The Melting Queen

by Bruce Cinnamon

  “Well look at you!” I say to the mother. “What a trooper, up and about the very next day!”

  “I never miss the parade,” says the mother. She bobs the baby up and down in her arms, trying to console it, trying to make it stop, already at her wit’s end with the crying. She smiles grimly up at me.

  “I’m sorry. He hasn’t stopped crying since he was born. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “What’s his name?” I ask. I look down at his face for the first time. Scrunched up in rage, in inconsolable fury. As if he wasn’t ready, and his gestation has been interrupted by this frenzy of spring. As if he never wanted to be born at all, affixed to the tracks of time.

  “We haven’t decided yet.”

  “May I?” I hold out my arms.

  The mother nods at once, instantly trusting in the superior motherly powers of the Melting Queen. She passes the bundle over to me. I cradle it in my arms. Bump it up and down.

  “Hey,” I whisper into the baby’s ear, so quietly that no one else can hear us in this din.

  “Hey. You’re okay. It’s going to be okay. Shhhhhh. It’s springtime now, and you’re healthy, and you have a mom and dad who love you, and everybody can’t wait to find out who you’re going to be. So be strong. Don’t cry. Be brave. And you’ll grow into a big strong man, and make your mommy and daddy proud.”

  I kiss the baby on the forehead and he stops crying. He unscrunches his little face and looks up at me. Our eyes meet. For an instant, I recognize myself.

  “How about you name him Adam?”

  The moment I speak the name, the world collapses, and everything is dark. I feel cold hard earth pressing against my back. I have a pounding headache and my ears are ringing. My muscles ache and for a minute I can’t remember my name:

  Adam?

  No.

  Victoria?

  No.

  River.

  Yes. River Runson.

  I sit up and look around. I’m in Beaver Hills House Park, a couple blocks away from the old movie theatre. There are always a few homeless people lying on the grass next to the pond, so no one has come to check on me. After a moment, I notice the note pinned to my chest:

  You passed out and were mumbling and making baby noises so I got bored and left. Text me some time. RR.

  I don’t even bother reading René’s phone number before I crumple up his note. I stagger to my feet and the world spins around me but I start walking west again, out of the park and along the avenue. Odessa. I need to get to Odessa’s.

  Odessa lives in a handsome brown bungalow in Belgravia, just south of the university. Bursting at the seams with artifacts that stand guard in the same dust-bordered positions they’ve held for decades, it’s less of a house and more of a museum. And the museum’s subject is Ludlow Spetnik, Odessa’s grandfather, whose century of travel brought him to every continent and nearly every country (those that still exist and those that have predeceased him). Every room is full of curios: a huge kaleidoscope with a crack running along its side, a snow globe showing a cityscape of Rome, decorative medals for a hundred forgotten accomplishments.

  Marching up the driveway, I go past Odessa’s car. She drives a giant Chrysler New Yorker the exact colour of a copper penny with a white canvas roof. Like everything she owns, it’s is a relic of Ludlow Spetnik’s life, very old but perfectly maintained.

  I don’t bother knocking at the back door, but barge in and call out Odessa’s name. She calls back to me and I find her in the bathroom, immersing a hundred Canada Dry bottles in the bathtub like she’s bobbing for glass Granny Smith apples.

  “Hey!” she looks excited as I come inside, but frowns at the look on my face. “Are you okay? You look awful. Did you just throw up?”

  “I just saw myself as a baby,” I stammer, losing control of my tongue. “I was myself but I was someone else. I was running through the woods. And then I was marching in the Melting Day parade.”

  “Sit down,” says Odessa, taking my shoulders in her strong capable grip and plunking me down on the closed toilet seat. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was the Melting Queen. But I was a baby too. At the same time. There were hundreds of times. I saw them all but then it was just one time. It doesn’t make sense, but it was so real.”

  My eyes lock on to Odessa’s and I remember my purpose.

