Issue 27 December 2015 Flash Fiction Online December 2015

A couple of months ago my son returned to the US after living for two years in Melbourne, Australia. He loved it there.

But he never got used to Christmas in the summertime. Barbecues in the back yard instead of hot cocoa by the fire. Decorations that consist of flowers rather than Christmas lights. No carols about how cold it is outside, or dreaming about snow, or jingle bells on one horse open sleighs.

There was still food. Plenty of food. ‘Heaps’ of food, as they say, Down Under. Especially when your host for the day is a Samoan family. Or better, 3 or 4 Samoan families, one after the next. No wonder he gained 30 pounds while he was there.

As for myself, I’m no lover of winter, but Christmas just isn’t the same without snow. And should we be lucky enough to have snow fall on Christmas Day it’s magical.

But snow isn’t so magical for the characters in our first story this month: “The Snow Globe” by Kate Hall.

And another Christmas offering, “To the Havens” by Ariel Bolton. If your kids still believe in Santa and his elves, I’d think twice before reading this one to them. Maybe three times.

Next, up we have a lovely sci-fi offering from Eleanor R. Wood, “Fibonacci.”

Finally, this month’s reprint, “Hoarfrost,” by Michelle Muenzler. This fantasy story originally appeared in Three-lobed Burning Eye in October 2012, then as a Podcast at Toasted Cake in December 2014.

OR, WHY YOU CAN’T BE NEIL GAIMAN

NOTE: If you like writing one thing (novels in particular), woot. Don’t read this piece, even though it might help. You don’t want what I’m selling.

Envy is rife amongst writers. It’s the first stage of jealousy and rooted in daydreams. Few daydream about labor. We daydream about success as reward out of thin air. Example:

How awesome is it to be Neil Gaiman? Rockstar of genre fiction, with more success than a dozen mid­listers combined and multiplied by his current stock of awards and accolades. He is rich, famous, does what he likes, and makes fun commencement speeches.

The trouble is, you can’t be Neil Gaiman.

And I wouldn’t want the job, even if I was offered some devil deal from a servile butler in a greasy EC comic book. Not because I’d end up devoured by ten thousand fans dressed like Delirium of the Endless (you know, Tori Amos) in the very last panel. But because, to paraphrase Paul Westerberg regarding Bon Jovi, I’d change bank accounts with Gaiman, but I could never write American Gods, even if I wanted to. And if I did, it would likely involve pro wrestlers instead of gods and the protagonists named wouldn’t be Shadow, but Sal Dubuski, a jobber from Horsehead, New York. And no one who liked American Gods would touch mine with a pole ax.

I can’t be Gaiman. You can’t be Gaiman. He’s already Gaimaning all over the place. But there’s something to take from his career: it wasn’t without a strategy, and it wasn’t achieved by following the traditional route most writers are sold as the means to success (publishing enough to eat). Before he was a phenomenon, he was a journalist and non­fiction writer for porn, humor, and gaming mags. Journalism allowed him to make contact with many people in publishing, including Alan Moore, which helped him establish relationships in the comic industry and earn cash.

Now, all the while, he’s writing his arse off and learning his craft, but he found his route. He didn’t just toil in short stories, write a novel, find an agent who sold their work: the old midlist three­step. And that’s refreshing, and poignant today. Most of us want a clear path to success: A+B=C. We want effort to be rewarded. We want to achieve by the sweat of our brow. We want a business model like our older heroes who show up at cons and tell the same stories of getting signed in the 80s before regaling us with a tale of how Harlan Ellison was mean or nice or both.

After surviving against the odds in the wake of the Great Recession, I’ve realized a harder truth embedded in the nature of success in work. There is no certainty, no stability, no meritocracy, no justice or fairness (I can already hear the windows clicking away, but hold on for a sec), no equality, and nothing is ever owed to you no matter what you do (hold on!) . . . however, in such a sea of vexing circumstances, there is also no singular road to achievement. And that means chances and opportunities exist if you ignore the old paradigms of work. Including in the arts.

