The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online

laughed.
    “Alice?” asked Joanne, who loves to be called J.J.
    “Oh, I'm just thinking about Chester waking up and not knowing for a week or two that I'm even missing.”
    “Shit,” bemoaned Gail, “my kids will miss me the minute they run out of milk or can't find clean underwear.”
    Everyone smiled because they would at least be missed, except Susan, who has left a trail of tears from her front yard to this very spot. “Listen,” Chris began, steering them back on course. “We have to agree on some things, those of us who are going on, and Mary, you can help too.”
    Mary rose just a bit when she heard this, maybe because she wanted to redeem herself. She wanted to do something that would keep her with the women walkers even though she was going to part from them, wouldn't be with them physically, pounding up the road. Mary leaned forward like a bird waiting for breakfast, her mouth open just a little to form an O, round and exact as a single Cheerio.
    While the stars shifted and the moon dropped lower, the women made their plans. Mary would call her husband from the next gas station to come and get her, and once back at home, she would call the other husbands and tell them about this journey. No one else wanted to stop. No one blamed Mary. No one else, though, could begin to think of stopping.
    Chris sighed loudly. “Someone will eventually call the newspapers, and people will try to figure out what we're doing, and they will say we're all lesbians or that we belong to a cult and have buried six babies in the backyard.”
    “I've always wanted to be a lesbian,” Sandy mused.
    “I've buried one baby,” Alice blurted out.
    “I think the Catholic Church is a cult,” added J.J.
    “There you have it,” Chris concluded. “We shouldn't talk to anyone. We should just walk and play it by ear. Do what we feel we should do, but we shouldn't talk. I think if we're hungry, then we'll eat. It seems like we shouldn't worry about, well, you know, normal things. We should worry about us, just us. Do you agree?”
    As she spoke, Chris had been waving her arms around like a preacher. She had gestured in circles and moved her hands so her fingers pointed into the air, and she had no idea where the words or thoughts or movements were coming from exactly.
    No one wanted to talk. They wanted to think and imagine and to walk until they forgot things. No one was tired. No one was cold, and food and drink were about as far from their thoughts as attending a Tupperware party. They wished it would stay dark until they were finished so that they could hide from the world for as long as they wanted to.
    “Is everyone okay with this?” Sandy looked from one face to the next as another car whizzed by.
    “Does anyone think we're nuts?”
    Susan asked this question, thinking to herself that if she had half a brain, she would have hit the highway twenty-seven years ago, just a week after she married John. She wished she had had the guts to do something with her life besides screw her brother's boss. She was thinking that disappearing from her own life in the middle of the night with a bunch of women who love her could possibly be the smartest thing she has ever done in her life.
    “Oh come on,” said Janice as if she had just been lied to and knew it. “If I stopped now, if the rest of us who really want to do this stopped now, we'd never be able to look at each other again for the rest of our lives. The one thing I know is that even if most of my life doesn't change, even if the shitty parts are still the shitty parts, I will still have done this. I will have walked.”
    Before they rose to their feet and returned to the highway, J.J. made everyone stay where they were for another moment. She had this idea, this picture in her mind that she wanted to keep safe. A picture of them, just sitting there gazing out into the night as if it is something they do every Thursday night of their lives.
    “I love to take a moment like this and