Winterizing

by Tim Horvath

We run out of things all at once — firewood and oatmeal and sugar (brown and white) and coffee and money. Payday is a distant balloon that might be drifting toward us or receding; impossible to say which. It feels like just days ago we were flush, you proudly bearing piles of wood closer to the house so we wouldn’t have to trudge daily through an obliterative carapace of snow. I could see your muscles, taut as you lifted, and when you lowered each handful your wispy breath came forth like a promise. Now I can only lie here cupping your breast and sifting through the cold-bumps there, marveling that like stars they are both ephemeral and necessary, the universe unthinkable without them. This will be our sustenance, our currency, our heat source, and we will hide midst them until one declares itself a new sun.

6S

Tim Horvath's work is out or forthcoming in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Fiction, Web Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, and many other places. His novella, Circulation, will be released by Sunnyoutside Press later this year. He teaches at Grub Street Writers in Boston and will teach writing at Chester College of New England starting in the spring of 2009. (He is also the author of the world's longest six sentence story, "Luminous Specificity," published in Six Sentences, Volume 1.)