. She climbs an embankment and makes her way through a stand of trees to a long field. Silence clings to her; she imagines it dripping from the bare trees and coating her in an icy balm. The hypnotic flash flash flash of her black boots across dead grass and drifting snow. There are occasional puckered clumps of white where the snow had settled, then melted, in a warm spell after the last storm.

Strange how her body reacts to the cold, precious liquids seeping out like some internal melting. The wind brings tears to her eyes, makes her nose run. When she breathes in deeply, the air seems to bypass her prickling nose and go straight into her lungs, warmed only by the beating of her heart as she crunches across the icy field. Gradually something unfolds in her chest, like a fist unclenching, something soothed by her rapid progress across the field. Her eyes fixed on the horizon, a watery band of evergreen beneath smoky blue, Alex sinks into a familiar, formless stream of images: the frozen wind's gnawing translates into wolfish teeth at her cool neck, a morbid fairy-tale scene, white, black, red. Girl in a jet coat on ivory snow, something silent at her throat and the scarlet surprise of a kiss. Ex, ex, ex, and — Oh. How it presses, presses so the hot love gushes up; she imagines the relief of that dark eruption.

She knows it's silly, comical even, but Alex always imagines it the same way, the profound, polar silence that would follow this draining kiss: crawling into a giant freezer and stretching out among the hoary vegetables and mysterious cold-burned packages of meat, just another shining form blind and dead in her winter-white fur coat.

She arrives at the lobby of his apartment building and pauses to let the mist on her glasses dissolve. When he buzzes her through, she takes the tiny mirrored elevator up to his floor. Cramped silver box and she is surrounded on all sides, the image of three short women, shapeless in long black coats. A pinched, foxy face in triplicate. Stray snowflakes glisten, melting in her tangled hair, escaping from three identical braids. The elevator creaks and shudders to the top floor, and she avoids her own eyes in the spotted glass, relieved when the door slides open. He lives at the end of the narrow, rust-carpeted hallway, and when he opens the door a wave of heat and the oppressive scent of clementines creep out like dazed prisoners. He hovers near the entrance, unobtrusive as a shadow, and as always protests that Alex shouldn't have come, that she must have nicer things to do, all the while waiting anxiously for her to come in so that he can close the door behind her. He waves a trembling, puffy hand toward the coat stand, indicating that she should hang her things up. "I'm sorry dear," he begins, breathless, tugging at the frazzled edges of his burnt straw hair, "I'm just such a wreck today. I know I must look a sight...and this place," he gestures hopelessly at the dusty carpet covered in crumpled tissues and dried gold trails of clementine peelings, "I just can't seem to keep up with anything." He begins this way every time.