The era of the commercial mid-list writer, who published two books a year, taught some college courses, and maybe wrote a novelization or ghost wrote a cookbook for a nice lower middle­ class career, has declined in the wake of the Great Recession, bookstore closures, and ebooks (some say it was earlier than that, especially for horror writers). It was a model, much like the one ­job career of the past two generations, that has broken down. Most people who call themselves professional writers have day jobs, or multiple part-time jobs, some specifically for health insurance needs. A career novelist, while not extinct, is hardly a safe bet or even a desirable goal.

I think of my fiction as an unsteady part­ time job that requires a lot of volunteering, but I chased that mid­-list star for years. To succeed, or so I was told, I’d have to fit my style to the market demand, something guys like Neil Gaiman don’t have to worry about. (NOTE: This is not a slam on Gaiman’s fiction. I think he truthfully loves his art and works hard to write stories he cares about. They just happen to be commercially palatable to Time Warner executives, 90s Goth kids, and the children of 90s goth kids and Time Warner executives).

Could I have his level of success in ten years? Given my content, I doubt it. My novels have dirtbag punk rock kids, fat vampires, and failed pro wrestlers. Rare is the time I write about the pretty people winning. I’m a writer for the underdog (the kiss of death in much pop fiction). That’s what makes me happy! It’s as if I was writing anti­commercial fiction on purpose (which might be true). In their-their brutally honest and funny book on screenwriting, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant warn all would ­be writers that they’ll never make any cash in Hollywood writing Bukowski­esque tales about the fuglies. While more forgiving than film, print is often the same way, especially in genre fiction (or are those covers lying to us?)

But when I abandoned sustainable income as a writing goal, I knew I’d be taking a harder road. My successes would be rarer, in part because I’m not writing to please the audience. I’m writing for them to enjoy me, a stranger who is taking up space in a magazine or book that could be occupied by Neil Gaiman. Which means a lot more rejection than if I gamed my fiction to fit their needs, as many authors do (successful and otherwise).

During this period, some part of me began to realize that I’d had too much invested in thinking of succeeding with ONE big project. One novel. The strong debut. The breakthrough novel. One major monograph. That one thing would save me and be the root from which all my porn dreams of success would grow. In art and commerce, though, the rule of one is that you better have more than one thing going. One job. One plan. One option. One idea. Having only one idea is death. And this means more than one view of success, and more than one means to get there. I’d given up thinking of success as anything I had control over, but what about means?

Unconsciously (as I don’t recall this being a plan), I began to make various kinds of art. I’d spent about four years writing ten novels, and with little return. So, I delved into a lot of smaller projects, and some big ones. But I remember why this approach clicked for me.

I’m a big fan of Chris Hardwick’s confidence theory, which I read while my life was in a traumatic tailspin. Hardwick’s career spiraled downward as a comedian and TV personality (thanks in large part to booze and other problems). One of the lessons he learned picking himself back up was there’s a wild value to saying yes to things that sound fun that may have only minor pay off. Lots of little things over time can add up, especially when it comes to your ego. If you only have one thing that defines you, it will be crushing when it falls (and everything falls eventually). So diversify and multiply to survive. If his TV work died down, he focused on stand up, or podcasting, or sketch comedy, or other associated fields that kept his mind active and schedule busy and built up his resume again until he started getting more TV work. But he still does tons of stuff. It’s not just the Nerdist website and brand. Hardwick created opportunities by saying yes to new, novel, related projects. Confidence in the future came from having options.

While my novels continued to bounce around, I decided to champion Hardwick’s approach of creating more opportunities by doing more work in places that intrigued me or I already enjoyed. So I rekindled my love of short stories. I started writing comic books. I do improv comedy. Failed opportunities also produced interesting results: when I applied for a job at the Khan Academy, I had to buy a tablet, drawing software, and learn a new skill-set for teaching and making a video. Did I get the gig? Not even close! But I enjoyed drawing and narration, so I make ridiculous improvised comedy videos, with over 1100 views and counting. I applied for roughly 120 odd jobs at universities, colleges, and other institutions and never got an interview, but I did win a fellowship that allowed me to travel the world and write history for a year. The rejections the past two years were staggering, but these successes were not possible without them. And not one novel was written or considered a god I had abandoned. I was too busy doing cool shit.

