When the snow lies like a second skin and the box elder and the cottonwood hang low beneath this slippered desert moon, then frost and sky are two opposing mirrors. When my tooth-long shadow ripples dune and striated, sleeping rock, the sky seems troubled too; no comet stirs the clouds, and the burn brighter than the fossil streams frozen upon these striped-rock walls like tears.

The desert is a land I have long-cherished. Rippling in the heat as in the cold, choking breath beneath its winding sands, it is the natural home for such a one as He who carries bones upon his back, souls within his weather-tattered coat. Beneath his little bud of moon and all these scattered stars, I could forget myself. I could walk across these sleeping sands and brush my sulfrous metacarpals through the bearded rabbit brush yellow on yellow ‘til icicles ring a frightened Dies Irae. I remember now a distant memory; a young man running through the snow, cold needling his puckered heels ‘til he collapsed for his devouring. I stop my pacing and recall my own demise the first of many where I would preside; the numbing frost, the swirling winds, at last the limbic warmth deep in my cerebellum, twisting like a worm inside a skull.

The clear plastic pitcher of milk was suspiciously placed in the middle of the table. I sneak over to sniff it in case Mom actually switched to soy. After all, she’d hinted at some big compromise before going to the store. Maybe she’d given in. No. It smells like the regular old milk, produced by enslaved cows. So what was her surprise? Meat-free sausage like the lousy stuff she’d tried last Sunday brunch? Or engineered sterile eggs, that would be just fine except for having been genetically engineered?