Sometimes it appears in the sky. Once in a while, it lays frozen at your feet. But this time, when it fell out of a tree, I got a little freaked out. Not exactly ready for it. The way it wrapped its arms around its chest, legs slamming against the ground, then all of that white covering it, making it disappear. Like it never happened.

I guess that’s what made me go out there.

Into the storm.

Lifting it from the heavy snow, I think, Poor guy, so young, so full of dreams and adventure, did he marry, have children, find a home? But then the damn thing lurches toward my throat, claws scratching, so of course I drop it, send it spiraling. Its beady black eyes looking through me with a Get the hell away from me, Cabin Girl, go back to your green tea and hummus sandwich, New York Times crossword and NPR, we don’t give a shit about you anyway squirrel attitude and then its sullen scamper away. No warm heart-felt glances, no clasped squirrel paws, no moment of gratitude at what we’ve been through together, furry animal and fucked up girl; it’s just his bushy tail shaking and incessant chattering, chattering on those icy branches. So, I think, hey, I’m all done here-- no more rescuing any more of their twitchy asses. Even when the other ones start coming at me, fur and claws and flailing fists balled tight before crashing.

I’m a little out of whack.

Must be the storm.

I’ll call home.

"Quick, turn on the television," Mama says first thing, like she says every time I call her.

Pissed off squirrels cartwheel down, drowning in the drifts. I turn away and stare at the burnt out fire, my crumpled newspapers.

"I don’t have a television," I say.

"What’s wrong with you?"

Television shows are the major form of communication in our family. They dictate what books to read (Kelly and Regis Show), what advice to take (Monteil Show), and hair styles (All soap operas). My sister, Dee Dee, just got her hair cut exactly like Bridget on The Bold and the Beautiful, this soap opera that the whole family watches, makes bets on. Dee Dee is the star in the family. She’s a flight attendant for Florida Air, lives two doors away from Mama, has platinum hair, paints her nails with stars and moons and is married to her high school football star sweetheart, Nelson. Who is now forty, fat, and owns a car dealership in Fort Lauderdale. I fucked him in junior high school.

"I don’t know. Maybe it’s the snow," I say in monotone because I’m watching a somber squirrel taking his place on the highest branch. He looks up to the gray sky before he rolls over backward.

"You should move back to Florida where it’s sunny all the time."

"Sunshine scares me."

Her unique, whistling snort. "Why can’t you just be happy?"

"Happiness scares me, too." I pause. "Judith."

Mama hates me calling her Judith. She goes by Judy-Bee.

"Jesus Christ," Mama says, but she’s not praying for me. After most of our conversations, she tells me to go to hell, so instead I live in Northern Maine with potato farmers, logging trucks, thick woods and cross eyed children.

This conversation is not helping.

At all.

Pines sway at one another and globs of snow smash the shutters. One is broken. It flaps back and forth, wooden lips mouthing off to the storm, Fuck you, Nor’easter, yeah, fuck you.

"Are you listening?" Mom asks. I forgot she was there. "How’s Tom?"

"It’s Tobias."

"What kind of name is Tobias?"

I really don’t know. He’s Jewish and thin. He wears galoshes with wool socks. My sweat pants hang off his skinny ass. He torments over the debacle of ethnic cleansing and suffers from constant colds. But then again, he is saving Loggerhead turtles, the ones that get lost from Florida and wash up catatonic on the Cape beaches. He calls them his babies.

He visits once a month.

He has a mouth guard and layers on eye cream at night.

He gets asthmatic after sex.

I don’t especially like him.

"There’s a blizzard here," I tell her.

"Don’t change Judge Judy! What are you doing, Bobby? They got the goddamn prostitutes on next." Bobby is my father. His real name is Robert, but he says it sounds like a fucking fag name and don’t no one call him that, that he’ll break their fucking head if they call him that. So I call him that.

I don’t go home often.

"Do you ever watch Judge Judy?" Mom asks.

