newspaper snow falling inside the house again. oma at the kitchen table cutting it up with the rigor of coupons, tossing it every which way. she erases the glyph of shoes on the mat, the dust pan, her spider plants, the black feet of the piano. she orbits through the rooms, filling them with banks of paper snow so high they reach the windowsills. any day now dammit, oma says. she’s preparing you for the storm that will sweep away the world. the whiteout, she calls it. she’s lost her filter recently, swears like a fishwife as she stuffs virgin snow over your bedspread, along the spines of your textbooks, in the front pocket of the NASA hoodie you were wearing when it happened. later your geology professor finds it in your hair before his lecture on the classification of clouds, picks it out, says cirrocumulus. we could all use a blank slate, oma says, especially you. you weren’t planning to tell her, confessed you were weeping because pluto was no longer a planet, but she snorted, said i’m not senile, honey. oma’s weirdly excited for doomsday, holds out her palm every few hours to check if the blizzard’s begun. she salts opa’s new gravestone with the pseudo-snow, mails an envelope of it to the university board, lobs it at the man on the corner with his honk-for-jesus sign. winter is a woman, oma says, a real cunt. she tells you her brothers died of hypothermia during the war, the same year her mother put a dead possum in her breast pocket to repel any man who came near. you’re making that up, you say and she goes to her jewelry box, takes out a little skull, presses it into your palm like it’s a pearl. you take it to geology but feel ridiculous and anyways you smell like 99-cent strawberries-and-cream shampoo. when you get home, oma confetti-throws paper at you for good measure, as if the house is meant to be a snow globe. she goes for the scissors to make more when a message from him pings on your lock screen. frostbite is a bitch, she says, burying your phone in the tundra of the living room. tell me you’re not still talking to him, she says and you’re not, not really, you’re just pretending a little longer that you’re fine, everything’s fine, cumulonimbus clouds are badass, that sort of thing. oma says nothing but you know you’ve ruined the whiteout when she gets the broom and starts sweeping over the tongues of your shoes. report him, she says, and when you shake your head, flakes flurry to the floor like dandelion seeds after making a wish.