The skies were gray, like they’d been all day. A thick coat of snow covered everything, not as a blanket, but a quilt.

Four feet.

This was more snow than I’d ever seen before, and it was still coming down in heaps.

Only a matter of time until our windows caved.

This, at first, had seemed like a blessing, a snowday waiting to happen. I would’ve been ecstatic, if not for the fact that Penelope was missing.

Just out to get the mail, she’d said.

Then this.

The mailbox was only ten houses down the street. Before, when she’d left, the snow had been up to… six inches or so.

Everything in sight was being buried by the chunks of snow being thrown from the sky.

We were waiting by the door. Penelope had taken most of the warm clothes we’d had to see if she’d gotten the letter..

“Negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit.” I enunciated each word carefully to my family.

“I’m going out there,” my father said, but my mom grabbed his arm, holding him there.

“No one leaves this house.”