#FlashFictionMagic: Snowbound

The snow Alice had been dreading was blinding under the late-day sunshine. With her walker, she moved from room to room taking in the extent of her imprisonment. Beyond the kitchen curtains the garden path had disappeared, leaving no walkway out the back door. The front window framed the driveway, a treacherous incline that seamlessly blended with the lawn. Not even the mailman would visit this week.

Stepping into the hall, Alice stopped to look at the list of numbers next to the phone. Her son Gary in Arizona was arguing in court on behalf of an important client. Annette, her granddaughter, was taking a final exam in California. It would be silly to call Helen to cancel their afternoon walk; anyone could see the sidewalks were impassable. There were no good reasons to call anyone, and Alice didn’t want to seem needy.

She turned the television to a talk show, and let the host’s voice fill the quiet corners of the house. A few times she sat down, only to stand right up again and take another tour of each room. She couldn’t settle, thinking of all the suffocating hours ahead during which she might not even use her own voice because no one was there to listen. It would be dark soon, and then the neighbors would put the lights out, and just as she’d felt when her husband, Bruce, died, it would seem like she was the only person left on Earth.

A knock at the door startled Alice just as she was pouring a cup of tea. On the front step in knee-high boots was Tony, Helen’s boy. She hadn’t expected him to show up until he had plowed out all his paying customers. Favors, she imagined, ranked lower than work. Yet here he was.

“Mom and I thought you might like to come for dinner,” Tony said, a grin spreading between his cold-flushed cheeks. “What do you say I plow and then put you in the truck?"

A little while later, sitting in the passenger’s seat beside Tony, Alice surveyed the snow neatly piled on either side of her driveway and realized that, from this point of view, it was prettier than she'd first thought.