"Television scares me."

"Here, talk to your sister." Mom’s had it with me. "And go to…"

"Hey, Girl." Dee Dee likes talking pseudo-black now that she’s found religion with The View. There’s a black woman on the show I’ve been told. She also likes Oprah, not on book club or self help days, but on celebrity Fridays. Oprah says ‘girl’ a lot too, so I guess that gives Dee Dee more incentive.

"Hey, Girl," I say back to her, without the same enthusiasm.

"Guess what?" She’s almost breathless.

"What?" I ask.

"I got a new car!" She has an edgy bounciness that tells me she’s popping pain pills again, Oxycontin, probably. I’m hoping to call home some weekend to hear that Dee Dee’s in jail after robbing a drug store in her angora pink sleep mask, demanding in her little girl voice, give me the pills, give them to me quick, I’ve got to get home for the next installment of the ‘The Bachelor’. So far no luck. "A Lincoln Continental with adjustable…"

Another squirrel plunges with a tragic sense of purpose. Maybe it felt suicidal, stuffed one too many chestnuts down his throat and decided to call it quits. Maybe it never really felt part of the squirrel world and just wanted to take its chances in the afterlife, or maybe it believes in reincarnation, that it will become a tiger next and rip apart small animals.

"…leather interior…"

I don’t see any movement in the snow. No little squirrel legs twitching. The frozen trees detached and stoic as another squirrel flails backward, clawing at air. That shutter just banging and banging and banging.

"Are you even listening to me? Did you even hear any of what I said? Hellloooo…"

I twirl the telephone cord around and around my finger. "Sorry. There are squirrels dying outside."

"Why can’t you just be normal? First its squirrels with you and then it’s on to something else like women in Afghanistan. Sure, they’re poor and have to wear ugly scarves all the time and sometimes get their arms blown off but are they my problem? Am I to blame?"

"Jesus Christ," I hear Robert say. "What the hell is she talking about now?"

"Give me the goddamn phone," Mom says.

I think it’s a good time to get off before I’m questioned about my pierced nose, why I chained myself to a nuclear reactor and how I go to that goddamn graduate school full of potheads and tree huggers. "Buh-bye," I say in my best flight attendant voice to Dee Dee.

She hates when I do this.

I pull a squirrel out. It’s iced over, rigid, but somehow the little guy has kept a sense of buoyancy on his hairy little face. Like he said wheeee when he jumped. I sort of want that in my life. A conscious flush of happiness before I hit the ground. I rub at his chest, flipping him over onto his back, then up again. His frozen eyes stare blankly.

He should be my friend.

So I put him into my backpack, next to my two granola bars and thermos of herbal tea. His stiff little tail pushes at my extra set of mittens, in and out with all that wool like he’s having some hokey-pokey. Naughty, naughty, I think.

Snow sprays down my neck.

The moon pushes the stars away.

And a sheet of ice falls from the roof.

Black and blue, it splits into shard and silvered glass and I smell the air and swallow my breath.

"Ready, Rocky?" My dead squirrel’s name. "Here we go."

I strap on my skis and head down to the frozen fields, blue spruce and buried logging roads. I want to get lost.

I know the trail, so off I go to the sinkholes, empty vernal ponds groaning and cracking as I slide over them. Deer tracks and dried yellowing grasses and pockmarked spindly trees and the cold and the numbness, silence knocking at my head. Pull up one hill, fall down another, one right after the other until I’m in deep. There’s no one. That blizzard blowing hard. Ice in a sweat layer around my face. Dusk a faint light across the distant lake, then dark. Soon, I’m five miles away from home.

That’s when they come.

The sound of revving engine and splintering ice then the smell of gasoline and smoke, crushed branches and mud, and headlights over the snow above me. In shadow, I see them, dressed as shiny marshmallows, black and silver, blue and red, their faces covered in reflective metal. And I crouch behind a pine and watch the line of them, tight against each other, spitting up snow, leaving a haze of gray, then gone.

