Dinner was painful. The food was good, but the drunken conversation between my mom and step-dad which was almost exclusively about “skanks” and “dumb-fucks” they worked with made everything taste sour. Couldn’t we talk about memories of Gram and Gran? You know the whole reason we were there. Not some “dicklicker” named Steve who fucked up a “vendor order?”

I somehow got through dinner with just having to converse with a few courtesy laughs and “ums,” “hums,” and “yeahs.” My first move post-dinner was to check in with the snow globe.

The snow globe presented me with what I would call “check mate” (even though I only loosely know what that term means). Waiting for me inside that little bubble of glass was a scene of me, sleeping in my stuffy guest room bed at Gram and Gran’s with my mom and step-dad standing around the bed, both carrying what looked to be a wealth of chemicals.

It was time to move. I wasn’t going to sit there and wait for my mom and step-dad to carry out whatever they were going to do to me and I was too scared to confront them. I was just going to get the hell out of the house while they were distracted by booze and warm acoustic guitar songs and see if I could find that shelter from the storm Dylan was singing about on their records in the storm outside.

I snagged the snow globe off the tree and stuck it in the jacket of my pocket. It was probably going to come in handy later and I didn’t it tipping off my family that I had literally snuck out the back door.

My jacket cinched up as tight as possible, my pink gloves slapped on and two of those pocket hand warmers snapped open and revving up in my pocket, I slipped out the back door of the house, skated across the thick ice formed in the walkway of the back yard and out into the alley. It appeared no one saw me and hearing the record player crank up just before I stepped out the door gave me the confidence that I had at least 10-15 minutes to get a good headstart on the two drunk asses back at the house.