Excerpt: The Antarctican Revisited

She laughed like a bell ringing beautifully and brightly but honestly as anything and wriggled out of my arms, standing up. “I think it was supposed to snow today. Did it snow?” And without waiting for an answer, she walked to the window in the corner of the hall and saw that it was, indeed, snowing.

“Come on, come on!” Merrick grabbed my hand and we fled down the stairs like a cliché couple in a cartoon. We were suddenly outside, where the air itself seemed to be blue. The snowflakes were illuminated under the orangey glow of the streetlights and she stood, eyes closed and inhaling as if to keep everything in the world inside her at once. She was pretty and smart and sometimes made me laugh so tonight, possibly because she was insane and possibly because of her smile and almost absolutely certainly because of her tears and her arms and the way she pronounced Antarctica and knew, like I did, that it was everything, tonight of all the nights in the universe I knew I loved her and craved her as the empty curve of Africa craves the nestling of South America that it has been missing for hundreds of millions of years.