“People forget years and remember moments.” - Ann Beattie, “Snow”

Of everything, I remember the last time I visited you at the toy store. It was a Friday, early February, the day it really started to snow in earnest; and since I wasn’t working Fridays then, I came downtown to keep you company. The city had already fled: traffic out of town at a standstill, high beams on, wipers going; Main Street as empty as a stage. The afternoon sprawled before us. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock: customer-less hour after customer-less hour crept by, so we drifted through aisles of bouncy balls and jigsaw puzzles and deluxe backgammon sets, board games with names like Gassy Gus and Gooey Louie. ​You actually sell this shit? I said incredulously, game in hand, and you laughed and said, ​what’s more, people actually buy it.

Meanwhile, the snow outside came down in curtains. It stacked on top of cars, buried curbs, drifted against the door, and it wasn’t until I stepped outside to feed the meter that I realized that every other store in sight had closed down and slipped away to the warmth of furnaces and fireplaces. I went back inside and said, ​look at this​, and we stepped out as an ambulance slid by at ten miles an hour, lights flashing a silent symphony of reds and blues against the white canvas of the city. It rounded a corner and vanished; the snow twisted in the wind like someone shaking out a sheet and covered the tracks with ease. And because it felt like nothing was quite real that day, you locked the store and we wandered off into the padded afternoon. Street after street: bars, thrift stores, movie theaters, all boarded up, desolate. There was a kind of freedom in it. Snow nestled in your hair; silence nestled in every alley. There in the empty streets, I felt closer to you than I had in a long time.

Maybe you remember it differently. Maybe you remember only the cold, how the city had seemed -- for weeks -- to be electrified: doorknobs, handrails, water fountains, all treacherous. Maybe the tips of your ears had already begun to sting, or your coat had a hole or had been forgotten behind in the store. Maybe the whole time you were searching for another face, a set of footprints in the snow, a cough or a car horn, because there was something eerie about the lack of sound: a city on mute, where even the ambulances didn’t turn on their sirens.

Maybe there was a weight. Maybe, when you recall that aimless afternoon spent among piles of action figures and stuffed animals, you remember not ducking behind towering displays of yo-yos and shooting toy arrows at each other, but the spaces in our conversation: the cramped, uneasy silence between us. ​I’m worried we’re going stale​, you said to me not long after. ​Past our expiration date. Maybe we’ve come as far as we can. We’re not the people we used to be. But I barely heard you, because I kept trying to picture us as bread gone hard, or milk gone sour, and instead I just saw seeds struggling up through frost-bitten earth. Look back, I wanted to say. We remember beginnings, not endings. We remember the quiet beauty of the first kiss, not the banality of the last. We forget the dead air, the long drives with nothing to talk about, the arguments about the future, and we hold on to trinkets of memory: blues dancing at one in the morning, our bodies in slow motion; washing you in the shower, water in streams down your back, my fingers drawing lines from freckle to freckle; wandering the empty, muffled streets of our city, snow whipping around, you burrowed into my arm for warmth. Look back.

But maybe you don’t remember that day at all. Maybe all you remember is a day when it started to snow and didn’t stop for a week. Maybe everything else about that day has gone, melted away, and all that remains when you close your eyes is a world swallowed in snow, lost beneath a billowing, unending blanket of white.

I was a one-woman witness to your parade.

The yarn shop was empty when you arrived with eight kids. You were the first customer, just past noon. You nodded hello but turned to the six girls and two boys, the oldest maybe 12, the youngest maybe 4. With a voice that braided patience and prompting with promise, you stated rules. Older children take the hand of a younger. Do not touch. Follow me.

Such obedient children. Long dresses, the boys in practical cloth pants and button-up shirts. Braids and bowl cuts. Were you Amish, or Mennonite, or Mormon? I did not know and could not ask.

You walked past mohair puffing out of a basket. Sweater wool cubbied by color. Silk looped and twisted like pastry to pick up off a glass shelf. My job was to display yarn so you could touch it. Touch is creativity, an idea, and the beginning of the self and possession. I did not think the children would follow your rules.