When it comes to work and art, I try to keep saying yes (an old improv ethos). I’ve helped friends plot their zombie movies, design comic scripts, and even narrated and sang in a live reading of a play at the EXIT THEATER in San Francisco. I grow my range of experiences. I take in the challenges. I don’t say “No, I’m working on a novel. That is my sole focus. Anything that takes me away from it will ruin my chances of it becoming the next American Gods. ”

Because who the hell would want that, when they can talk to crack heads outside a theater before singing Tom Waits as actors in scuba gear are about to quote Rilke? That’s right. No one.

I’m not waiting for one thing. I’m making many. And my hope is that, over time, I’ll see a pattern in the experiences that can lead me to even greater things in history, fiction, performance, etc. Something will percolate in the cultural marketplace that may lead me to the next adventure. If you bank on ONE THING (the one pitch, the one agent, the one novel, the one whatever) to make you happy and pay your bills, and it doesn’t, you’re devastated and in bloody trouble. If you’ve got tons of projects, then the devastation is minimized because when it happens you’ll be too busy doing something else and looking good (to quote Kung Fu legend, Jim Kelly).

And yes, for the last time, the position of Neil Gaiman has been taken.

I told myself it was a dream, that time my sister Clara took the screen out of our second-floor window, bade me silent with a press of her nail-bitten finger to her lips, and flung herself from the sill.

In the dream-that-wasn’t, a goose made of snow and starlight whooshed out of the front lawn that marked the edge of the world, and she landed softly upon its back. They whisked up into the freezing night, snowflakes twirling their endless dizzy dance, though no clouds lowered the sky.

I watched her rise, her plaid nightgown fluttering in the wind, the same plaid nightgown she had worn as long as I had known her, and I felt the floor buck under my feet. Thunder jarred me as the walls jerked, and the whole world tilted sideways.

Once. Twice. Three times. Never more than three. The twin moons, dark black and ringed with green, appeared as they always did when the world shook, and seemed to stare down at me.

I clung to the windowsill and strained to see up into the darkness, the sky’s unforgiving curve. The snow-goose bounced against that curve with a note like struck glass, dissolving on impact, and Clara plunged to the ground. She didn’t have far to fall. The moons gazed at us like we gazed at snowflakes under the magnifying glass, waiting for them to melt. They never melted.

Clara, crumpled and groaning on the ground, rolled onto her back and screamed up at the moons, shook her fist at them, called them captors. The moons blinked, and vanished. The world righted itself with a BOOM, and I fled back to my bed, hoping I only dreamed.

Clara shook me awake the next morning for another Christmas, and we looked up at the sky together, the silver lines–like comet tails–marking the limits of the world.

“But you told me space didn’t end,” I said. Clara had read it, in the book lying open on the table. It was the only one she read; the books in the library wouldn’t come off the shelves.

“It doesn’t.” Clara wrung the neck of her nutcracker, the one she opened every day, and his wooden crown came off in her hand. “Someone put a lid over us.”

I watched the sky for days, waiting for the cracks, that damning evidence, to vanish. They never did.

* * *

Some days we heard music after the quakes, a tinny symphony that rose from the ground and made the snow shiver. Clara would climb under the Christmas tree with her book when the first notes started, put her hands over her ears and read. After she had attacked the sky, though, she began going outside and shouting, her voice fighting the deafening sonata for dominance until the last strains slowed to a pudding-thick crawl, then stopped altogether.

I tried to remember if I ever found the music anything other than confusing, but I couldn’t remember how old I was when I first heard it. Maybe I had always been ten. I never thought about it, before Clara attacked the sky, and sometimes I wished I could go back to not thinking about it.

* * *

We opened the same presents every morning: a nutcracker, now faded and paint-worn, for Clara, and a soft teddy bear, its fur rubbed away and one eye missing, for me.

“I hate this thing,” she said one morning, staring at the nutcracker in his nest of faded, crinkling paper. “And I hate that I can’t get rid of it.”

She had tried, many times: breaking it apart piece by piece, burning it with the magnifying glass. It always returned to its spot under our fading Christmas tree.

“This isn’t how real life is supposed to work,” Clara said as I climbed into bed that night. She stood by the window, glaring up at the cracks in the sky.

