The Melting Queen

by Bruce Cinnamon

Kaseema stands up.

  “I need to make some preparations for the Coronation,” she says, spreading her hands confidently across her desktop. “And to be frank, you probably shouldn’t be here when Birch gets back. But that’s fine, because I’m sending you somewhere else anyways. There’s someone I think you should meet.”

  {8}

  A lush oasis in a desert of ice and snow

  Odessa pulls her big glugging tank of a car up to the conservatory’s main entrance.

  “You’re sure you don’t want us to come with you?” asks Sander from the back seat. I can hear the longing in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Sander. I have to do this alone.”

  I turn to Odessa, sitting there behind the white plastic wheel, her grandfather’s giant glasses perched on her nose with effortless style.

  “Thanks for everything, Odessa. Thanks for being here for me, and being decisive when I’m so doubtful.”

  Odessa gives me a small smile.

  “You’d do the same for me.”

  I lean over and give her an awkward car hug over the gearshift, then clamber out of the big copper boat and into the crisp afternoon sunlight.

  The grass is still grey, and the trees show no signs of budding greenery. But inside the conservatory it’s like I’m on a different planet. The moment I walk inside I’m hit with a wave of humid, fragrant air. I smell the rich mossy soil, giving life to thick roots and colourful blossoms.

  Stepping into each of the Muttart Conservatory’s glass pyramids is like entering another world. Each one is a little oasis of life and warmth in the cold winter city. Four splotches of green on a sterile white canvas. Four terrariums, offering a taste of spring to those of us without the means to escape to Hawaii in the depths of winter. An arid desert in a valley of ice and snow. A temperate grassland sheltered from howling winds. A burst of blooming flowers under a perpetually dark sky. A tropical rainforest on the banks of a frozen, locked-up river.

  I ask for Victoria Goulburn at the front desk and a volunteer directs me towards the Seasonal Display pyramid. I expect to be greeted by a majestic array of colourful flowers. Instead, I see that the flowerbeds have been completely torn up. A concrete path snakes its way around the room, past scattered patches of dirt.

  Somewhat devastated by the lack of flowers—but never surprised by Edmonton’s ability to disappoint—I make my way over to the tall woman who’s unloading trays of orange-yellow flowers from a trolley.

  “Hello,” I say as she sets down a tray next to the flowerbed. “I’m River.”

  She unfolds herself and slaps her hands together, brushing off stray dirt. She holds a hand out to me.

  “So you are. I’m Victoria.”

  She looks even thinner than she does in her portrait, if that’s possible. She has moody black eyes and a long straight nose and her black hair is pulled back sharply from her thin face. She turns away from me, toward one of the trolleys.

  “I’ll be honest with you, River. It’s always been uncomfortable for me to meet another Melting Queen once I’ve been inside her head or she’s been inside mine.”

  She hands me a pair of blue coveralls to match her own, then kneels down next to the garden and pats the soil, as if for reassurance.

  “But if you help me plant some marigolds, then we can talk a little. I know you must be very upset. So was I, when I had my first Intrusion. The least I can do is help.”

  “Then the least I can do is help you plant.”

  I pull on the coveralls and stand there, uncertain. Victoria gets up, hands me a flowerpot. I run my fingers over the petals of the nearest flower. It’s dark orange in the centre, fading out to brilliant yellow around the sharp-lined edges.

  “It looks like molten metal.”

  “Marigolds are our spring feature. Edmonton’s official flower. Guess who decided that?”

  We share a look and I can tell we’re going to get along. She kneels back down and starts digging a shallow hole in the soil.

  “I suspect the others feel the same way about being around each other,” she says. “Which is why there’s never been a Melting Queen reunion. When I’m around one of them I feel like I’m fraying at the edges. Like part of myself is pulling away, trying to leap back into that other woman’s body who I’ve been for a while. It’s not a pleasant feeling.”

  I sink down next to her and notice that this is exactly what I’ve been feeling. I can faintly feel my fingers patting against the soil. Except they’re not my fingers, they’re Victoria’s.