I was born with the bloodlines of touch. My parents owned a greenhouse. Fingers in dirt and moss, palms on thorns and blossoms, arms pressing terracotta. For so long I thought all parents owned stores and all kids could within them do as they pleased.

The children followed you down every aisle, touching nothing, saying nothing, a stunning success of proper behavior. But then the real test. The store’s mascot, a grey Maine coon cat, asleep on the couch. Her name was Blanche, like one of the Golden Girls. That cat was meant to be petted. You were supposed to choose a ball of baby alpaca yarn, infant blue, and sit with Blanche to browse patterns from the three binders. You were supposed to slide your fingers through Blanche’s long striped fur, her ruffly white chest, even brush the tufts on her ears and decide to buy a little extra yarn, just in case, plus this one extra pattern, and why not let all the girls pick out cotton for crafts, and Blanche would chirp her meow and stretch out her ridiculous fox tail, which you, all of you, could pet.

None of this happened. No one petted the cat, for the first time in the history of the yarn store.

At the door, you praised the children for listening. You turned to me and said thank you, it’s a lovely store, perhaps we will be back. Perhaps you never left, because I remember you so clearly now. I remember how your children grew up to listen and to respect, like those rules were longer bones in their hands, faster springs in their steps, tighter weaves in their worlds. I hope they also grew up to touch something decadent, something useless, and something luxurious, even though I admit there are days now when I wish you would stop me at the door, lay down the rules, and say, “follow me.”

I am a hunter, she says. And fires wild into the fleeing geese.

The wide blast of the gun breaks into the spring of her shoulder. And she feels it in the bones of her chest. The spreading pellets in the sky like fistfuls of rain.

Later, he drives and she stares out the window at the running fields of twisted grass and the thin Ash woods of upstate. A natural hunting blind.

He spots dried mud under his fingernails while making a slow turn, from one narrow road to another. He has the urge, like the urge to drink, to pull over there, in the grass, and pick the mud out with his slim folding knife, which he takes always into the wild, the grasses, but has never used.

He resists.

Did you have fun? he says.

Wish I'd hit something.

That isn't so bad, he says. He thinks about broad sky, and their thunder in it. Shrieking calls. Loud and without meaning. Plunging into the sky as into a block of solid blue ice.

And the road is as narrow as a fine line drawn with a pen.

What's worse? she says. She's watching the trees for movement. A bird. A rabbit. She imagines her dinner depends on it. Her life, and the life of everyone she knows. She smells rich soil, river chalk and red clay. And it all clings to their rubber overalls balled up in the trunk.

You hit something, he says. He is thinking about clothes small enough to fit between the pages of a book. And a person small enough to fit in his hand. You hurt it. Maybe killed it. You see it struggle. Fall. You watch it fall. You watch closely. It's wing is broken. But when you go looking, and you look for a long time, you never find a body.

She doesn't respond. She is thinking about what it means to provide, and the feel of the gun, cracking in her hands with all the solid presence of a newborn's first cry. Outside the window is a place as wild as any she has ever seen. Shadows as deep as pools. Trees as crooked and smooth as broken necks.

She sets her eyes free, uncaged animals, and they claw at the landscape as if they want to destroy it.

Something unfamiliar plays on the radio, drifting static as they move from the edge of one place to the edge of another, and she is about to speak, when, just above the trees, the jagged line of the sky, she spots a shutter of movement. The shutter of a body, and later she will swear on it, and it will become more clear and vivid in her memory. A naked man, tall and wet with long, loose limbs and a flabby chest, thin as a cigarette. Weakly cradling a small, rounded stomach. And his broad, crooked gray wings, bent out of his back, are beating hard, beating desperate, but failing. His whole, strange body knocking painfully against the glass sheet of the sky like a broken hand gathered into a fist.

A shape she recognizes.

