Through Jehan's open window the first snow sparkled a galaxy under the stars themselves.
Well, under the streetlight by the sidewalk. But if he kept his eyes on the shimmering ground he could imagine.
He filled his lungs with a tingling swirl of air. By morning this pristine glitter would be smudged in smog and car horns.
He needed Bahorel.
It was a night for candlelight and quill pens, but Jehan still hadn't trained that carrier pigeon. He turned to his desk and dug through the collage of magazine cutouts, drafts of poems and empty chocolate wrappers. Had he eaten the entire bag? Well, as he'd told himself each time he slid his fingernail under the fold of a new one, he was gathering material for a poem crafted out of those saccharine phrases printed on the inside. A villanelle or pantoum perhaps? repetition was the only thing that could render them anything like poetic. Those who bring sunshine/won't settle for a spark…
He realized he'd paused, hand hovered over the silvery wrappers.
He finished unearthing his phone, slid his thumb in a symmetrical pattern over the stained glass rose on his lockscreen; the phone clicked open.
He texted Bahorel.
J: hey I need you. and your camera.
B: let me guess, we're hunting down a poem in the wild
J: perfect night for it
B: k let me get the dogs
J: what are they doing rn
B: sleeping
B: like the lazy creatures they are
J: don't wake them! they'll fall behind on their rest
B: when's the last time you've gotten a full night
J: besides I don't want to interrupt their dreams, I hate when people do that
B: don't worry, judging by Stuart's wriggling around I'm pretty sure he dreams the same thing every night
J: ooh, what is it?
B: that he's eating a very large amount of food
J: isn't that also what he does in the day
B: yeah well he's not a very imaginative dreamer
J: and Abigail?
B: idk she just kicks herself bit by bit off the couch
B: anyway, be there in 10
B: and fine i'll leave the dogs to their slumber
Bahorel pulled up in front of the sidewalk where Jehan waited in the yellow circle of streetlight at the end of a trail of footprints. His favorite cloak — mauve, velvet with a silver satiny lining — swept the snow. He stepped around to the driver's side of Bahorel's car, pulled the cloak tighter over his shirt. It was a t-shirt, but it was Combeferre's birthday gift to him, printed in miniscule gold text with the entirety of the Iliad. The occasion demanded it, goosebumped arms or no.
Bahorel rolled down the window. "Where are we tracking down your poetry tonight?"
"Grass."
Bahorel leveled at Jehan an incredulous glance. He cranked the window down another creaking inch. "Grass."
"Yes, all frosted over in the moonlight."
"You lured me over here with the promise of adventure, not poking around your yard at 2 AM."
"No, the wheatfields; there'll be some stalks of wheat still left and I want to see them all bubbled in ice. You have your camera?"
Bahorel lifted its bright red case from its cushion on the passenger seat.
His camera contained half photographs of condemned buildings, rooftops and himself striking poses in said locations, and half macro shots of cornflower petals and dragonfly wings. He claimed those were all for Jehan, but Jehan had been on enough long walks with him to know better.
Jehan walked around the back of the car to admire the crisp tire prints in the ankle-deep snow. He gathered his cloak and opened the passenger door. "Mind if I take the camera's place?"
"Just keep her on your lap."
They drove out of the city, turned off on the first gravel road and stopped once the highway was out of hearing, by a fenced-in field, rippled under the ink sky like the surface of the moon.
Jehan handed Bahorel his camera, crunched onto the gravel and paced up and down the road, savoring the grind of his knitted writing slippers on the chips of granite, sparkling lie the stars and the ice. The slippers would be soaked through with slush, but they washed well, and having absorbed the wonder of this night along with the melted snow, they'd be all the more worthy to warm his feet during long poetry sessions.
Bahorel called from the snowy bushes by the chain link fence. "We trespassing or no?"
Jehan trudged through the path he'd opened. "We are in pursuit of beauty," he announced to the NO TRESPASSING sign. He didn't mind breaking laws of this rigid and unimaginative sort — but unlike Bahorel, he preferred to have a reason, if only to be able to declaim it. "The grain's been gathered; we glean the art that remains."
Bahorel opened his hand at the field. "An inexhaustible harvest."
"How poetic; I'm finally rubbing off on you." Jehan stuck a toe of his slipper into a link of the fence. "Give me a hand?"
Bahorel grabbed Jehan's waist and swung him over the fence.
He landed in a sweep of cloak, both feet and one hand, and grinned up at Bahorel already leaping over. "Hey - I wanted to make the first step carefully, you know, deliberately."
Bahorel laughed. "I don't know deliberately."
Jehan's hand had landed near wheat stubble piercing the snow. The dead stalks glittered with crystals. "Ooh, get this one."
Bahorel's camera flashed in Jehan's eyes, a sudden star. "I meant the wheat —"
Bahorel crouched, adjusted his lens, struck pictures like lightning.
"Well," he announced to the field at large, "I consider myself adventured for the night. This beats watching Abigail slide inch by inch off the couch."
Jehan shook out his cold-aching hand, stood and craned up and flung out his arms at the sparkle of galaxies set like bubbles in deep black ice. Freezing air bruised through to his bones and he wrapped himself back into his cloak. "Look. God doesn't go half-measures when He wants to set a scene; even the sky's frozen."
"Combeferre would correct you there." Bahorel pressed invisible glasses into the bridge of his nose. "The stars are in fact flaming spheres —"
"But you see what I mean."
Bahorel propped a fist on his hip and raised an eyebrow at the sky. He lifted his camera and blinked a tiny nova into the galaxies. "Only with you, Prouvaire."
They picked around the edges of the field, arranged and photographed the scattered blades of wheat passed over by the harvester but ornamented in clinging fractals of ice. Finally Bahorel's camera held enough pictures to afford hours of sorting and editing, and the snow stretched too temptingly untouched.
Jehan pressed a footstep, toe to heel, lifted his foot and surveyed the black shadowed print. "Why's it so irresistible to spoil pristine snow like this with footprints?"
"The thrill of destruction." Bahorel stamped a boot into the snow as punctuation.
"Or the need to make our mark. It's an empty stage. A gessoed canvas, a blank sheet of paper."
They printed across the new page of starry snow a poem, two dotted strokes of night sky.