On a Thursday that flirted with frostbite,
New York City crouched under its own weight—
steel towers, whispered winds, and the soft crunch
of snow finding refuge on cobblestones.

Larry, all scarf and cane, shuffled toward the subway,
his breath little clouds of resignation.
The old aeronautical engineer,
half-pilot of his own past,
still sharp enough to spot a flawed trajectory.
“What’s the goal of a day like this?” he muttered,
his words rising, invisible,
like an arrow let loose from the quiver.

In a snug brownstone uptown,
Liam balanced coffee in one hand,
Luke’s shoes in the other.
Nine years old and barefoot in November,
Luke had positioned himself by the window,
his finger tracing shapes on the frosted glass.
What did he see there?
Shapes, stories, secrets the rest of them missed?
His father—half curator, half parent, all chaos—
called from the kitchen.
“Lukie, shoes first. Thanksgiving’s not waiting for us.”
But Luke, wordless, stayed locked in his frosty tableau.

What was the aim?
To survive a holiday?
To sit, three generations deep,
over lukewarm platters and borrowed civility?
Luke didn’t ask, but his silence begged it.

The train ride to Larry’s was a symphony of sighs:
commuters bundled like question marks,
windows fogged by breath or regret.
Luke leaned into Liam’s arm,
his head resting there,
eyes scanning the gray blur outside.
Did the city look like a mountain to him?
A massive, unscalable thing,
both majestic and unkind?
And if so, was his destiny carved into its skyscrapers
or lost in the labyrinth of avenues below?

Larry greeted them at the door,
his cane tapping a rhythm
like the metronome of some unseen clock.
“Shoes off, unless you want me cleaning snow until Easter.”
They piled in, warmth catching them unaware,
like a hug they hadn’t asked for.

At the table, Luke fiddled with a paper napkin.
Liam and Larry sparred, as fathers and sons do,
their words harmless arrows missing their marks.
“Still at the museum?” Larry asked,
his tone a mixture of pride and faint disapproval.
“Yes, Dad. Still trying to make the world care about art.”
“And the boy?” Larry’s nod toward Luke felt like a judgment.
“Still trying to make the world care about him,” Liam said, quieter now.

Luke stood abruptly, his chair scraping the hardwood.
“Function,” he said, his voice clear, crystalline.
“What’s that, buddy?” Liam asked, startled.

Luke pointed to the table’s centerpiece—
a lopsided construction paper turkey,
its feathers mismatched and glorious.
Larry had helped him make it last week,
his old engineer’s hands steadying Luke’s tiny ones.
“It doesn’t do anything,” Luke said, frowning now.

And there it was, the question no one had asked aloud.
If a turkey made of glue and paper had no purpose,
what about the rest of them?
What about Larry, whose memories seemed to weigh more
than the moments left to live.
What about the quiet spaces in the room,
where the absence of something—or someone—
pressed heavier than the furniture.
What about Liam, juggling the shards of his ambitions,
curating beauty for strangers
while his own life unraveled at the seams.
And what about Luke,
nine years old, his silence a language
none of them could yet translate,
a voice both too soft and too loud
for a world that didn’t know how to listen.

But Larry only chuckled,
his laughter a low rumble,
like a distant engine coming to life.
“Kiddo, not everything has to do something.
Sometimes it just has to be.”

Luke stared at the turkey a moment longer,
then nodded, as if a secret had been shared.
He returned to his seat, napkin in hand,
folding it with the careful precision
of someone working out the edges of a dream.

The snow kept falling outside,
steady as a plan unfolding,
soft as a hope not yet realized.