  “I need to leave,” I say. “Can I have your car? You can come too, if you want. We can drive south. To Phoenix, maybe. That’s a good place to start a new life, right? They would never find us. Not if we leave now, straight away.”

  “Hey!”

  She shakes my shoulders, brings her face close to mine.

  “Stop freaking out!”

  She kneels in front of me and puts her hands on my knees.

  “Tell me what all this is about. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  I dig out my CIRCLE and hand it to her. She examines it, saying nothing. I watch her eyes slide across the letters printed there, the ones I’ve scratched out and the ones I’ve written. A frown makes a tiny crease appear between her eyebrows, but just for a second. She passes the card back to me, for once at a loss for words.

  “What...? When...?”

  “You told me to rename myself. I did.”

  She looks at me like she’s seeing me for the first time, for an uncomfortably long time. For a second I think I see something dark flicker through her eyes, something cold and hard and cruel. But I must be going crazy, imagining things, because I blink and it’s gone, replaced with a warm, affectionate smile. She stands up and takes my hands and pulls me to my feet.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she says. “Let’s go to the End of the World.”

  The End of the World is the popular name for a collapsed road with a spectacular view of the river valley. Odessa leads me out onto the only bit left standing, a curve of concrete pilings, and we sit at the very end. Beneath us, the mangled remains of a scenic road—chunks of concrete and iron rebar sticking out of the ground, being slowly digested by the riverbank—are wrapped up in dry prairie grasses that rustle in the wind. There are still no signs of green in the vast grey valley.

  “I have really clear memories of riding my bike along Keillor Road when I was a kid,” says Odessa. “I remember the huge cracks opening up in the pavement all the time. Workers would constantly come and fill in the cracks with black tar. And then one day we came along and the road had just slid down the hill into the valley. We knew it was coming. It was inevitable, doomed ever since they built it. They constantly had to repair it, and shore up the supports.”

  Odessa lines pebbles up along the edge next to where she’s sitting, like a battalion of toy soldiers. After every available scrap of rock has been lined up, she moves her hand slowly along their ranks, flicking them over the edge one by one.

  “One day the whole thing is going to collapse. Any day now, according to the Belgravia Community League. Which is why they put up those No Trespassing signs. As if anything could stop us.”

  We watch the river flow by. There are still stray chunks of ice being carried along by the current, but soon the silty brown water will become pea-soup green, running free and clear.

  “What are we doing here, Odessa? There’s no time. We need to go.”

  “You need to calm down,” she says. “And nothing beats this view.”

  She smacks the concrete outcropping with the palm of her hand and rubs it back and forth affectionately, like a faithful horse’s rump.

  “What I need to do is leave. I’ve been wanting to leave for months and I keep finding excuses not to go. But now I need to leave. Like, right now. No more excuses.”

  “Because you’re the Melting Queen.”

  Odessa runs her hand over her smooth, bald head and fixes me with an intense stare.

  “I’m not going to do it,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s insane. I need your car. We can leave today. Then they can just Name another Melting Queen
. Or get some woman who wants to change her name to River Runson. It’s not hard. Apparently all you need is a permanent marker.”

  The sun beats down from the bright blue sky even as a cold breeze slams into us, carried all the way down from the mountains by the river. Odessa is silent. She puts her elbows on her knees and stares down into the valley.

  “You think I should do it,” I say. “Is that what you’re saying? You think I should be the Melting Queen. That’s crazy.”

  “I’m not saying anything,” says Odessa.

  “Well what would you do?” I ask her.

  “It doesn’t matter what I’d do. I’m not the one they Named.”

  “You’d do it though, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’re not me.”

  “No. But you would do it.”

  She looks me up and down, from my booted feet to my mess of ginger hair.

  “Yes. I would do it.”

  “Why? Then you’d have to stay in Edmonton a full year.”

