Prison Nights, Winter Nights

On clear winter nights we would sometimes go for walks on the mountain to look up at the stars. We would walk as far as the frozen lake, then turn back in the direction of Villeneuve, and on the way down to the lights of the city again we would walk tightly arm in arm, our boots squeaking on snow. “The mountain isn’t really a mountain,” I said to Dillon on one of these freezing night walks. “It’s only a giant knoll, a glacier hill. I read that somewhere or other not long ago. It’s a magnificent hill of prehistoric debris.”

“It’s not a glacier hill at all,” he said. “It’s an extinct volcano.”