It’s ten degrees, maybe twenty if the sun is lying. My soles hit the porch steps and pain shoots up my calves from the cold. I make it to the sidewalk, flailing for balance, and by the time I hit the curb, her taillights are a pair of rubies shrinking into the gray morning.
Fucking dammit.
I pivot, sprinting back toward the house to grab keys, phone, anything. I must have pulled the door shut behind me when I launched myself down the steps.
My hand meets the keypad and… nothing. No little lights. No cheerful beep. I press again. Dead.
No. No no no no no. The battery. The one that’s been chirping for days. The one I kept telling myself I’d change “tonight” and then got distracted and said “tomorrow” and then got distracted again and said “later.”
Guess what time it is, Leo? It’s later.
I am now the living, breathing definition offuck around and find out.
I punch the center button to reset it, get exactly zero response, and stand there, half naked, half hungover, entirely freezing, realizing I am locked out of my own house with no keys, no phone, no dignity, and no way to fix this situation without being the asshole who woke up his neighbors at 6 a.m. on a fucking Saturday.
I head back down the steps, trying the windows because I am nothing if not a man who prefers the obvious humiliation to the creative one. Every ground-floor latch is tight.
My alarm system is fancy, which means every sensible point of entry is sealed like it expects a raccoon army at dawn. I could break a pane, sure, but the second I do, the siren will go off, automatically signaling the police while Lois follows up with a call to 911 and the HOA. Then the HOA will send a sternly worded email about “seasonally appropriate attire on common-view porches,” and I will become the next viral Nextdoor post:Boxer-Clad Burglar Actually Just Hungover Homeowner.
My feet go from freezing to pain to that alarming numbness where you can’t tell if you still have toes. I hop back onto the porch, huffing steam like a dragon who regrets everything.
Options spool through my head and all of them are bad.
The only unsecured window in the entire house is the little one that opens into the weird bonus loft—a dormer tucked away over the side yard. It’s not really a second story; it’s a glorified treehouse someone slapped onto a cottage style house to make the blueprints more interesting.
The front dormers are ornamental—pure Potemkin village. But the side dormer? The loft? Real window. Real latch. And unless I’m wrong, I’ve never once told my alarm to care about it.
I glance at the pergola that frames the back porch. Snow cruststhe top slats, weighty and white. There’s a bump-out of roof not too far from it.
If I can climb the pergola, use something to clear the snow, belly onto the roof, and shimmy across, I might be able to reach the dormer ledge. Would that be insane? Yes. Would it be a better option than freezing my testicles off on the porch while composing a note to Tori with icicles? Also yes.
“Brilliant,” I tell myself. “Let’s do the dumb thing.”
I pad gingerly around to the back, tiptoe-hobble-curse, and size up the climb. The pergola is solid cedar, anchored into brick, crossbeams spaced like a ladder if ladders were designed by a sadist.
The snow makes it slick, the cold makes it brittle, and I make it worse by being a tired, hungover idiot without shoes… or pants.
There’s a broom leaning in the corner by the grill, bristles stiff with old ash. I grab it, knock off the crust, and test a foothold on the first crossbeam. It holds. I reach for the next beam with my hands, palms stinging instantly, and do the thing rock climbers do where they pretend they’re not dumbasses with a death wish.
One rung. Two. My toes are screaming. I hug the post and rest my forehead against the cold wood.
“You’re fine,” I tell my entire lower body, which has decided to revolt. “We’re fine.”
I get another rung, plant my foot, shift my weight—and my arch slips. My right foot slides off the slick beam, my left knee slams into the post, and my full body slams forward into the ladder of wood with exactly one unfortunately positioned crossbar to break the momentum.
My entire universe reduces to a single, blinding point: I have just introduced the left side of my scrotum to a frozen piece of cedar at velocity.
Every man has a language for this pain. Mine is incoherent. Sound rips out of me—the noise you make when you’ve discovered an entirely new color of agony—and I cling to the beam with my chest and biceps and will my soul not to leave my body.
I see God for a second, or at least I see a cartoon of Him holding a sign that says, “Buddy.”
I breathe through my teeth. I want to vomit. I want to ascend into a higher plane and leave my balls behind. “Initiate subspace,” I whisper to my junk, and wait for the waves to recede from killing to maiming.
Cold helps. So does swearing. I do both. When the pain eases from white-hot to a deep, punishing throb, I re-set my feet and move like a contrite sinner: slow, careful, with the full knowledge that one wrong move and I’m back in communion with the cedar crossbar of doom.
At the top of the pergola, the broom earns its keep. I extend it, push snow off the small lip of roof that runs from the porch over toward the dormer. Sheets of powder slough off like blankets. Once there’s a bare strip, I belly flop onto it. The roof is rough under my chest, the shingles grabbing skin.
My ribs complain, my stomach does not understand why it is being exfoliated, and my testicle is still not speaking to me. That’s fair.
