It used to snow in Ohio. Snow in a way that freezes the moisture in your nose when you step outside, causing your childhood imagination to worry about ice crystals forming in your brain. It pummeled this state in a way that defeated our abilities to open our front doors, packed, as they were, against the stuff.
I was nineteen, living under my parents’ roof. The roof in question was new to us, “The biggest house on the block,” my father boasted, despite it being a duplex with two oddly laid out apartments on a shitty downtown street, in a dying town, in a state that the nation only remembered in election years when our inability to settle on a cultural identity made us, in some perfunctory way, importantly unpredictable.
They’d recently sold my childhood home, where I had received calls from my first real girlfriend and first had sex with the girl who would become my wife.
My father called me at my job at a now-defunct bookstore to say there were no signs of it stopping, that he didn’t trust me on the roads, that he would pick me up and leave my car in the empty mall parking lot. Drives with him were always silent, but there’s no silence like a winter storm.
Safely home, as we trudged from the alley to our back door. I witnessed him stop ahead of me and test his leg, adding then removing weight.
It wasn’t his child’s place to ask.
I was awoken by my mother’s instruction to get dressed, the EMTs were coming. It was four a.m. I waited all day for them to return from the hospital. Only she did. A stroke, she said, caused by a brain tumor. He was dead in three weeks. He never knew that, earlier the week of the storm, she, too, had been diagnosed. She joined him the following winter.
Now, so many years later, we have our own scares, separated, again, by less than a week, afflictions in body parts that are beloved to the other. We went separately for tests, like dentist appointments or errands. We sit at the kitchen table, chatting about the cold, drinking our coffee, variously willing our phones to ring or keep silent. Framing her head, I watch through the window as flakes fall, knowing they’ll add up to nothing.
M.C. Schmidt’s recent short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Southern Humanities Review, EVENT, Coolest American Stories 2024, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022) and the forthcoming short story collection How to Steal a Train (Anxiety Press, 2025).