the ink from the coroner's office had hardly gone from the paper when the wind cut across his face, whisking through the stubble in icy eddies that sent a soaring deadening through the slack skin of his cheeks. at his feet lay the crumpled remains of snow, battered into compactness and then to dust through many cycles, now browned with dirt and smear in frothy blackness by grease.

behind him the gatling roar of an engine starting up spouted wet flat echoing noises into the expansive harbor of the alley. black oil smoke thick with the smell of rubber oxidized on the forgotten routine of too many midnight beer hauls. the snow on the cap of the exhaust pipe melted and slid into the soft light newfallen snow of the pavement, leaving a small dark patch, looking like dead clotted blood.

the insides of his nostrils grew their warm pain, like the color of light shined through eyelids or blood in the mouth. the cold isolates the flesh and holds it against its antithesis. it warms to the challenge and places everything into a clarity of awareness which lights memories with its depth of vision. against an encompassing suspension of whiteness over the world, obliterating the horizon in miles of impassibility, the city stood abstractly stark and hypothetical. the water stretched along the street in spreading puddles turning white with ice as if infected. the dark towers of brick grey or brown. windows with greyed boards rotting in them. black tar melting down the side of a red brick tower. a few giants grown uninteresting when their architectural period passed drew long shadows across grass clumped parking lots, their red on white signs fading in the breeze, dirt collecting thick on the stickered numbers pasting up charges. fuck you grown grey in chalk under a bench.

the cold washed over his deadening cheek like a steel scrape. the power lines hung immobile in the wind.