The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  THE MOON, THE SEA, THE DARK

  The water laps only 10 steps from the outer wall of the castle. Many things have happened since I last wrote. Once, while lying in bed, I saw, through my bedroom window, two humans, a giant female and male, walk by hand in hand. They stopped at the outer wall of the castle and spoke in booming voices. From the sound of their words, I know they were admiring my home, even in its dilapidated state. I took back the enchantment from Greenly, so he would not have the burden of sight and speech any longer; his job was finished and he had done it well. I dragged him to the lake and set him in my boat and pushed it off. Oh, how my back ached after that. If the rats come now, I will not fight them. The dungeon has been overrun by sand crabs, and when I am quiet in my thoughts, I hear their constant scuttling about down below, undermining the foundation of While Away. A piece of the battlement fell away from the turret, which is not a good sign, but gives me an unobstructed view of the sea. Washed up on the beach, due east of the castle, I found the letter I had sent so long ago with the night bird. The ink had run and it was barely legible, but I knew it was the one I had written. I am tired.

  THE STARS FALL

  I have just come in from watching the stars fall. Dozens of them came streaking down. I smiled at the beauty of it. What does it mean?

  A VISITOR

  I saw the lights of a ship out on the ocean and then I saw something large and white descending out of the darkness. Phargo was barking like mad, hopping every which way. I cleared my eyes to see it was a bird, a tern, and a small figure rode upon its back. It was Magtel, but no longer a boy. He was grown. I ran down from the turret, nearly tripping as I went. He met me by the bridge of the moat and we hugged for a very long time. He is now taller than I. He could only stay a little while, as that was his ship passing out at sea. I made us clam broth and we had jellyfish curd on slices of spearing. When I asked him, “Where is Meiwa?” he shook his head. “She took ill some time ago and did not recover,” he said. “But she asked me to bring this to you if I should ever get the chance.” I held back my tears not to ruin the reunion with the boy. “She stole it from one of the humans aboard ship and saved it for you.” Here he produced a little square of paper that he began to unfold. When it was completely undone and spread across the table, he smoothed it with his hands. “A picture of the Day,” he said. There it was, the sun, bright yellow, the sky blue, a beach of pure white sand lapped by a crystal-clear turquoise ocean. When it came time for Magtel to leave, he told me he still had his axe and it had come in handy many times. He told me that there were many other Willnits aboard the big ship and it was a good community. We did not say goodbye. He patted Phargo on the head and got upon the back of the large white bird. “Thank you, Eelin-Ok,” he said, and then was gone. If it wasn’t for the picture of Day, I’d have thought it all a dream.

  THE TIDE COMES IN

  The waves have breached the outer wall and the sea floods in around the base of the castle. I have folded up the picture of Day and have it now in a pouch on a string around my neck. Phargo waits for me on the turret, from where we will watch the last seconds of While Away. Just a few more thoughts, though, before I go to join him. When first I stepped into myself as Eelin-Ok, I worried if I had chosen well my home, but I don’t think there can be any question that While Away was everything I could have asked for. So too, many times I questioned my life, but now, in this final moment, memories of Phargo’s whisper-bark, the thrill of battle against the rats, fishing on the lake, the face of the moon, the taste of blackberries, the wind, Greenly’s earnest nature, the boy holding my hand, flying on the night bird, lying with Meiwa in the mussel-shell bed come flooding in like the rising tide. “What does it all mean?” I have always asked. “It means you’ve lived a life, Eelin-Ok.” I hear now the walls begin to give way. I have to hurry. I don’t want to miss this.

  The Annals of Eelin-Ok

  Story Notes

  When I was a kid, the New York Daily News ran a comic in its Sunday color funny pages called “The Teenie Weenies.” This was a full or sometimes half-page comic of only one large panel. It was about a tiny race of people who lived under a rosebush. They rode on the backs of dragonflies, made feasts of acorns, battled mice, and generally lived the good, small life. I was enchanted by them, as I think most kids are by diminutive representations of things. Remembering this comic and the wonder it wrought in me was the impetus for “Eelin-Ok.” As I’ve gotten older, I rarely feel that same enchantment, although there are other experiences equally as powerful. One place I still can sense it is at the beach where my wife and I and our two sons have been going every summer since our family started. So it was that my small hero wound up living in a sand castle at the edge of the shore.

  I dedicate this story to one cool kid, Chieko Quigley, ice skating aficionado. “Eelin-Ok” was published by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow in the second volume of their young adult series for Viking, The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm. The story won the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, an annual juried award given to a speculative short story of “exceptional literary quality.”

  Jupiter’s Skull

  Mrs. Strellop had a little shop called Thanatos in the Bolukuchet district at the south end of a cobbled street facing the canal. On evenings in late summer, for those few breezy weeks preceding the monsoons, she would fix her door ajar with a large, dismorphic skull and sit by the entrance, inviting in passersby for a cup of foxglove tea.

