The Snow Collectors

Every schoolchild knows water holds memories better than any other substance.

So I left my seaside home, with its gritty old carpet and flapping windows and conch shell–bordered garden of weeds and grasses, and drove east in my father’s green Plymouth to start anew. He and my mother had both been artists, one of those couples so in love with each other you fear for their children, but I’d had Claire and she’d had me,

Our throats hurt in the mornings after those dreams, as if we had been singing all night.