Two pills sat in K’s hand, neither of which would end her life. Both however would have certainly caused much consternation to her family. She picked up a clump of snow and melted it in her mouth. Standing next to the open car door, she watched the snow flakes fall on the seat and wondered how angry it would have made her husband to know. Once the snow had melted in her mouth she cupped her hand and threw back the pills. K locked the car and traced her footprints back to the front door, behind which were seven people waiting to start their dinner.

    She continued the night laughing and drinking and even ate the chicken when she hated chicken, just to act normal.

    At the dinner table, K listened to conversations she couldn’t understand and thought only of the snow outside falling to the ground. By the end of the night she would stand on the balcony’s edge wondering if the snow below her lay deeper than five feet, four and a half inches. K could see few things outside: the snow, of course, and the car where she had willingly given herself to her husband only a few hours before. Beyond this was darkness.

    K and her husband had arrived late. They had been following tire tracks in the snow from the edge of town, which continually disappeared and reappeared, leaving the couple to lose patience with each other. Just before leaving the car, K wiped away the few remaining tears and put on her make-up. What also caused the couple to arrive late was when K’s husband stopped the car to take her in the back seat. Her only preamble to this was to tell him that she had forgotten to take her birth control pill and he told her that he’d pull out before anything happened. His inability to follow this one rule had led her to stand outside with snow in her mouth, swallowing one pill so as not to fall pregnant, and then another to ease the tension of the ensuing normality.

    Around the table sat seven people, one of whom was K’s husband, and another being a stranger who would later bring her to orgasm for the first time that night.

    During desert, only a few minutes after the stranger had excused himself from the table, K asked her husband where he had put her handbag. He directed her to the upstairs bedroom and returned to the table. K placed her handbag back down on the bed and without knocking, walked into the bathroom. The stranger was standing over the toilet. At this point they had yet to speak one word to each other. K waited for him to finish and while he was washing his hands, she reached both arms around him, unzipped his fly and exposed his sex. The stranger turned his head and saw a towel in her hand and expected her to drop to her knees, but K had never liked oral sex. She released the draw on her pants and let him feel her wetness. K then manoeuvred him behind her and, facing the basin, braced herself.

    K thought of nothing, which she found nice. Not the people downstairs, not the face of her husband, not her next patient who would be waiting for her back at work, not her last patient who could no longer be saved, not the falling snow, not the depth of the snow, not the stranger inside her. When she came, he had been in her for only a minute but K had lost all sense of time and couldn’t say how long she had even been in the bathroom. She used the towel to muffle her voice. After they had cleaned up and re-dressed she left.

    When she arrived downstairs K saw a vase lying broken on the kitchen floor. Her husband was sweeping up the pieces. He had collected most of them, but missed the minute shards that had sprung up and were now floating in the air. K’s husband looked up at her and smiled. She breathed in the microscopic shards and they did not tear up her insides.

    Far down the street from the house stood the town church. At eleven o’clock bells rang out. The snow lay deep and even around the base because nobody had bothered to sweep that day’s build up. K stood on the balcony watching the snow fall.