Winter's Bone

31

TWO KINDS of pills and a bedridden afternoon, evening, on into the night. The sky was dark and whistling, shaking windows and the horizon beyond, but Ree lay there immune to weather. The boys came home early and said, “More snow days!” but Ree merely grunted. The yellow pills had shown qualities worth appreciating, too. Seems like yellow ones shoved away hurt pretty good but left the mind on and lighted, while blue ones shut you down to an utter smooth blackness where time was sheared away in chunks without having to be lived through at all. Sometimes you want the mind on. Stuff dances around in there when the mind’s on, not often the specific dancing memories you tried to call up with actual specific thoughts, but generally even the uninvited dancing stuff tickled or intrigued or at least left a fuzz of feelings behind. Whiteness piled on the windowsill, snowflakes sashayed and darted and plunged past the glass panes, and she reached to the floor bedside, shook loose another blue, and lay back waiting on black.