  “Does it stop?” I ask as I start planting my own flower. “Does it end once you’re not the Melting Queen anymore?”

  “Yes. Except when you’re near another Melting Queen. A connection like ours doesn’t just go away. It’s something that you’ll have for the rest of your life.”

  “I don’t want it for another day, let alone the rest of my life.”

  Victoria looks at me from under a heavy brow.

  “As much as I wish that this wasn’t true, you don’t have a choice. They’re going to tell you lots of things that are just silly old meaningless rules, but that part is real. You’re having Intrusions now. I’m willing to bet that you’re having people recognize you, come up and share their grief with you too, right?”

  I nod.

  “That’s part of it too. You get memories invading your mind all the time, and people confessing their sins and insecurities to you.”

  Victoria settles back on her heels for a moment and looks outside at the blasted barren moonscape beyond our pocket of greenery.

  “The Melting Queen is Edmonton’s perfect mother,” she says. “And Edmontonians are all children in Her presence—clutching at her skirts, wanting to be heard, wanting to be forgiven. It’s not important what you say to them, just that you listen to them. Just that you provide them with an excuse to hear themselves speak. Coo in their ear. Tell them it’ll all be okay. Give them comfort. Absolve them of their guilt or grief or whatever they need.”

  She plunges her hands into the soil.

  “The Cultists say the Melting Queen is the incarnation of fertility itself. She brings the spring. She is the new life. So it’s best if she’s a young, fertile woman. Or else the magic won’t work and Edmonton won’t bloom.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “So is having memories from a hundred years ago erupting through your mind.”

  “So that’s why Kastevoros Birch was so upset,” I say. “I’m not a fertile woman.”

  Victoria gives me a weary look.

  “Look, I don’t know what your situation is. Whether you’re transgender or gay or one of the new ones I can never remember. But there’s one thing you need to understand. The Melting Queen is more feminine than any real woman ever can be. None of us are good enough. We’re all trying and failing to be May Winter. No woman can ever be the angelic mother that we’re supposed to be. You just have to do it when you’re Named. Even if you’re not the ideal. There are consequences if you don’t.”

  “Like what? Everybody keeps saying that, but nobody says what will happen.”

  Victoria shrugs.

  “I don’t know how much of this is true, but they say that some kind of natural disaster always happens. There are a few examples of Melting Queens in the past who have refused the call. Aloise Pennant refused in 1915, and there was a big flood. Opal Pearson said no in 1942, and there was a giant blizzard. Invidia Straum wouldn’t do it in 1987, and then there was the Great Tornado. Something bad always happens, a catastrophe for the city. And we always end up doing our duties in the end anyways.”

  “What could be more catastrophic than a nonbinary genderfluid Melting Queen? A Melting Monarch, I guess I should say.”

  Victoria stands up and stretches, then goes to the trolley with the trays of flowers.

  “It’s not just about the city,” she says. “It’s also about your sisters.”

  She looks up at the fogged panels of glass overhead.

  “I lived in
Australia, you know,” she mutters from across the room. “For twelve years. I built a life there, in Perth. I was vice-president of a successful company. It was beautiful. It was warm, all year. I was as far away from Edmonton as anyone can get.”

  “Then why would you ever come back here? If I escaped from Edmonton I’d never come back.”

  She brings another tray of marigolds over. She unpots one and settles it in the hole she just dug. She massages the earth around its roots and takes a deep, meditative breath.

  “They contacted me. Birch and ECHO. They told me I had been Named as the Melting Queen. My mother had stuck my name on the statue, you see, just as she’d done every year since I left. And now I needed to come back here, to the city where I had grown up, the city I had fled at the earliest opportunity. I refused. I told them they were crazy. That I didn’t care.”

  “So what changed? What got you to care?”

  Victoria looks up at me with a pained expression on her face.

  “I had an Intrusion.”

  She takes another flower from the tray and brushes her fingers gently across its petals.