The wind howls. I bump and batter the branches with my ski poles. And head over another hill. And another. My mittens are soaked, my backpack frozen to my jacket, I can’t feel my ears because they’ve probably fallen off my head and are laying on the trail somewhere and I really need a drink. And not some damn herbal tea, either.

This fucking sucks.

Trash the sky.

Trash the wind.

Trash the cold.

I’m ready to party.

They circle around again. Down in field, glittering and spinning in circles and figure eights. Buzzing engines, yet the smell of oil mixing with spruce and fir invigorating. Then they disappear over the hill in flashes of red.

Aimlessly, I ski. First left, then right, heading for the glow of their lights below. Finding dark pockets. I hear a loud hoot, a goddamn, and smell smoke.

There are no tracks now, drifting snow covering any trace of me. Icicles hang out of my nose. Are frozen over my chin. And my hands are filling with cement.

So I lean against a broken tree, pushing my hip into the bark. It’s rough but slides when I rub up and down on it and the outline of the moon is hazy, no evening star, no splash of white to get lost inside. Maybe I am crazy. Not normal. Deranged. Maybe I’m really an alien pushed into a human body and I’m not meant to be here, ET, ET, phone home, pointing my finger to the sky trying to find the right telephone number. Maybe I was put in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong family. Maybe I’m just wrong.

I feel like hitting something.

So I hit the tree.

It stays still.

Rivulets of ice freeze along my chin, over my cheekbones.

I smell him before I see him, his heavy body next to me. Grease, roasted pork, burnt rubber, swallowed beer, leaking gas, warm engine. When I open my iced eyes, his face is the color of a smashed tomato.

Helmet off, he slings me over his shoulder and my bones crackle.

I drape my hands over his down jacket hips and the machine whisks us past blown apart bushes, dead trees and granite cliffs.

I bite his jacket to hold on.

Their hut is covered in plastic sheeting, lit up by kerosene lamps. It glows with the plastic milk bottle whiteness and rattles even though duct taped closed. A smoky fire made of charred logs, tires, and beer cans blazes in front of me but we don’t warm our hands to it. Inside the hut, I hear singing, a drinking ditty called Hey, Lottie, about a girl who loves to give blow jobs. Someone throws a bottle of whiskey outside and it breaks apart as I try to stand.

"Hey!" One of them comes out from the side of the shack, zipping a flap on his snowmobile suit. He walks in a sway-backed way and grins at me with a wrecked face, broken nose, chipped tooth, raw cheeks.

I just stand there, propped against my Snowmobiler Boy.

"Yo, Jay Z," Snowmobiler Boy says.

"Found her?" Jay Z’s voice is gravelly. His eyes gleam. My skis stick up from the back of Snowmobiler Boy’s silver Ice Monster snowmobile. He takes them out and props them on the shack.

"Yup," Snowmobiler boys says, taking my skis and propping them on the shack.

"It’s fucking cold out here," Jay Z says, as he kicks one of the tires further into the fire with the tip of his boot.

Snowmobiler Boy nods again, staring at me.

Inside the shack, they’re singing another Hey, Lottie song, this time about girls with big tits.

"Come on," Snowmobiler Boy says.

Smoke gusts into my face from the burning tire. My eyes water so I close them, temporarily blinded as I nod my head, yes, yes, until the cold air smacks them open again. He pushes the plastic aside for me, but I fall against him, warm air coming out of the shack, guys inside just raising their fists and bumping their hips at us.

"Shut the fuck up," Snowmobiler Boy says, the shack littered with candy wrappers, sodden newspapers, an old mattress, two cots. They move away from us, still nudging each other in their shiny suits, spread out feet on the lopsided floor. I feel my face melting.

They pass a bottle to me and it’s too quiet, their eyes down my face, studying my chest when I take my jacket off. I take a long haul off the whiskey and note the nods I get when I wipe my mouth with the back of my sleeve.