  “I haven’t spent a winter in Edmonton since I was seven,” sighs Odessa. She gazes back down into the river valley, where a speckled horse is grazing on the salty grass. Eighty years ago some guy released a bunch of horses into the valley, and the City has never been able to catch all of the offspring. “Maybe the daring thing for me to do would be to stay. Not invent another adventure for myself.”

  “And you’re saying that the daring thing for me would be to become the Melting Queen?”

  “You’re not me,” repeats Odessa. “You don’t have to do the daring thing. You do whatever’s right for you.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  Odessa takes a battered cigarette case out of her pocket, opens it up. There are only two cigarettes inside, which she contemplates for a moment before sealing the case and putting it back in her pocket. I know that these old, stale cigarettes are Ludlow Spetnik’s, and Odessa smokes them very rarely, and fears that when she’s done the last one her grandfather will die.

  “I’ve always thought that this whole idea that they Name a random woman as the Melting Queen was a total sham,” she says. “There must be some sort of secret powerful cabal that chooses. They’d never want to name someone who really challenged their values, who questioned their institutions and their hierarchies. Overturning the status quo is okay for one day, but not for a whole year. That’s why they always Name these bubbly cheerleader-types to trumpet how great everything is, how wonderful Edmonton is. Because being the Melting Queen means having a huge platform to advance whatever agenda you want. In the right hands, it’s an amazing opportunity for resistance.”

  She glances over at me.

  “Every Melting Queen has some token project or initiative that she undertakes, right? It’s always reminded me of all the different Barbies. Like, instead of Flight Attendant Barbie and Zookeeper Barbie we have Chinese Heritage Barbie or Youth Homelessness Barbie. But none of them every make life better for people in a large-scale, lasting way. None of them really challenge the fundamental structures of power that govern our unequal society. They’re still just women cutting ribbons and kissing babies in a man’s world.”

  Odessa stretches out backwards. I worry that she might tumble off the outcropping, but she hooks the heels of her grandfather’s overlarge cowboy boots under the ledge’s concrete lip.

  “I think that you have an opportunity to change things. To take this stupid beauty pageant and turn it into something meaningful.”

  I shake my head, wishing she’d just give me her car keys and wish me bon voyage.

  “I’m not brave like you, Odessa. It’s easy to imagine myself as brazen and shameless, but to actually not care what other people think? I don’t know if I can do that. I’m not cut out to go up there in front of everyone.”

  I look down at the valley and see pine trees rustling in the wind. Out of nowhere, the feeling of panic rises along the back of my neck again. I shiver and gasp, shaking violently and almost falling off the End of the World.

  “Hey!”

  Odessa’s arm is around me, sitting me up straight. The fear lessens into a low throb.

  “What was that?”

  “That happened right before, last time. When I had that vision. When I was in that Melting Queen’s body.”

  Odessa shakes her head.

  “We need to talk to the Melting Queen people. They’ll know what’s happening to you.”

  “No! We need to just go. I can’t do it, okay? Stop trying to convince me.”

  Odessa growls with frustration. She lets go of me, stands up on the narrow outcropping, perched above the precipice.

  “You need to do this! I’m more certain about it the more I think about it. I don’t know why they chose you, but you are not some mindless bimbo who’s just going to follow the script. You’re going to have to fight really hard, harder than you’ve ever fought for anything, to make all this matter. But you have a responsibility. Think of all the expectations you can overturn! Think of all the people whose minds you’ll be expanding. Think of all the genderfluid, nonbinary kids whose parents have no idea what those words even mean.”

  I look up at Odessa, hands on her hips, bald head haloed by the sun.

  “Nonbinary,” I say, testing the weight of the word on my tongue. It doesn’t feel wrong.

  “Yes,” she says. “That’s what you are. Isn’t it? That’s what you were trying to say on Melting Day.”

  “I’m sorry I lashed out at you and Sander,” I say. “I just thought Melting Day would be this bright new dawn and everything would just be resolved and I’d feel great.”