  “Shishira Sarasvati was the Melting Queen before me,” she says. “She was young, only seventeen when she was Named. Everyone was so excited for her to be Melting Queen, because her mother Vasanta had been the Melting Queen many years before. It was the first time that two Melting Queens came from the same family. And even more special was the fact that Vasanta had given birth to Shishira during her reign. It seemed like it was her destiny to be Melting Queen.”

  Victoria puts the flower down and looks at it sadly.

  “Shishira wasn’t a great Melting Queen. People had high hopes for her, because her mother started the Heritage Festival and they all expected her to do something even better. But she didn’t go out in public much or make many appearances. The ECHO people say it’s because she was sick, that she was fighting off the cancer which eventually ended her life, sending the whole city into mourning. That’s the official version.”

  She looks at me now, with her sharp-eyed raven’s gaze, angry and sad and bitter.

  “The truth is that Shishira killed herself. Because of me. Because I didn’t come back. Because I ran away from being the Melting Queen. There was no coronation, there was no way for her to pass on the power of the Melting Queen to me. So it ate her from the inside. It drove her crazy, until all she could do to get away from it was to die. She didn’t have cancer. She stayed out of the public eye all year because she was particularly vulnerable to Intrusions, and they tore her apart. And they only got worse after she Named me, and I wasn’t there to pick up the torch from her. So one night she went out onto the High Level Bridge and she jumped.”

  I can’t look away from Victoria’s pupils. They’re like dry wells, sucking me down into the depths with her.

  “I felt her die,” she says. “I was sitting in my office at work, on the other side of the world, and then I was her. I’d been having Intrusions since she Named me, but they were just minor things like smelling cookies baking or hearing a song playing in the other room. My first full-scale Intrusion was her suicide. I died with her, jumping off that bridge. And then we died again. And again. And again. And I felt it. Over and over. It haunted me in my dreams. It tore into me when I was awake. She killed herself—I killed myself—a hundred times. I died speaking my own name. Her last word, begging me to come home. A thousand times.”

  Victoria shudders. But she pushes through, desperate to exorcise this ghost.

  “I came back to Edmonton so that I could apologize to Shishira’s mother,” she says. “And then I did my duty as Melting Queen. I didn’t want to be around anyone, so I just planted elm trees by the thousands. It’s a pathetic memorial to the seventeen-year-old life I ended, but at least it made Edmonton a tiny bit better. And every time I see an elm tree, I remember her. And every time I plant something new, and help something grow, I pray that it will restore some kind of natural balance against the life I snuffed out. But I know it never will.”

  She lets out a long breath. Her eyes are dry—as if she’s already shed all the tears she ever had to cry, and now can’t make any more—but she rubs the backs of her hands against them anyways.

  “It’s a sacrifice, to be the Melting Queen,” she says. “It’s not fun. You have Intrusions tearing you apart. Some of them are painful, and dark, and frightening. Some of them make you run for your life in terror. But even the nice memories are difficult, lifting you out of yourself and then slamming you back down. You bring things back with you. You’re assaulted with dozens of horrible stories every day from people who expect you to make them better. No matter what you do, some people will hate you. But you have to do it, once you’re Named. You owe it to your sisters who’ve gone before you.”

  She digs her fingers deep into the soil, carving out another hole.

  “I hope you don’t have many Intrusions, River. Some Melting Queens don’t have any. Some Melting Queens are like Shishira, and have Intrusions every day. Every one of us is different. But we’re all connected.”

  I see the pain in her thin face and I understand. Here she is, clutching at my skirts. This is her confession.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “You couldn’t have known what would happen. I’m sure she wouldn’t have killed herself if there hadn’t been other things going on in her life, some other reason.”

  Victoria shakes her head.

  “I wish I could believe that was true. It’s not. But thanks for saying it.”

  She plants another marigold, then looks over at me.

  “I think you’re going to be a perfectly suitable Melting Queen, River Runson.”