"How you do it, Jacko?" asks Jay Z, adjusting himself.

Snowmobiler Boy, Jacko, shrugs, sitting next to me on the mattress. "Another?" He presses the bottle at me and nods.

I lean my head back and pour it down. Then I smile at him, my face cracking, melted ice down my neck. He licks his lips slowly. Then takes a toke of the weed circling around. When he hands it to me with drumstick-sized hands, I hold my smoke in hard and let it out in tight O’s, watching it rise to the wooden ceiling filled with carved names, dates, phone numbers.

We party. Wind plastering the plastic tight against the shack. We get drunk. Buried bottles of scotch, gin coming in from the woodpile covered in blue veined ice.

We get stoned. Moonlight spreading white outside. We play cards. The lake splintering and groaning.

"Why you out skiing?" one of them asks, and I look them over, mud boots kicked off, hardened melon arms matted with fur, unzipped pants, blue tattoos of naked girls, cracked teeth, Jacko with his moon face, his capped silver tooth, his thick thigh pressed against mine. We’re boarded safe against what’s outside; their beer bottle breath and fried eyes, all of us huddling together through the blizzard, expecting nothing but the next drink. I almost want to start singing another round of Hey, Lottie, it’s so calm in here.

But I don’t like feeling safe.

Or calm.

"I’m in training," I say slowly.

Now this piques their attention. Curiosity heating up their faces, making them twitch their lips. Jack Daniels gets passed.

"For what?" Jay Z asks. He stares at the ceiling.

"Reconnaissance." I nod my head and all I hear is huh, huh as their heads loll around on shoulders. "Mission F-12, SAD unit."

My brother, Fitz, is a Navy Seal and talks in abbreviations and numbers, head bald, eyes dark, feet spread. He launches deadly attacks, organizes special operations, despises fugitive dictators, and continually saves the lives of innocent citizens in third world countries. On his annual holiday leaves, he gives us riveting tales of carnage, torture, slaughter, just before the pumpkin pie is served.

I recently burned a flag.

He thinks I’m a terrorist.

"Cool."

"No way."

"My brother is in the Fourth Infantry Division," Jacko says, and takes a breath so deep that he starts coughing so I pound him on the shoulders with my fist until he stops. "Thanks." He unzips the rest of his coat and gold chains spill out, a cross, St. Christopher metal, iron fist, chain link. Dark chest hair rises to his neck. He’s huge. Chest and face and arms proclaiming manhood.

"Where you stationed?" Jay Z asks. He cracks his neck in loud pops, loosening his thin shoulders, and his eyes squint. Slams an empty can of Bud against the wall with his fist and raises one eyebrow.

"Jay Z just came back from Fallujah," one of the guys tells me.

I keep my face neutral.

"You ever been there?" Jay Z looks me over, my skinny arms in my Save the Whales tee shirt, pierced nose loop, my back pack with its rainbow sticker. "Fallujah?"

A couple of other of the snowbilers look me over too, lulled detachment mixed with who the hell is this bitch really and what’s she even saying lines around their eyes, between the palms of their hands.

So I get into full Brother Fitz mode. "Let me make it plain and simple to you." I spread my legs out and push my backpack under the cot. "I got a go-it-alone policy and if you’re shooting-from-the-hip here…" I give Jay Z my best interrogation stare, focusing just above his brow. "I can take it another notch further." I clap my hands together hard and kind of like how they back away. "I’m not the average soldier. I can plot insurgent operations, simplify intelligence plans, justify hard core tactics and occasionally, yes, I think I can say it, here…" I look at all their drunken faces. "Save small animals. I have tremendous warmongering qualities but I also have a heart." I hold both hands over my heart then salute the air.

They lean forward.

They rub at their hands.

They spit into cups.

They think I’m full of shit.

So I start making out with Jacko. Grab the back of his head and stick my tongue in tight until it’s just the stomp of boots leaving, rumble of the engines rising high against the ridge, scorched tires and leaking oil, haze of gasoline and Jacko’s hand down my shirt.

