It was all around. Crystaline white flakes that fluttered to the ground like so much carefully-torn confetti. Though the sky overhead was so dark that not even the clouds were visible, the snowflakes shined brightly in the headlights. Each that touched the pavement ahead of them was melted immediately by the tires, heated from so many miles of travel, but the banks on either side of the road were covered in a half-inch layer of ivory powder.

In the backseat of the green Chrysler, Dave was asleep, and Jesse sat with a small flashlight tucked between his chin and his shoulder, scrawling something onto a notebook. Matt was semi-cautiously steering the car through the light downpour. Lint, however, was sitting forward in the seat next to Matt, his nose nearly pressed against the glass, his eyes wide.

Matt had told him earlier, sounding half-amused and half-mocking, that it was just snow. But Lint had retorted that he'd never seen snow, and he hadn't expected it to be so white. An hour later, he was still apparently enthralled with the color of it, as his position had hardly changed since then - something that was quite remarkable for someone with as much energy as Lint.

"Fuck this," Matt said, as he saw a mileage sign for upcoming towns. "We're stopping in Spade to rent a hotel room and get some rest."

Jesse looked up from whatever he was writing or drawing then, giving Matt a curious look. "It isn't snowing that hard..."

"Nah, but I'm sick of driving, and we still got about three hundred miles to the next gig," Matt clarified.

His attitude wasn't surprising: the last two shows they'd played had not gone over so well. In El Paso, Texas, they played for a crowd of four people. The show before that in Nevada had drawn enough people, but the promoter had stiffed them on their pay. And the drive from El Paso to the next town they'd play in was roughly six hundred miles. No one in the band had been feeling exactly optimistic for a few days, except Lint who was still too entranced with the snow to even notice that Matt had spoken.

The hotel room in Spade, Texas was very much like the town it resided in. Small, run-down, dusty and desolate. Nonetheless, they rented a room and hauled the few duffelbags of clothes into it to camp out for the night. The shower worked, which was Brett's main concern since he hadn't had a shower since the ill-fated night in El Paso and a drummer can become pretty sweaty regardless of how many people are at the show.

Matt flopped onto one of the two queensized beds the second they entered the room, from whence he scarcely moved the entire night, seizing the remote control for the TV. Lint dropped his bag onto the floor and promptly headed back outside.

He closed the door behind himself and sank onto the simple concrete stoop to stare into the storm. Here the flakes were illuminated by the yellowy streetlights that dotted the parking lot. The tiretracks their car had made in the snow were slowly fading and disappearing underneath the onslaught. Though the place itself may have reminded him of his apartment complex back home, he had never seen the complex look even half as etheral as this old parking lot did now.

His blues eyes darted back and forth as if attempting to watch the descent of every flake, but otherwise he was completely unmoving. It may have been a few minutes or a few hours that he sat there before the door behind him opened.

"Lint?," Jesse asked, peering out at him. "You gonna stay out here all night?"

"I dunno, maybe," Lint answered distractedly.

Jesse moved from the doorway to sit next to his friend on the concrete. "It's pretty, isn't it?"

Lint nodded, finally looking over at Jesse as if just noticing his presence. "Yeh...never seen anything like it."

"We got a lot in Pennsylvania," Jesse told him. "Haven't really seen it since I moved out to the bay, though."

"Everything just looks so clean," Lint remarked, turning back to watch the snow. "Like after it all melts away the world will be perfect."

"Mmm," Jesse mutters thoughtfully, leaning against Lint's shoulder lightly. "It's a nice thought, in any case. But I'm sure when it melts we'll just be in boring, flat, dusty Texas."

"Yeh...but we don't gotta think about that right now," Lint said with child-like insistence.

Jesse smiled slightly, perhaps for the first time since Nevada. "All right, we won't."

He leaned more fully against Lint, and Lint returned the weight. Their temples pressed together, both sets of eyes watching the continuous snowfall. They each ignored the wetness that slowly covered their own bodies as the flakes melted with their body heat. After a time, the sound of the TV inside the hotel room was extinguished. Neither Matt nor Dave stepped outside to check on them. And neither Lint nor Jesse made any move to go back inside for a long time.

Eventually, the sun lazily began to peek over the bland Texas horizon. The entire visible world was sheer white, and it seemed that they might have been the only two people awake in that expanse of land. As the snowfall lightened and turned to a slow drizzle of rain, Jesse stood and tugged on Lint's hand, which he'd been holding for some time without realizing it.

"Come on, let's get a few hours of rest before Matt makes us drive on," he suggested, his voice quiet with calm.

Lint only nodded and stood as well, following Jesse back into the motel room with one last look at the whitened world, never releasing his hand.