Bob & Sam: It’s Cold, Metaphorically Speaking, Too

Bob: The ice is like a metaphor. For something cold and frozen. Like a thought paralyzed in a old trapper’s refrigerator crisper. Thawing. Soon to be mixed with squirrel gravy and hope. Hope for spring. When the ice is no longer a metaphor but rivulets like aircraft carriers plying the Gulf. Not Mexico. Persia. Ice like plutonium enrichment. Cold, man, cold.

Sam: No, Bob, colder than cold. Cold not just like ice, but the frosty, burny, dangerous dry kind. Dry ice, that is. A winter like a 7-up two-liter bottle stuffed with the craggy, cracked chunks of dry ice that only Albertson employees are allowed to touch with thick rubber gloves, with a touch of water inside thrown into a deep freezer until it explodes, blasting sound waves to the middle-aged mother of three purchasing Hungry Man salsbury steak dinners in the freezer aisles, who hears it and wonders, “Where’s Jimmy?” That kind of winter.