"I always wanted a girl like you."

"Good."

My head is a riot of stars, the mattress so soft. And I watch him unzip and unflap and unbutton, long johns, flannel, fleece in layers on the floor. I prop myself on my backpack. He’s balding when he takes off his wool hat, a white gleaming circle, and his eyes never leave my face. He tells me that he loves me, that I’m his girl, that he’s never felt this way before or done this before, but I see his name carved many times on the wood and there’s a Patty, a Shannon, two Lindseys, an Alice, Annie, Jen and Liz.

"What’s your name?" he asks me.

And when I tell him, he takes out a knife from underneath the mattress and carves my full name deep into the wall, letters large, and he dates it, looking at his watch. Some wood chips fall on top of my face and I don’t brush them off. They smell like him.

"You are so strong," he says and I say, yes I am, and we go at it like pros.

It’s a carnival ride of bushy tailed fucking. Flapping and flailing, fingers and arms and legs and his fat tongue sucking and slurping, flipping first one way then another, me on top, him on top, to the side, backward, upside down, and me finally over the cot, panting, seeing nothing but white. Our sweat on the splintering boards, leaving damp outlines of hands and knees, my face.

He leans into me, tracing his name on my chest, Jacko in block letters. "Where you been all my life?" he asks.

"Out in the woods," I say.

"When do you have to leave?" he asks and there’s a look of ownership on his face, a hard grin as he traces his name larger and larger across my stomach, down my thighs. He turns me over to write on my ass and I stare at the floor, his used rubber, the broken bottles, my thawed out mittens.

"You mean dispatched?" And I know he’s seeing me, this GI Jane girl, out in my desert fatigues, with a ration pack and a couple of grenades. Staring down foxholes, ordering up Marines, restoring order, warding off advancing rebel attacks, I’m the girl deployed for him. He can leave the rest of the chiseled ones alone because I’m the girl soldier of his dreams.

"Yeah." He flips me over and traces one of my nipples. It’s rather sweet. So I stick it out for him.

"Next week," I say. "Undisclosed location."

"Oh, man," he says, pushing his face into my belly and I can see him home with me, with Judith and Robert, Dee Dee and Fitz, and we’re all watching Survivor, betting on the outcomes, the odds of revenge, strategy, and it’s so pleasant on the couch with Jacko, eating Cheeze Whiz and crackers, cracking open the Old Milwaukees, all the men in John Deere hats and the women in God Bless the USA teeshirts sipping Carlo Rossi. I could dress like Dee Dee in a tight fake leather miniskirt and sit on Jacko’s lap and Robert would finally pat my ass and wish me well. Wouldn’t everyone have a good time? A normal time?

I’m covered in him.

His hand is hot.

I have to get the hell out of here.

"It can never work between us, Jacko," I tell him. "We come from two fundamentally different places."

"But I saved you, Baby," he says, wood chips falling against my backpack as he carves a heart with our initials sliced deep, his back turned. "You’re my little baby." And I’m seeing all the frozen squirrels deep in drifts and the hands coming at them, liberating them, emancipating them from death, to a new world order. Didn’t I rescue you? Weren’t you in desperate need? Why can’t you just cooperate, lay down, and enjoy it? Hey, we expect full cooperation, a smooth transition, people.

I look at his potato bud ears. "You are totally disillusioned," I say.

He scratches his head, then pushes his palms into my shoulders, his tongue banging against my teeth. "I’m going to take you home with me," he says, unplugging my mouth for a moment, only to return with liquid vengeance.

"That would be a coup d’force," I say into his mouth.

Jacko bites my neck and I scrap at his back with my fingernails, digging deep then rubbing. His face is so stupid as he moans. His breath stinks. He can’t catch a clue.

"Do you even comprehend the situation?" I ask but his eyes are pressed closed.

And that’s when I notice it.

Rocky.