  {9}

  A flourishing throne in full bloom

  The next week is a whirlwind of activity. I’m cloistered in the Melting Queen offices, working with Kaseema to prepare for my coronation. There are sacred words to memorize, logistical details to finalize, and protocols to internalize. All of the regular staff have gone, disappeared like Birch and the ECHO board members, so it’s just Kaseema and Odessa and Sander and me. I’m worried that Birch and ECHO will return at any moment, and I become even more worried when they fail to reappear. I ask Kaseema what they’re up to and if she’s heard anything from Birch, but she waves off the question.

  “I’ll deal with that. You have more important things to focus on right now.”

  Odessa and Sander stay close to my side throughout my training, keeping me company and giving me moral support. Every night we sleep over at Odessa’s house, and she talks me into staying in Edmonton all over again. It’s good to have my allies around me.

  Sander knows exactly what I’m supposed to do in the coronation ceremony, and he coaches me through each step. He continues to watch me like a research subject, peppering me with facts about my predecessors like he’s trying to spark another Intrusion. But my week is mercifully free of any other episodes. I know that while Odessa and I are sleeping Sander is poring over every scrap of writing about the Melting Queens. But he can’t find anything written about the Intrusions, and to compensate he throws himself into teaching me every detail of the coronation ceremony and its significance. Kaseema seems equally impressed and exasperated by his enthusiasm, but with all of the regular ECHO staff gone, I’m sure Sander Fray and his superfandom are a welcome addition.

  Odessa couldn’t care less about the traditions of the Melting Queen. She places herself in charge of my wardrobe, a decision Kaseema resists until I speak in my friend’s favour. Kaseema’s absolute faith in me is somewhat terrifying. I’ve never had someone be automatically loyal and attentive to my every need before. It makes me want to not disappoint her. But I still feel energized by embracing some of Odessa’s non-traditional ideas.

  The Melting Queen always wears a green gown at her coronation and a pink gown on Melting Day, just as May Winter did a hundred years ago. But Odessa has other ideas. She builds a gown out of glass and mirror—a thousand shards all glinting in t
he sunlight, showing the viewer little pieces of my naked skin beneath the dress along with little fragments of themselves. From my knees down, the pieces of glass and mirror grow larger, pointing out in all directions like jagged shards of ice. I’m like a pillar of the High Level Bridge, collecting all the mounded icebergs which get shoved up on its skirts by the inexorable force of the river. A sheer green scarf is arranged across my bare shoulders—the only touch of colour, the northern lights shimmering above it all. I study myself in the mirror. There I am. River Runson. Melting Queen 115. Edmonton embodied.

  Odessa weaves my Tymoshenko Crown each day, and the looping braid becomes a fiery redheaded halo which makes me feel powerful. She applies small touches of makeup along my jaw and around my eyes. I warn her not to bury my features and cover up my real face. I’m not some obnoxious drag queen like Magpie. I just shine a light on it in the right way.

  By the end of the week, the three of them have got me as ready as I’m ever going to be. They make me go over my words one more time, rehearse the physical steps in the giant ECHO boardroom, and before I know it I’m standing in a large tent in Coronation Park—backstage, listening to the drone of the vast crowd outside.

  “What does it look like out there?” I ask as Sander pops his head through the tent flaps to check on us, like he’s been doing every five minutes.

  “Everyone is really eager,” he says. “The park is completely full.”

  Coronation Park is the most important place in Edmonton. The site of the first Melting Day, it sits right next to the river. Over the years the park has gotten smaller and smaller as commercial development in the river valley eats into it. But at its heart, the Spring Throne remains undisturbed.

  According to Sander, the Spring Throne grew up out of the ground at the moment May Winter was crowned as the first Melting Queen. The branches wove themselves together to make a seat, shot up in straight lines to form a tall majestic backing, and burst into bloom across the throne’s wide back—a mantle of pink wildflowers to welcome the new queen. There are archival photos showing the Spring Throne in full bloom, but for at least sixty years no flower has sprouted from its branches. Some people say that only a truly perfect Melting Queen will make it bloom again, and inherit May Winter’s legacy, and perform grand miracles like the Melting Queens of yore.