I sighed and smoothed the coverlet under my hands. “How do you know? Did your book tell you?” I tried not to hate the book for making Clara unhappy, but it was hard.

Clara looked over her shoulder at me. “I’m going to break the sky. And then we’ll both get out of here. You’ll see.”

I made a noise of agreement and closed my eyes, but sleep never came. I stared into the dark confines of my eyelids and listened to my heart pound at the thought of Clara’s idea. I couldn’t tell if it beat a tattoo of fear, or excitement.

* * *

Clara made her escape the next morning.

She unwrapped the nutcracker without looking at it, kissed my forehead, then charged up the stairs, ignoring my shouts as I followed. I reached our room in time to watch her leap from the window.

I leaned over the sill as the goose erupted from the snow and they charged those cracks in the twilit sky. The emerald-ringed moons blinked at Clara, and she hurled the nutcracker at them with a shriek.

The cracks yawned open, creaking like doors. Clara surged out, fist raised in the air, and as the hissing darkness rushed in, I saw her goose disintegrate, saw her fall, fall, not the short distance to our lawn, but somewhere else. Snow swirled around me, dry and familiar against my skin, and then something more rained down, clear and jagged and cutting. The moons vanished. The world crashed onto its side and rolled, end over end, tossing me about like a bit of wrapping paper.

When it finally quieted, I couldn’t see snow, or the outlines of our house, or our Christmas tree. Glittering fragments of sky lay scattered everywhere, drawing blood when I touched them, and I could see the toothy hole Clara had punched in the sky, the dark emptiness beyond it. I had no way to reach the hole, to follow her, and when I called out, I heard no answer. I hugged my faded Christmas bear and shivered, sat down amidst the ruins of sky to wait–for Clara to come back, for the moons to glow over me once more, for the dry darkness to steal me away, too.

The music began to play, note by laborious note, and even it sounded broken.

One sample of DNA.

One chance to prove herself and silence her peers.

Two viable ammonites eventually swim in their tank, juvenile and tiny. Their spiraled shells may be imperfect Golden Ratios, but their erstwhile association with Fibonacci’s sequence drew her to them as a child. The addition of the sequence’s last number to its predecessor to generate the next, converging on an identical ratio between each one, creates a logarithmic beauty she finds soothing.

Three mass extinctions had occurred before the ammonites succumbed to the fourth. With the planet on the brink of another, she’s certain these animals hold the key to survival.

Five times she’s reluctantly turned down Henry’s dinner invitations. She fears the fifth was one refusal too many.

Eight years she’s studied to fulfill her dream of reviving the ancient cephalopods and returning them to the dying ocean. They say de-extinction will create further problems, but they haven’t come up with alternatives.

Thirteen weeks after hatching, the little creatures begin to thrive. It will ever after be her lucky number.

Twenty-one people are invited to Henry’s leaving do, herself among them. She sips half a glass of bubbly before heading back to the lab. The ammonites are most active at night.

Thirty-four proves her greatest birthday. Her ammonites have mated successfully, throwing off the vestiges of their nautilus-hybrid lineage. Nothing can compete with this for a birthday present. Her colleagues celebrate with her. She wishes Henry was still here.

Fifty-five journalists leave messages for her on the day her research is published. She returns only three of their calls.

Eighty-nine hatchlings survive the planktonic stage. Her increase in funding pays for a bigger tank.

One hundred and forty-four specimens aren’t enough to rejuvenate an ecosystem. She hopes the ammonites’ prolific offspring will boost plankton levels while the adults provide a predator’s balance, thereby injecting life force at both ends of the food chain using an ancient animal known for its resilience.

Two hundred and thirty-three juveniles are stolen when the lab is burgled. She discovers empty tanks and smashed equipment. Heartbreak chokes her; the young ones are doomed without her care. She’d been experimenting with new fragments of nautilus DNA to diversify the gene pool. Now she has to start over. She sobs amongst broken glass and scattered utensils.

Three hundred and seventy-seven minutes pass before Henry calls. He’s heard the news. Is there anything he can do? If she’d like his help, she’s got it. She doesn’t need his expertise, but she could use a friend. He books the next train back.

