Jason Thornberry

Snow Day

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

She opens her eyes, half in the blankets, listening to the passage of heavy feet pass overhead. Rising and moving toward the bathroom, she braces the wall with one hand, passing a scarred wooden dresser. The photos lie flat there, in a half-circle, like playing cards. She stops.

A photo catches her eye from the surprise snowstorm last year. Jordan squints at the camera in his favorite knit cap, a speck of snow hanging in one eyelash. Arms crossed at the wrists, she clutches him to her chest, smiling at the camera like she’s about to tell the photographer a secret. If she looks at this photo long enough, she can still see Jordan wipe his little face and point into the murky distance. She can hear his voice, high and sharp: 

“Mommy—they’re making a snowman!” 

After breakfast, they’d put on their snow cleats, traversing the slippery sidewalk, holding hands. A few blocks away stands Jordan’s elementary school, and beside it, a park with a baseball diamond and a few acres of grass covered in white. Staring at the photo now, she remembers the cold. The layers she wore that morning. She can feel the cold seeping in. Can see the dogs—Jordan always wanted a dog—barking, chasing, and crashing into one another in the park snow. She can hear the other parents—like the woman who took this picture for her—laughing with her, sipping from paper cups. Sees tiny clouds rising over their heads. Smells coffee. Cinnamon. Hot chocolate. A man smiles at her, glancing away, chucking a tennis ball overhand like a pitcher. The ball travels sixty, seventy feet arcing downward, disappearing into a snowbank. She remembers the German Shepherd chasing after it. And she remembers the squelching sound of Jordan’s footsteps beside her as they return home.

The other pictures capture him playing softball in that park the year before, getting his face licked by a golden retriever another day while clutching an ice cream cone over his head like a torch. She recalls her rush when she took each picture with her old camera—the formless pride, watching him grow. 

She stopped being embarrassed by single motherhood. Stopped preparing answers for judgmental older people who wanted to tell her how everything went, what everything meant. And yet, when she spoke with her clients, they stopped her. Said she had a good head on her shoulders for someone so young. Everyone thought she was in her twenties. She was thirty-six. 

“Good genes, I guess,” she laughed, talking to the mother of Jordan’s friend.

Last month, Jordan’s father convinced him to come to Olympia to live with him, his new wife, and their brand-new baby girl. And their Labradoodle puppy.

A lanyard with a nametag is lying beside the pictures: Desiree Roberts, Seattle Youth Ministries. The face in the photo smiles up at her. Brown eyes. Short, curly, dark hair. A gap in her teeth. The neckline of the lavender dress she wore. Surprised by the camera, it is the look of someone photographed on their first day of work. She picks it up.

Desiree looks for that face in the mirror when she makes it to the bathroom. Instead, she sees the face of the woman who fell asleep in her clothes last night. She sees the image of the woman who cries in the parking lot most mornings before she comes into the office. She considers the grey roots, the pillow creases. 

The cell phone vibrates in the other room. She breathes her son’s name.

Jason Thornberry is a disabled writer whose work appears in JMWW, Linden Review, Letters Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. His memoir is currently being considered by several publishing houses. He teaches creative nonfiction at Seattle Pacific University. Jason lives in Seattle with his wife and dog.