That squirrel burns with blue fire as it pulls itself from my back pack, its tiny claws catching and sliding, catching and sliding, and those black eyes on me, unblinking.

"You’re safe with me," Jacko says, taking my hands and pushing them to his chest, over his heart. I look at Jacko like he’s insane, a crazy boy with his beating heart, so I smack him. He likes that and pulls me close.

Rocky climbs out and just stands there, arms clasped in front of him as I twist away from Jacko, whiskers twitching. Irritation along the edges of his snout, the way he pushes one foot out further than the other, and I know, I understand. There are some things you’ve not supposed to save. You got to leave them where they fall because there are reasons for the leap, reasons to fly free for just one fucking moment. That feel of wind inside your head, arms loose and the weightlessness, what it means to be held by nothing, no one. Yes, there’s the blurry whiteness at the end, the black ice, but if you stay very quiet, very still, lean your head softly against the ground, they may never find you. Their tunneling hands faint then fainter.

"I won’t let nobody hurt you." Jacko keeps a reckless look to his eyes as rips open another rubber, throwing the wrapper against the flapping plastic. But I can’t look at him, his craggy face, bristly warm body, iron bound arms, the way he works his hands over me, under me, into me, as if I’m not even there.

Rocky scampers over on his newly thawed legs and sniffs that rubber package, pawing at it a little bit as if it’s a scrap of food, something held out to him. But when he realizes its just garbage, he gets pissed. Jamming his squirrel arms into his squirrel hips and clicking his tiny squirrel teeth at me. Jumping up and down, his bushy tail smashing the filthy floor.

"I want to introduce you to my brother," Jacko says into my neck, and that’s when Rocky screeches, throwing his arms to the ceiling and letting it go, rattling the plastic sheeting, sending bottles rolling with his skittering feet, his cries echoing against the abandoned lake and slumbering trees, flying out across the smoldering fire and granite rock.

Jacko screams, both hands going around his dick, as that squirrel scrambles up one wall then the other and finally smashes through the plastic, clawing a hole to the outside. Wind terrifying and beautiful through the branches and I laugh at Jacko’s limpness, pointing at it, until ice tears track down my face and he gets his rifle and shoots out high, aiming at darkness, at that squirrel who chatters somewhere away. And I laugh and I laugh, shouting, "Marines, Aim your guns, aim your guns" until he leaves, calling me a crazy bitch, his Ice Monster snowmobile blowing smoke and fumes.

Light now from the morning, rising pink through the slits of the shack. This place patched raw and trashed as I tear the plastic off, wrapping myself in it. I watch Rocky. His head inside a Lays potato chip bag, hips shaking, and thrown Colt 45 bottles full of malt liquor ready. This squirrel has found nirvana. No more suicidal leaps of hunger, of faith, of boredom. Refuse and droppings and its all there for his taking, spread against snow. Maybe he’ll even find another trashy squirrel to spend his life with and they can dig through crumpled snacks, warm their fur on the occasional snowmobiler boy bonfire, have lots of bushy tailed babies. I’m not expecting thanks. I don’t want to be congratulated, appreciated, recognized. I’m not going to call PETA. And I don’t want that squirrel following me.

Because sometimes it comes from the storm. And is simply this: The packing up of your pissed off frozen squirrel and a long hike down some beaten path to a shack made of garbage. Sure, there’s the hauling you have to do, and yes, there’s this feeling of the clock clicking forward and maybe when that fucking squirrel chatters and screeches at you to come back, come back, you throw a couple of things to keep it away and it can all be such a pain in the ass, this motion forward toward frozen paradise. But if you hold it, press it tight, you realize you’re going to get it, that one minute of happiness. A twirling and jumbled motion in your head where trash is golden and scraps of plastic give warmth and a final thaw is good. That your desire for cold and flickering light and howling winds is just your way of tossing bundled secrets to the sky, at people’s faces. Today, at least, you were able to see. So you slide-kick it out of there, tracks splintering snow.

And that cold feels good.