  Odessa sits back down.

  “I’m sorry for misgendering you and using your old name,” she says. “That was really careless of me.”

  She reaches out and takes some of my hair in her hand. She brushes out the tangles with her fingers and starts braiding as she speaks.

  “To be honest, I was kind of annoyed when I first saw you in Café Fiume. I hate when straight men wear dresses as some kind of audacious costume. They get all this attention and applause for being so brave, for daring to demean and lower themselves with femininity—always saying shit like ‘I’m secure enough in my masculinity to wear this dress’ like it’s some big accomplishment. That’s what I saw when I looked at you. But I was wrong.”

  She lets the braid drop and I turn to face her.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” I say. “I just have this feeling that sometimes I’m far more than what I used to be, and sometimes I’m nothing at all. Does that make sense?”

  Odessa nods.

  “You’re not a man. You’re not a woman. You’re a bit of both, or even something else. You can flow between genders or not have one at all.”

  She looks out at the valley.

  “I spend a lot of time thinking about gender, and challenging it in my performances,” she says. “A gender is like a language. You learn to speak one since the moment you’re born, so you never even notice its complexities, its weird rules and nonsensical exceptions. You don’t pay attention to how it works, you just use it every day. In every interaction. Even silently, in your head, when you’re alone. Everything is instinct. I imagine that being genderfluid is like learning a second language, or a third or a fourth or a fifth, and then speaking a hybrid pidgin version of all these different tongues, depending on which one has the best words to express how you feel. And right now you feel like you’re using a different language for every sentence, don’t you River?”

  It’s the first time she’s called me by my new name. I look into Odessa’s cool grey eyes. I feel an intermingling of joy and despair.

  “That all sounds so beautiful. I wouldn’t be able to say it half as nice as that. I want to be strong and clear like you, Odessa. But I don’t think I can be. I think I’m going insane.”

  Odessa smiles at me.

  “You are strong,” she says. “Sander sleeps through the winter, and I fly away to greener pastures. But you stay here, i
n the frozen wasteland. You endure. You’re a survivor, River Runson. That’s what I’ve always admired most about you. That’s why I love you. And even if you change your name, and become this bright new self you’ve been talking about, I know that will never change.”

  She looks at me with warm, radiant love, and I feel myself blush. Odessa has never said she loved me before.

  “I love you too,” I say. “And I admire your creativity and your total self-confidence and your fearlessness and your fighting spirit and your don’t-fuck-with-me attitude.”

  “I know,” she laughs. “I’m amazing.”

  She leaps to her feet.

  “Now let’s go throw some bottles against a wall,” she says, yanking me up beside her. “Destroying things is amazingly cathartic when you’re stressed.”

  I glance back at the river as we tightrope walk back off the concrete pilings.

  The colour of the water leaps quickly between several shades of blue and brown and green, and I can see Keillor Road flicker in and out of existence. I shut my eyes tight and take a deep breath to fight off a wave of nausea.

  We arrive back at Odessa’s house and she tells me to wait on the back patio next to the garage. She comes out a minute later with an old-fashioned gramophone and a stack of vinyl records. She pulls one out of the stack at random and puts it on, then goes back in the house. The Glenn Miller Orchestra bursts out in blaring brass. As the music crescendos, Odessa comes back outside with a sagging cardboard box full of old Canada Dry bottles, sticky labels now peeled off from their soak in the bath.

  “Give it all you got,” she says, handing me a bottle.

  She hefts one of her own, then heaves it with as much force as she can at the garage wall. The bottle explodes, sending little pieces of green glass showering down on the cracked concrete patio.

  Her garage walls are beige cement with small jagged white rocks plastered into them. I pick a particular rock, which sparkles in the reflected light of the sun, and with a grunt I send my Canada Dry bottle straight at it. The bottle strikes just above my target, shattering into a hundred pieces.