Two hundred and thirty-three glass fragments are swept up while they talk. The act of restoring order to the lab alongside a sympathetic ear calms her nerves and reignites her determination. She hasn’t come this far to balk now. The police can’t promise anything. Henry has faith in her. She uses it to bolster her faith in herself.

One hundred and forty-four letters have been cut from a newspaper to form the most cliched of ransom notes. Despite its comic appearance, it chills her. The ransomer wants £100,000 in exchange for her ammonites. He’s sent the same demand to several rivals. He doesn’t need to declare a time limit; she knows how valuable her specimens would be to another scientist. Her latest research could be usurped before she’s even begun a new round of cloning. She crumples the note in sick fury. She doesn’t have £100,000.

Eighty-nine weeks pass. She clones more hybrids, diversifies the genes, raises new hatchlings. She hears nothing of her abducted ammonites, and no more from the ransomer. If someone else paid up, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.

Fifty-five possible sites are scouted for the trial release of her mature specimens. The Mediterranean is large enough for an oceanic microcosm and enclosed enough to monitor the experiment. She chooses a quiet Turkish lagoon, a secluded Moroccan beach, and a sea cave in southern France.

Thirty-four tests determine her ammonites’ readiness. She monitors their food intake, hormone levels, water readings, and dozens of other essentials. They are acclimatized over several days in tanks at each site.

Twenty-one hours before the release in Turkey, Henry phones. He’s ecstatic for her, yet she senses contrition. “I paid the ransom for you,” he tells her. “But they’d all died, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I saved their shells; I’ll have them sent to you for study. Forgive me. Please.” She hangs up, hurt and relieved.

Thirteen salty splashes: one for each tagged creature. She watches them join the shoal ahead and is unprepared for the bittersweet emptiness that takes their place in her heart.

Eight text messages arrive from Henry during the ferry crossing. She replies when they reach Morocco. ‘I’m speechless… thanks for looking out for me. See you in France.’

Five news crews appear at the French site. One of her assistants must have tipped them off. The world might as well be informed; her years of work will either pay off or they won’t. They film the last of the new ammonites swimming away, proving her hopes aren’t the only ones resting on the creatures’ success. As the waves engulf them, Henry rests his arm around her.

Three grants come in at once. She knows Henry’s financial sacrifice safeguarded her success. She asks him to collaborate with her. He grins. “Thought you’d never ask.”

Two years later, the ammonite population is climbing. There are signs of other species stabilizing, but it’s premature to draw conclusions. Nevertheless, her doubters are wavering.

One boat sails across the sparkling Med, a scientist at its helm. Another prepares scuba gear. They thought of honeymooning in the Alps, but this is what brought them together. They drop anchor and don their gear for the trip’s first dive. She smiles at Henry and falls backward off the deck.

One ammonite appears before her. And another. Two. Three. Five. A whole school of perfect spirals. Her heart lifts. They’re thriving.

“Sarge? There’s a–thing–I’ve found at Pier Seventeen. I think you need to see this.” The voice on the other end of the line held just a hint of a quaver.

George Aklaq grimaced at his screen. Trust the new kid to find trouble twenty minutes before the end of a shift, and just before his holidays too. Beaupré’s toque had slipped down over his headcam again; there was no telling from the camera feed what he was looking at.

“Can you be more specific, Constable?”

Beaupré hesitated. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a doll.”

Shit. Missed one. Aklaq reached for his parka. “Stay where you are, I’ll be right there.” He paused with one arm in his sleeve and scanned the assortment of flotsam on his desk. A smooth river stone lay half-hidden under a stack of reports. He put it in his pocket; he didn’t need a paperweight anyway.

Outside the detachment, wind was rising off the Beaufort Sea, scouring everything with crystals as sharp as sand. Aklaq opted to drive the short distance through the blocks of stacked shipping containers rather than risk frostbite. Winters in the port of New Tuk weren’t as cold as they had been historically, but they still had a sting.

He found Beaupré’s cruiser pulled up on a floodlit jetty beside an oil tank. The constable was squatting next to the bumper, peering at something small wedged in the stark shadow between the base of a gantry and the tank wall.

“Is this what I think it is?” the young man asked when Aklaq approached. The object he was examining appeared to be a ball of greasy cleaning rags.

