Ordinary Happenings in Three Acts

A sudden chill has descended upon the city. The streets seem clogged with air so cold it has practically assumed a personality of its own: menacing, biting, with the exaggerated sneer of a cartoon villain. Thick, white snow covers the city like down, blanketing trees, houses, stores, the tiny arterial streets that pass by school parks, the tops of parked cars. They are all cloaked in an impossibly dense mantle of cold.