It was sitting on my porch boards like it had always been there — almost two feet long, thick as a cinder block, cloudy in the center in the way that ice gets when it freezes slowly around something, already sweating in the November morning air and leaving a dark wet ring on the wood where it sat.
My first thought, in the four seconds before anything else occurred to me, was that it was a prank. Kids got bored in this neighborhood. Grief had a way of making me cycle through cruel scenarios before I settled on ordinary ones.
I leaned closer, my breath making small clouds in the cold, and I tried to make out the form through the bubbles and the clouding in the ice. I could not, not well enough to be certain, not standing up. I went back inside and put on my coat and boots and came back with a dish towel, which I used to wipe the surface clear enough to see.
