Silk

“Yeah, my dad was there right at the start of that war,” he said and began to heat the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter. Niki had never actually watched anyone shoot up before, tried not to stare, tried not to seem rude by looking away.

“He was Army, two tours,” and after the powder had turned to a dark and bubbling liquid, he wrapped a green and yellow bungee cord tight around his bicep, thumped hard at his forearm with one index finger while the heroin cooled. “Took a bullet at Nhatrang during the Tet Offensive.”

“I don’t know where that is,” Niki said, and cringed inside when he took the needle from the case, old-fashioned glass syringe that he had to screw the needle onto.

“Shit. Neither do I. Just one of those places he used to talk about, that’s all it means to me.”

Keith drew the heroin carefully, carefully, every drop in through the needle, tapped the syringe and pushed out the air bubbles. He set the needle against his skin, skin scarred with tracks like a pox, needle aimed away from Niki, toward his heart.

“He used to talk about the war a lot. Had a medal and everything ’cause he got a foot blown off.”

And he pricked the skin, shifted his thumb slightly, easing the pressure on the plunger; Niki clearly saw the dark flow of his blood back into the syringe, the billow darker than crimson in the shadowy apartment before he injected. When the syringe was empty, he slipped the needle out, removed the bungee cord. Closed his eyes and inhaled loudly.

“It doesn’t hurt?” Niki asked him.

Nothing for a moment, and then he exhaled, slowly.

“Babe, it only hurts when the well runs dry,” he smiled, and for just a second looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable, more than a fucked-up junky rushing after his wake-up fix. And she could almost see in him what Daria might see, glimpse of something that Niki had heard in his music the night before, someone he kept safe and out of sight.

“It only hurts when it ain’t there.”

And she thought of the things she’d read, secondhand life, William Burroughs and something about Billie Holiday. And how little any of it meant, how she understood that she’d never understand, unless she let the needle kiss her own skin one day, and another day after that, until the junk became as much a part of her as air or water or the blood in her veins.

“Most of this kit was my dad’s, too,” Keith said, and when he saw the surprise on Niki’s face, he laughed. “No shit. They sent him back short a foot, but he had that fucking medal and a hell of a morphine habit.”

And then neither of them said anything for a while, just the wind outside talking to itself, and Keith stared past her out the window.

“Should we wake them up?” she asked, finally.

“Sure,” he said. “Bunch’a lazy-ass motherfuckers.”

“And then what?” Niki asked, and Keith gri

“Bet you never built a snowman, New Orleans girl.”

“No,” she said. “I never did.”

After the icebox of the building, the cold outside wasn’t such a shock, except when the wind gusted, came roaring at them around the corner of a building, up a deserted street, sluiced through garbage-can alleyways. A wind that made Niki think of places she’d never been, Chicago wind, Manhattan wind, wind that flayed without bothering to peel back skin and muscle first, that cut straight through no matter how many layers of clothes.

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, fla

They built their ski

“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 ca

“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 optical illusion.

“See,” Niki prompted, “Those are the wings.”

Spyder got up and started off down the street without them.

“Hey, where are you going?”

“Home,” Spyder called back. “I have to go home now.”

“Well, wait,” and by then Keith and Daria had noticed, although Mort and Theo were still busy pummeling each other.

“Where’s she goin’?” Keith asked, and Daria shook her head, asked, “Where’s Spyder going, Niki?”

“Just come on, guys,” and Niki was already ru

“Wait!” she called after Spyder. “I can’t walk that fast,” her voice so loud and small in the cold air and no sign that Spyder had even heard, trudging ahead as if there were no one left on earth but her.