Yellow

Perhaps I'm being way too poetic here, but I think everything gets quieter when it snows. Even my family--even my family--was nigh on silent when I woke up later than usual (because of their silence). The curtains still colored the light coming through my window yellow instead of white, but there was a certain quality to it that caused me not to worry I'd overslept.

I went downstairs, sleepily shoving my hair out of my eyes. I had this new haircut, you see, and while I liked it because it made me look, in the mornings, like an actual human being instead of Cousin It, I now had to sleepily shove my hair out of my eyes every morning. "Good morning," I mumbled to my dad, who was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the obituaries.

Now, my dad is not the guy who has time to leisurely sit around reading the newspaper every day. I wished he was. He wished hes was, and I only wished it because he wished it. But, no. My dad was in the estate furniture business, which meant he sold dead people's furniture, so he always knew who was dead.



Maudlin, yes. But, hey, I wasn't complaining. Sometimes things are just maudlin. And if my dad didn't sell it, what would happen to the furniture of dead people? Rot. Better to find it a nice home before it got too lonely.

I also had a really, really cool desk. It had a secret compartment.

"Morning," my dad said back as I poured a cup of coffee. "No school today."

He's actually a very smart guy. But sometimes he just doesn't think. Especially when he's reading the obituaries. It's a bad situation.

I didn't tease him about it though; he wouldn't have even noticed, so engrossed was he in his paper. I took my coffee back upstairs.

The secret of snow days was to pretend you were asleep as long as was humanly possible. Seeing my dad was a non issue, as thirty seconds after I closed my bedroom door, he wouldn't even remember he'd seen me. But if I'd run into my mother (clearly getting coffee was a risky endeavor, but a risk I had no choice but to take), it would've been snow boots and a shovel for me.

I mean, I had brothers. Brothers who wanted to get buff, who appreciated manual labor of any kind, who hung chin-up bars over their bedroom doors, who spend their afternoons in the Axe-scented weight room at school. And snow was both wet and cold. My bed--hell, my whole house--was warm and dry.

I wasn't about to put up with that.

So for that morning I listened so slam poetry in the only yellow light in the whole white world.