Punxsutawney Phil and the Executioners in Top Hats
by Bo Fisher

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and neither am I that other thing they say I am. I don’t say the word. My mom has no problem saying it, and neither does Row who’s rummaging through her bag at the door as we speak. It’s only that when the cigarette smoke starts to mix with the early February snow on the Ohio that my head gets foggy and I have to part the debris to see what really is. I can still see it, and though they cannot, I can empathize with their blindness—I can empathize. Row doesn’t care to look at the goddamn snow, and that’s why she’s mumbling something or another about my concerns regarding the government’s contamination of our tap water and how cigarette ash has become hotter in the last three years.