Aklaq prodded it gently with his mitt. The bundle was frozen in place, but for a cone-shaped scrap of green felt, which came off in his hand. Where the felt had been, he could see a tangle of stiff hair and the outline of a head no larger than an ermine’s. The face was hidden, buried amongst layers of cloth. Aklaq grunted. “Elf, yeah. Dead.”

“What’s it doing here?” Beaupré demanded.

“They try to cross the sea ice sometimes,” Aklaq said. “The elders around here say there used to be more of them, but now the icebreakers keep the Northwest Passage open year round, so we don’t see so many.”

Beaupré straightened. “It walked all the way from the North Pole?”

“Ran like hell, probably. The shifts in those factories are twenty hours long, and the food will be running short this time of year.”

The young constable stared. “That can’t be. Elves look so happy when they reply to my kids’ wish list videos.”

Aklaq suppressed a flash of anger and merely raised an eyebrow at the Constable.

“What do we do now?” Beaupré asked.

“We take it to the dumpster. Then we fill out an incident report form. The code for elves is 076, Animal Control.”

“But it has clothes! It has boots!”

“Yes. Yes, it does.”

Beaupré’s face was pale, paler than the cold and the floodlights justified. “Isn’t there some legislation that applies? A UN convention or something?”

Aklaq shook his head. “Nope. Elves aren’t human. Officially, they’re not migratory wildlife either.”

Beaupré turned away. For a moment he said nothing, then he spun and landed a heavy kick on the push bumper of his cruiser. “The hell they aren’t,” he said.

Aklaq laid a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, son.” He drew the stone out of his pocket. “Here, I have another idea. We’ll give him a proper sea burial.”

They drove the length of the quay, to a place where the lamp posts ended, and the polar dark lapped at the edges of the port. A frost-rimed sign announced NUNAKPUT SUBMERSIBLE TOURS, SEE OLD TUKTOYAKTUK, MAY-SEPTEMBER. On one side of the jetty, a submarine lazed in black water, awaiting summer tourists. Heaters in its hull kept the encroaching ice at bay.

Aklaq brought the bundle to the water’s edge. The elf had died in a fetal position, but he found a way to slide the stone in among the rags. He handed the mass to Beaupré. The constable took a deep breath and Aklaq thought he might be praying. Then he dropped it into the water. They watched it disappear into the darkness.

Beaupré looked up, stared down the row of cranes that stretched beseeching limbs to the north, the row of pumps with arms folded. “What do I do if I find a live elf?” he asked.

Aklaq scowled. “In theory, there’s a trapping program. We’re supposed to send it back to the Republic of the North Pole, alive or mostly dead. Personally, I’ve never seen a live one. I’ve just never seen one.” He adjusted his toque so that it slipped down over his headcam.

Beaupré looked at him sharply, then nodded.

 * * *

Half an hour after shift ended, Aklaq was on the highway, his trunk full of gifts for his nieces and his thoughts turning to the possibility of getting out on the land for the holidays. On his right, the silver snake of the Mackenzie pipeline kept pace with him, carrying liquid wealth in the opposite direction. “I’m going as far as Inuvik,” he said to the rear view mirror, “but I know someone in town who can take you farther south.” In the back seat, a row of ermine-bright eyes regarded him with silent suspicion. Behind, though he could not see it in the afternoon darkness, he sensed a storm preparing to sweep down from the pole.

When the first snow falls, it burns. The other women dance in the flurry without me, beneath a moon clouded by giants’ breath. Snowflakes spin into their open mouths and dust their outstretched hands. They dance that winter’s planting will be done, that their wombs will spill over with its seed. They dance that summer’s turn will be slow to come.

If I could still dance, I don’t know what I’d dance for anymore.

* * *

“Hundhor would make me a good husband,” my hearth sister says. Hundhor is the white bearskin rumpled beside her. His jaws are wide, though his eyes are only one summer dead.

“He is too young,” I say.

I cannot look at her. The first snow has planted her womb–her eyes have turned glacier slick, and her fingers skitter like sleet down Hundhor’s ruff. An ice-baby is certain, come deep-winter, and she will need a husband to keep her warm.

