The pop star asks her father to do her a favor during their family’s annual ski trip. He does not understand what for or why, as she has previously never expressed much enthusiasm for his hobby of skiing but did enjoy drinking hot chocolate and making snow angels, but he lugs a tripod and his camcorder for her anyway. The pop star does not know how to ski and is a warm-weather person. They drive eight hours to a resort that advertises their snow is one hundred percent real, no machines required. 

“I don’t believe anywhere has real snow anymore, not when the drought’s lasted for years,” he says, mostly to himself. His daughter is entering that fragile era where anything associated with her parents is embarrassing at best or repulsive at worst, and he considers himself grateful that she wanted to go with him in the first place.  

“Let’s find out,” she says.

She takes her guitar out, and she sings. The tune, the father thinks, is sad, the words, strange and looping, more like a chant than a song. Perhaps this is what the younger generation thinks music is supposed to be. When he was a child, music was supposed to say something and be in your face at all times. He had a heavy metal phase, complete with outfits in photos that he is ashamed to show his daughter. But then he grew up, his imagination extending only to the city limits of their small house and winding-road suburb.

“The cold in my bones, the cold in my home, the snow in my bones,” she repeats. There is no verse or chorus, no structure her father can put to her words. 

The father wonders where she has learned how to sing like this, in a way older than pop music, older than the catchy numbers from the Great American Songbook. Her only training has been through church choir and through the CDs she listens to on a portable CD player. One day, she told her parents, “I’m going to be a singer,” and from that day on, she would sing every day and night, waking them all up at the crack of dawn like a rooster. 

Before long, the snow on the ground lifts into the air and snows up, as if gravity has reversed. They are the only two people outside the ski lodge, with most people still sleeping, as it is early in the morning. The snow flies into the sky, drifting, drifting, falling back where it came from until the mountain is bare. When she is done, there is only grass and rocks visible on the side. 

“The snow came from somewhere else,” the pop star says. “Canada, possibly Alaska. Somewhere up there. It’ll go home now.”

She holds out her arms, guitar hanging around her neck and resting against her coat, as if waiting for the snow to return, and when nothing happens, she jumps while laughing. Her father starts recording a new video on the camcorder, even though she has long stopped singing. 

+++

Tina S. Zhu is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine who also co-edits WYRMHOLE, the terminally online speculative fiction newsletter. Places her work has appeared include Lightspeed, The Cincinnati Review, Best Small Fictions, and The Crawling Moon: Queer Tales of Inescapable Dread (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024), a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has received support from Lambda Literary and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and you can find her at tinaszhu.com.