March. The kind of month you want to sucker punch in the balls. The snow begins to melt…not enough for it to really be spring, but enough to form black ice and reveal the dog poop that had been fossilized since November. Too late to sled, but too early to do anything else that might be fun.


Janice walked, buried under several sweaters, hats, and scarves. She had recently realized the futility of scarves; they were loosely knitted and protected an already collared neck. She now wore them, as everyone else who’d come to the same conclusion had done, because she thought they were stylish.

And now it began to freezingly rain, or perhaps rain freezingly; Janice never quite understood how to properly turn the noun into a verb. She had the same problem with putting sleep walking into the past tense. Slept-walked? Either way, the freezing rain that was either freezingly raining or raining freezingly kept on smacking into her face, seemly navigating between both the multitude of scarves and her burgundy bifocals.

Janice was on a downtown avenue, lined with tall grand buildings and tattered American flags, which, had they been endowed with memory, would not have been able to recall the last time they were taken down, no matter what the weather. But no matter how grand the buildings were, the sidewalks were piteously empty. Janice could see all the way to the library at the end of the street, where East Main died suddenly at a three-way intersection.

But suddenly the imposing structure was swallowed up, it's granite lions and gargoyles obscured by roiling hail and freezingly raining freezing rain, all being pushed around by great gusts of wind. Waves of precitipiation, both freezing rain and otherwise, crashed over Janice, and she hunched further into her useless scarves, suddenly wondering why the fashion world was so impractical.

Janice had heard about grapefruit-sized hail a few months back, as she and Fluffers sat on her couch in pajamas watching T.V. Oh, how Janice longed for the weekend and her welcoming apartment, the pillows and the pink and white pajamas. And as she squinted out into the steadily worsening weather, she began to notice the widening diameters of the hail. Janice headed towards the nearest building.

So a question for my one or two readers: what happens next?