She takes my frosted hand in hers and holds tight despite the silvered trails that creep up her arm from mine. “I wish you could have danced with me.”

“Next winter,” I say, and pull my hand away. It crackles, pinprick shards casting adrift and gathering like loess on the stiffened bearskin crusted to my frozen legs.

“Next winter,” she says, her voice quiet.

It is a lie we speak every summer’s death, and every summer’s death it feels less true than the one before.

* * *

Her marriage is decided. Hundhor’s fur is brushed to a sleek shine. His dead eyes glisten with smeared seal fat.

I drag myself to the hearth entry and peer between the layered hides. The wind bites into my flesh, and the hoarfrost creeps a finger farther along my cheeks. But I must watch, and she must know I am watching.

Beneath ice-sharpened skies, my hearth sister dances with Hundhor. No snow falls upon them–an ill omen. For a moment, I dream she throws Hundhor’s hide to the ground and runs to me, her ceremony incomplete. Together, we birth the frozen thing deep in her womb, and I care for it as though it were my own.

But no. When the dance is done, she wraps her husband’s arms about her shoulders, and the slickness of her eyes softens. They retire to their new hearth, his great paws enveloping her.

Hundhor offers her the one thing I no longer can. Warmth.

* * *

At deep winter’s rising, she calls loudly at my entry. Her voice breaks the snapping wind. “Will you see him? You must see him. I will not leave until you see him.”

I do not want to see the crackling shard cradled in her arms, the purple iridescence of its hunger, or the green glaze that signals its other needs. I do not wish to see her ice-baby.

“Return to your husband,” I say. “My hearth is closed to you.”

My heart cracks, mirrored by the cracking of my womb. I set my hand to the winters-old bulge of my belly where the dead ice has rimed my flesh smooth, but there is no further movement.

No, my hearth will remain closed until summer forces itself through winter’s cracks. Until all the ice-babies have melted, the low whistles of their wailing lost to the first thaw.

It will be a long wait.

* * *

Winter is forever. When I breathe, my hearth fire gutters.

Outside, women’s laughter and the whistling of ice-babies fill the air. The ice has not yet tipped my ears, so I cannot close out their voices.

I stare unblinkingly at the bearskin worn thin and blocked in ice beneath me, a river of fur trapped in perpetual stillness. I do not remember his name, my failed husband.

It is forgotten along with the intended name of the dead thing still trapped within my womb.

* * *

“Please,” she says through the skins of my entry, “just hold him.”

Winter seeps from the soil, but I am closed to the growing warmth. It is easier being ice than flesh.

“Please,” she says again, “just for one summer’s turn. Just for one sun’s passing.”

I refuse to answer. She has Hundhor now–let him hold the ice-baby. Let it melt in his paws while she weeps. Had she not left me, I would have cared for it. And for her. Now she will lose the only thing she loves to the thaw.

Perhaps it is cruel, but there is too much ice in my heart to care.

* * *

When the wailing begins, I do not hear her voice. She should be at my hearth, begging one last time, her husband abandoned. If she begged once more, I would relent.

It is difficult to breathe, there is so much ice in me.

I miss her smell.

* * *

She has gone to the glacier to save her ice-baby. She has gone to death.

I tremble, and the hoarfrost shivers from my flesh. But even as it flakes away, my dead womb builds it anew, silver trails spiking in snowflake patterns. I tremble harder, then scream and shake until summer’s breath explodes past the ice of my lungs and warm air scrapes my throat.

With a snap, I break my legs free of my failed husband’s fur. I shove aside my entry hides and drag myself through the thaw slush and toward the glacier’s mouth. Ice bleeds in my wake.

I find her, stiff and naked and purple-lipped, in the glacier’s mouth. Beside her, her ice-baby gleams black, its edges melting despite the glacier’s protection.

“Shhh,” I say, and hug it to my breast. It whistles between shades, from black to green to purple to blue. Its edges harden as the ice of my womb crackles outward. Hoarfrost turns our flesh to stars.

“Shhh,” I say again, and start the slow drag homeward.

I will make sure this ice-baby lives, through this summer and through every summer after.

Previously published in Three-lobed Burning Eye, 2012, and Toasted Cake, 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.