Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [96]
There’d been no hope for the van, half-buried by the Dumpster, so they’d all borrowed layers from Keith’s ragpile boxes, set out on foot, and when they passed the smoked-glass window of a shoe-shine and repair shop, Niki thought they looked like the shambling survivors of some Arctic apocalypse, ice not fire, Robert Frost’s second choice. Tube socks for gloves, flannel like the hides of plaid antelope, and Niki had found a second pair of jeans, Levi’s that would have been huge on Keith or Mort, cinched around her waist with an old extension cord the color of a neon-orange warning.
They built their skinny snowman on the sidewalk outside the Compass Bank on Twentieth Street, just a little taller than Niki and Daria, three uneven tiers and he listed a little to the right. Mort found limestone gravel for the eyes, an old windshield-wiper blade for an industrial Cyrano, snapped sticks off a frozen shrub for twiggy arms.
“Ugly fucker,” Keith said, and then he’d made the snowman a bifurcated dick with another twig.
“You are so sick,” Theo said, and so he smacked her in the back of the head with a snowball, as big as a grapefruit. The one she lobbed back at him was only half as big, packed harder; it missed Keith altogether and caught Daria right between the eyes. Keith started laughing so hard that he had to sit down, holding his stomach, sinking up to his waist in the snow.
“Fuck you, asshole,” and Daria had found some wetter snow in the gutter, muddy snow, and a few seconds later she’d nailed him and Keith was spitting and coughing, but still laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.
Spyder had sat down beside the bulbous lower tier of the snowman, had pulled out his stick-dick and was busy using it to trace swirling lines in the snow crust. Niki joined her, sat as close as she dared, remembering the awkward kiss the night before, still just as confused, still just as attracted. The designs Spyder drew in the snow reminded Niki of aboriginal rock paintings or sloppy paisley.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and Spyder looked up too fast, clear she hadn’t even noticed Niki until she’d spoken. The cut over her eye was red, red against her wind-pink face.
“Um,” she said. “Yeah, but I should go home now.”
“Do you think Byron will be there, and Robin?”
“Maybe,” she said, and in the street, Theo and Daria had paired off against Mort and Keith, and they cursed and laughed and shrieked as the snow flew like shot from fairy cannons.
“Look like fun?” Niki asked Spyder, and Spyder only shrugged; she’d refused any extra clothes, except a pair of socks for her hands, a hole in one so her left pinkie stuck out the side. Her black jacket stood out, contrast like a hole in the day.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“There is something else I’ve always wanted to do,” Niki said. A missile intended for Theo sailed over their heads, then, hit the snowman instead and sprayed them both with crystalline shrapnel. And she stood, found a patch of snow they hadn’t messed up yet with footprints, and lay down.
“What are you doing?” Spyder asked, turning to see, face scrunched into a James Dean squint.
“Just watch,” Niki said. “When I was a little girl, I read about kids doing this, in those Little House books or somewhere.”
And then Niki began to move her arms up and down, legs scissoring open and closed again, displacing snow, plowing it aside. And then she stood, shaking and brushing away the white powder before it could melt and soak through.
“It’s a snow angel,” she said, proud that it had come out looking just like she remembered the pictures, and Spyder only stared, said nothing, eyes intense like she was trying to solve a puzzle, an