Ice Storm by Lou Cadle

Author:Lou Cadle [Cadle, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cadle-Sparks Books
Published: 2020-04-11T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Before night fell, he excused himself to go home and make sure his mom wasn’t home, and that nothing else had fallen on the house, and that nothing else had gone wrong. As he made his way through the dim rooms, nearly as cold as the outdoors, he felt strange, as if he was visiting the ruins of some former civilization. That was nonsense, of course, but the house felt dead, unlived-in already. And really, really cold. The walls cut the breeze, so it was warmer than standing outdoors, but it wasn’t warm. The ice in the sink hadn’t melted yet.

His notes for his mom were where he left them, untouched. Snow had drifted onto the kitchen floor, and he took a minute to sweep it up with a broom and dustpan and dumped it out in the sink.

Alone in the house, without the distraction of board games or conversation, he felt his worry for his mom grow and grow. Surely if something had gone terribly wrong, he’d have been told. If she was—his mind veered away from the thought, but he made himself have it, face it straight on—dead, like in a car accident, the police would have shown up to tell him, right? That’s what happened on TV. So she wasn’t dead. She was probably still stuck downtown, in her office, and the only thing keeping her there was that the roads weren’t cleared. This block wasn’t, for sure. No one had come along to cut trees or clear downed power lines or scrape the snow from the street today or put down salt. No one had tried to drive on it, though they’d fail to get far if they did.

He grabbed the soft throw from his bedroom before he left for Eve’s place.

On the way back, he went into the street and kicked aside the snow. There was still ice down there on the roadway, frozen solid, bumpy in a few places from where people had been driving down it a couple days ago when it first fell. In other places, it was smooth and clear, the dark surface of the road visible beneath it. Even if the temperatures rose to 33, 34, 35 degrees, it would still take a day or two for it all to melt. The drifts might be around for longer than that. What they needed was a day of 45 degrees, to make it all go away.

Back at Eve’s, he noticed how few logs were left to burn. He hadn’t been paying attention to her feeding the logs into the stove today, but there weren’t all that many left. They’d be warm until morning, she had said, but after that, he wasn’t sure. “Should I go back out and try to collect fallen branches to burn?” he asked her, before he took his jacket off.

She shook her head. “They’d be wet and green.”

“Green?”

“Not seasoned. You can mix green and seasoned wood to burn, wood more than a year old like what I have here, but there’s a fire hazard with the fresh stuff.

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