“Bundle up, you wily tiger—we’re going to the heart of winter,” began an email I checked and read as I got ready to go. It had been snowing since the day before. Though cracks and gaps of blue were beginning to peer through the early morning cloudbanks, the wind still carried gusts of powder that left a sparkling glaze over whatever it encountered. I watched from my window for a few mindless minutes, entranced by the familiar view of industrial Brooklyn, ordinarily so locked and gridded but now softened by a blanket of snow, every edge rounded, every point concealed.
I barely made the 8:03 a.m. train to Huntington, a town on the north shore of Long Island. The Long Island Railroad must have discontinued service the night before; bleary-eyed, business-attired commuters crammed onto the train en masse, seemingly desperate to get home and spend the rest of the weekend with their families.
I had planned on using this one-hour train ride to get a good start on a short story I was supposed to submit to a magazine on Monday morning. But standing there, sandwiched between a stroller and a reeling businessman, I couldn’t even get my journal out of my backpack, let alone compose my thoughts on its pages. Of course, I was secretly relieved. I’d been struggling to come up with an idea for the story for days, my thoughts circling aimlessly in the warehouse of my mind; the harder I looked, the emptier it seemed. I had been dreading the train ride for this reason. Instead of struggling with my blank journal pages, though, I was forced to relax. And then, unexpectedly, as I struggled to maintain my balance, pressed against the bathroom door and jostling commuters, I finally got an idea—or rather, an idea for how to get an idea.
“I’m here on a condition,” I said the moment I stepped into Bennett’s car, which was idling in front of the train station. “The condition is that by the end of whatever adventure you have planned, I will have a fully-formed idea for a short story. I’ll write it tomorrow morning.”
“Perfect,” he said. “Put this on.”
It was a tiny camera he’d gotten for Christmas. It was attached to an elastic band, which I strapped over my wool cap. It turned out that Bennett had a project due Monday, too—a video for a workshop he was taking online.
“You look good,” he said, gazing at my forehead.
“So, how does your story start?” asked Bennett as we twisted over winding roads slick with ice, skidding and slipping gracelessly toward our mysterious destination.
“Easy,” I said. “It begins with the email you sent this morning. ‘The heart of winter,’ and all that.”
The blue cracks in the overcast clouds above had widened, and light ricocheted blindingly off the white world through which we glided. Squinting, I flipped down my sun visor so I could see.
“Hey!” shouted Bennett. “You’ll spoil the shot.” He lifted the visor as we rounded a turn and jetted out across a narrow strip of land hardly wider than the two-lane highway we were on. On one side was a frozen pond, on the other the rolling azure water of the Long Island Sound, an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Does this thing record sound?” I asked, pointing to my forehead.
“Depends on which way you look,” he laughed.
I turned in time to see a large hawk swoop low over the sea.
“Where are we?” I asked as we trekked into the woods, punching deep footprints into the unmarked snow.
“Target Rock National Wildlife Refuge,” said Bennett.
“Target Rock?” I repeated.
“A large rock in the water. For a long time it helped guide sailors into the bay. It’s one of the only distinguishing features of this otherwise uniform and disorienting coastline.”
“Like the missing element of my short story,” I said. “The one distinguishing feature that will guide readers through the disorienting wilderness of words.”
“Target Rock,” said Bennett, turning to wink at my forehead. “That’s where you’ll find your story.”
We followed a line of deer tracks, relishing the sensation of our snow boots slicing through the powder like sailboats through wakeless water. The low sun glittered between bare branches. Tittering sparrows bounced from branch to branch above us, and seabirds circled high. I was growing uneasy.
“I wish something would happen,” I said. “A bear. A hunter. Anything. This story’s going to be boring.”
“Something will happen,” Bennett said. “Don’t worry. At Target Rock something will happen.”
After a while, I forgot all about the camera on my head and the looming deadline, too. Bennett had been in Nicaragua for the past three months, and this was our first chance to be alone together since he’d been back. The last time I’d seen him was at a noisy party a few days earlier, and we’d argued. I had been hurt that he’d been back in town for two full weeks and hadn’t made time to see me, his best friend. We had a lot to catch up on and a lot to say, things we could only say to each other, things that neither of us would’ve wanted on film, things that weren’t fit for a story in a magazine.
