The girl with the orange saucer is plucky enough enough to claw her way up the snowy hill. At the top, she dances in the sun, boneless and gleeful. To steady her nerves for the trip back down, she imagines how snow becomes cloud: snow fears melt, droplets fear warmth, updrafts fear catching. Heavy hail will plummet to the ground, but the cloud that rises, like the one the girl is whizzing past right now, takes on the shape of a vast tongue that can’t wait to lick the snowbank she is traveling on.

The snowbank sees the cloud above it morphing into the vast tongue, but is in no real danger of melting, held up as it is by physics like a shrill scream in a throat, so when it begins to drip onto the purple asphalt, droplets run for the storm drain, seeping into an abandoned underground amusement park where a merry-go-round idles, bored and obscene, and the snowdrift no longer knows why it shouldn’t give in to the cloud, which will take on its features, or perhaps pretend it’s a twirl of cotton candy shoved in a cone for the circus down here.