Winterscape

It hadn’t been an easy decision to call it quits. Scott could still see Dan’s broken-hearted expression whenever he closed his eyes, but it had to be done. Dad still wasn’t talking to Dan, and Clay was helping Dan sneak his stuff out in the middle of the night so Dan could move in with Joey.

The answer was to escape. Escape long and hard. White Horse was the obvious answer, an endless winterscape where he could hide from the sun. Scott moved out just after Christmas - which hadn’t been much of a Christmas, with Bob in the hospital and half of the family not talking to each other.

Scott couldn’t remember White Horse at all, just knew that he’d been born there. He had a plan, and it was a solid one, and it involved being as drunk as possible for as long as possible. A season - he’d give himself one season, and then it would be done.

The house was small and ramshackle and in desperate need of fixing up, but Scott didn’t care. He had a week’s worth of clothes and a lumpy old mattress and his guitar, and he surfaced one day a week to do laundry and clean while he was hung over. Sometimes there were girls, sometimes the girls were just in his dreams.

He woke up half-frozen on the porch more than a couple of times, tear-tracks frozen on his skin and his vodka pleasantly icy.

After the first month he started finding scraps of paper and bottle labels with lyrics and chords scribbled on them, songs he didn’t remember but that resonated pleasantly in the back of his skull when he tried them out.

By the second month he was sober during what few daylight hours glinted off the pale snow, writing feverishly. He cobbled together an old laptop and some recording equipment. A message posted on a board online netted him sound samples and random instruments, but he still spent his moonlight hours wasted, in the arms of the green fairy.

By the end of the third month, the days were getting longer, and his hangovers were jump-started by the cheerful chirping of a bird.

His season was up.