Мариам Петросян - The Gray House

The snow is a curtain outside the window. It falls and it falls, easing up only by dinnertime. The entire yard is now only bumps and folds under the white sugary blanket. Very beautiful. Even the Outsides is not quite itself, and it's completely quiet, as if the House had been transported to a wintry forest. Pity it's dark, or it all would have glistened and sparkled.

After dinner everyone rushes out. I drive down too. I like snow, even though wheelchairs have a habit of getting completely stuck in it, which is unpleasant, but on the bright side there are many delights that are only available when it's been snowing.

I pick out a convenient spot and dump myself out into the snowbank. Then I assemble a store of snowballs, and then everyone passing by gets a snowball to the head. My aim is perfect, as usual; as long as I have things to throw, they always land where I want them. Noble soon joins me. The two of us give a good thrashing to the walkers of the Sixth and to Lary and his gang. Logs are uniformly clad in striped pom-pom hats, so aiming at them is ridiculously easy.

By the time the girls come out, everyone is fairly warmed up and wound up. The first barrage greets them right on the porch. They don't even have time to step down. But there's enough snow on the porch too, and it offers better opportunities for hiding, so they recover pretty soon and answer with an avalanche of their own. Noble and I are in a completely open spot and cannot run away, so most of it arrives our way. I am flattened against the snowbank and temporarily incapacitated, and by the time I manage to crawl out, the battlefield is strewn with half-exploded ordnance and Noble is wounded in the mouth. He barks out curses mixed with snow.

“What was that word you used to describe them?” I inquire. “‘Tender’? Or was it ‘charming’?”

Before Noble has a chance to answer, a girl in a blue parka gets him right on the bridge of the nose. He yelps and proceeds to prepare the snowball of vengeance, the size of a melon. While he's thus busy I provide cover for him, picking off the hats that poke above the railing, but the blue parka girl manages to plonk him twice more. Finally Noble rises up and tosses his deadly missile at her feet. An explosion of snow and screams. The blue parka goes down like a bowling pin. I was doubtful that this thing would fly at all, so I’m amazed and humbled, and say so to Noble. He looks at me askance.

“You don't think I hurt her too much, do you?”

“I think she only fell to flatter you,” I say. “It's unlikely she got hit that badly.”

Noble doesn't believe me and crawls to see for himself. “Crawls” is the wrong word here. It's a slow word. Noble moves very fast. Well, right now he's hampered by all the snow. By the time he reaches the porch, the girl's already up and shaking the snow out of her hair. He asks her something from below. She laughs, shakes her head, and plops down into the snowbank next to him—so that he doesn't feel himself awkward next to her standing. That's how they continue the conversation—wet and plastered with snow. Like a comedic duo that just climbed out of a gigantic cream pie. But I don't have time to observe them—someone is shelling me from behind the railing. I have to respond, even though the adversary is hidden and all my snowballs dash futilely against the porch. I wait for the someone to peek out, but she's smart and keeps down. Which interferes with her aim, so her snowballs miss too. You might say we're missing each other.

Then I accidentally look up and see Sphinx's outline in the window of our dorm. It doesn't matter that it's just an outline, and it doesn't matter that his mouth, invisible to me, is almost certainly smiling. I still know what he's thinking when he looks over our snow battles. Half of my life was spent on windowsills staring down and dying from envy. So one look at his distant shadow is enough for me to lose the desire to frolic.

I toss the lovingly prepared snowball aside and crawl toward Mustang. After an eternity of being pelted from all sides I finally reach it, only to discover that Mustang is wet and slippery. Some clown had the bright idea of using it to shield himself. I try to climb in but keep slipping. Takes me three tries. Then I realize that the snow around me is so trampled that there's no way to drive through. Mustang lists to one side, stalled irretrievably. A gloomy sight. Horse and Bubble, kindhearted Logs of the Third, offer help. They roll me up the porch ramp, and we are immediately mobbed by the girls begging me to play with them just a bit more. That's unexpected and flattering, and I perspire anxiously all the way up to the second floor and to the doors of the dorm, recalling how they dubbed me “William Tell” and asked me to stay. And that's considering that the yard was fairly swarming with guys. Every walker of the House plus the wildest of the wheelers.

The hallway is empty. Only Blind's out, shuffling to and fro and kicking wet sawdust with his feet. When I wheel into the dorm, Sphinx is still by the window, inquiring testily of Alexander who Noble is cavorting with, buried up to his neck in snow, and who's that girl running circles around Black, eyeing him salaciously.

“How is it possible, Sphinx,” Alexander says, “to see the salaciousness in the eyes from up here?”

Now warm and dry in my dressing gown, I sit over the chessboard. Sphinx is right across from me. Knitting his brow, demonstrating to the world how the little gray cells are working overtime, but in fact engrossed in the sounds filtering from the yard.

“Put the kettle on,” he tells Alexander. “They're going to barge in soon and start whining and demanding tea. You’ll be running off your feet.”

Alexander plops the kettle on the hotplate and joins us on the bed. I have this ambush brewing, hidden in the corner of the board, and on no occasion should Sphinx notice it, so I sing the distracting Confusion Song and pointedly stare at the other corner, where a decoy attack is being prepared. Blind is sitting with his feet on the table, yawning and rummaging in the tool chest, already half-gutted. The screams in the yard grow less and less loud, then migrate to the hallways. Squeals, thundering feet: someone's galloping down the corridor while being destroyed with snowballs.

I feign great interest and turn toward the door, but when I glance back at the board, the inventive attack is in ruins and Sphinx is pushing my queen off with the rake-prong.

Queen in the ashtray means the game's all but over.

“The snow's coming here,” Alexander says.

The door screeches and here they are, white as a gaggle of snowmen: Black, Humpback, Noble, and Lary, and two girls with them, the blue parka and the purple one. They're all in hysterics. Lary, giggling moronically, smashes a large snowball in the center of the board.

The pieces scatter. Sphinx, scowling, uses his knee to wipe his face. The scowl is quite a friendly one, but Lary thinks better of dumping the second snowball on us and with the same idiotic grin breaks it over his own head.

Black and Humpback help the girls with their heavy clothes. Coats are tossed on the windowsill, hats are taken off, and scarves unwound. The blue parka turns out to be fiery red. It's Ginger, of course—sharp face and inky eyes. And the purple one is Fly, swarthy and toothy, covered in moles. Now that I've identified them I’m free to jump up and down on the pillows and screech invitingly.

They immediately plop down on the floor. Sphinx sidles up, or down, to them, while Black and Humpback proceed to bustle, putting out the plates, cups, and ashtrays. They all leave wet squelching footsteps that Alexander keeps surreptitiously running the rag over.

I slither down to the floor too. We sit in a semicircle. Most of me is under the bed, only my head is peeking out. Tea's served. A compelling installation of wet socks on a string stretches over our heads all across the room, spreading fragrant dampness. Drying boots stick out of the heater. Ginger and Fly are both wrapped in blankets, with smoke curling upward from under the makeshift hoods.