When I got home from the deaf-­blind convention, I couldn’t stop touching people. It was a week of haptics, tactile sign language and fingerspelling, touching and being touched, and it just naturally continued flowing out of me. I found myself patting the hand of the policeman as he leaned into my car window to give me the speeding violation: T​hank you, officer. ​And I couldn’t help stroking the arm of the bank representative when I stopped in to make a payment on my home equity loan: Principle only, please. ​And later, in line at the grocery store, I brushed a piece of lint off the sweater of the woman in front of me, pressing her shoulder reassuringly. When she turned around, startled by my touch, I touched her again, on the elbow, to apologize. Which only made it worse.

People are touchy about being touched. They don’t like it. They misconstrue it. They take it as an advance: a pass or a flirtation, an aggression or an invasion. But not so with deaf­-blind people. For deaf­-blind people touch is everything. It’s communication and information. It’s intonation. It’s affirmation, feedback, backchanneling. It’s connection and community. It’s practically sacrament and yet it’s as natural and necessary as breathing. All week I had brushed up against and been brushed up against, gently bumping, gingerly jostling, signing and spelling into hands, printing on palms, scratching and tapping, sketching and mapping on backs, shoulders, knees, interpreting and chit­chatting as my fingers and hands remained in almost constant contact with the fingers and hands and bodies of others. The deaf­-blind world is a different world altogether. A world of physical contact. And already I found myself missing it terribly.

In fact, I seemed to be going through a kind of withdrawal. I felt separated, isolated, untouchable in a world of untouchables. It felt like there was too much space between me and the world, too much space between people and things, too much space between people and people. I felt depressed. I began to self­-medicate: I started touching myself. Not in a sexual way, but a platonic way, a deaf­-blind way. My hands looked for each other; they touched each other and themselves, folding, tenting, twiddling, praying. And I touched my face­­ - my temple, forehead, nose, cheeks, lips, philtrum, chin. My neck, head, crown, shoulders, arms, wrists, thighs, knees. I touched myself and I thought of my deaf­-blind friends at the convention, whom I longed to see again, whom I longed to touch. But the next convention wasn’t for another two years.

Especially I missed Adriana. Her slender, beautiful hands, the weightlessness of them as they rested on mine, listening. It wasn’t exactly romantic; it was more semantic: her nimble fingers, her fluent signing, the grammar of her face, her virtuosic receptive skills - ­­it was all about language. I was seduced by the voluptuousness of tactile sign language. She was my deaf­-blind delegate from NY, and I was her SSP (Support Service Provider). I guided her, assisted her, interpreted for her, clued her in and helped her out by touching her constantly, but only on her hands, occasionally on her back, or her arm, or the little atoll of her knee. “Those are the only permissible places,” the Pro­-Tactile instructor told us during the short training session on haptics for interpreters and SSPs the first day of the convention. “To tell the deaf-­blind person that someone is laughing, for example, you can spell HA­-HA in her hands, of course, but if her hands are occupied, for whatever reason, then you can indicate it like this on her arm, or her back, or if you’re both seated, on her knee.” Then he did a little sort of double flex­-scratch with all five fingers in the air, by way of illustration. “Nothing above the knee, though; and never on the head, or stomach, or chest, or butt, or breasts. Unless, of course, invited to, in the privacy of your dorm rooms.” There were some giggles.

I have to say, those first few days at the convention, a part of me hoped I’d be invited to. And sometimes it seemed like I was on the verge of being invited to. But the invitation never came. And in a way, I’m glad it didn’t. Because it wasn’t about sex. It was so not about sex. And between you and me, some of us never grow wholly comfortable doing i​t, now do we? I mean doesn’t it feel a little like the blind signing their names on the signature line? I mean don’t we often need a hand to guide our hand to where they say the ultimate expression of who we are ought to be? And then when it’s done, it’s as though our lovers take back the pen, and the paper, eyeing the sad mark that is ours, and wondering what in the world the world should make of such a squirming, illegible thing.

Paul Hostovsky's latest book of poems is The Bad Guys (FutureCycle 2015). He is the author of seven books of poetry and six poetry chapbooks. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net awards. He has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Writer's Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. To read more of his work, visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com.