  She was a handsome woman of advanced years with a long braid the color of iron that she wound around her neck twice and tucked into the front of her loose blouse between her breasts. Her wrinkles—the crow’s-feet at the edges of her eyes, the lines descending from the corners of her lips—belied her charm more so than her age and were in no way at odds with the youthful beauty of her elegant hands or the glint in her green eyes.

  She wore loose garments—wraps and tunics and sometimes a shawl—all fixed with glitter and sequin designs. Her earrings were thin hoops of crystal that caught the light of the candles positioned about her shop and transformed it into stars on the dark draperies that covered the walls. Her only other piece of jewelry was a ring on the left middle finger that held no precious stone, but instead the polished eyetooth of a man who was said to have once betrayed her.

  That tea she served, redolent of the digitalis, slowed the heart and tinged the mind with a dreamlike effect that seemed to negate the passage of time, so that, after a single cup and what seemed a brief conversation, I would look up and notice the sun rising out over the treetops of the forest beyond the waterway. The sudden realization of a new day would place me back in reality, and invariably I would turn to her and ask, “What exactly were we discussing?”

  She would smile, eyes closed, and shoo me home with a weary wave of the back of her hand. “A pleasant week then, Mrs. Strellop,” I’d say. She would offer me the same and, as I stepped into the street, add the rejoinder, “Good days are ahead, Jonsi.” It was only later, while lying in the cot in my small room over Meager’s Glass Works, listening to the morning wind and the distant tolling of the bell over in the Dunzwell district, that I would try in vain to piece together what she had told me through the night. With all my concentration I could only bring up slivers of her tales, and these I could not see but only feel the irritation of like thistle spines in my memory. The effort to do even this exhausted me beyond reason, and when I finally awoke later on, it was with an indistinct and transient belief, like a morning mist already evaporating, that my dreams had brought me closer to a recounting of her words than any conscious effort. In truth, every atom of these baroque nightmares was completely lost to me.

  Like Mrs. Strellop, I had also known betrayal and was drawn to the Bolukuchet the way the others who wandered the world with a hole in the heart were, as if by a great magnet that attracted emptiness. The majority of us had a little bit of money, at least enough to live comfortably, and those who didn’t worked at some
lazy job from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon when the café opened and generous old Munchter served the first round for free. I had originally landed in that purgatorial quadrant of a crumbling town on the banks of the muddy Meerswal with the ridiculous idea that I might, in my middle years, revive my youthful interest in poetry. Though I jotted down some words upon waking each morning, the writing was, in all honesty, a dodge.

  Mrs. Strellop owned a shop the way I wrote poetry, for although she trafficked in talk and that mischievous tea, they came free of charge. There was no product or service I could readily discern. I knew very little about her, save for the fact that she was the first one to welcome me to the district. Ever since then, I’d gone by her place from time to time for a sip of oblivion and a session of amnesia therapy. I never saw her that the sun wasn’t in its descent, and I saw her most just prior to the autumn rains. It was Munchter who told me about the ring she wore. I inquired, “What sort of betrayal?” “What difference does it make?” he replied, and then with a shrug, denoting something close to sympathy, refilled my glass for free.

  There were many engaging personalities I could have written about in the Bolukuchet. In fact, there were as many as there were individuals living there, for everyone had a tale they were reluctant to tell, a past heightened to mythos by the ingredients of time, distance, and the distorting forces of exquisite lassitude. We wandered the narrow alleyways, sat, smoking, in darkened doorways, leaned lazily on the rusting, floral-designed railings of second-story verandas, like spectral characters in the mind of an aged novelist impotent to envision what happens next.

  It is a certainty that nothing good ever transpired in the district, for that would be a contradiction to its idiosyncratic metaphysics of gravity, but nothing terribly dreadful happened either, until, of course, this. On a windy afternoon of dust devils and darkening skies, two days before the monsoon struck, the body was discovered by Maylee, the new prostitute recently in the employ of Mother Carushe. Mrs. Strellop had hired the young woman to fetch fresh fruit and vegetables each day from the barge that docked at the canal quay three streets up. When Maylee, carrying a basket of fresh carrots and white eggplant, pushed open the door to Thanatos, she was met by a ghastly sight. Eyes popping, blackened tongue lolling, Mrs. Strellop, draped in a plum wrap decorated with quartz chips in a design of the constellation of the goat, sat slumped back in her chair, one beautiful hand holding an empty vial that it was later determined had contained a draught of cyanide and the other clutching the doorstop skull in her lap.

  She was buried quickly, before the rains would have made the digging impossible, and the next day the entire district turned out at Munchter’s for a sort of informal wake of testimony and tearful besotment. We shared tales and descriptions of her, and, after my third Lime Plunge, I must have told everyone of her usual parting phrase to me, “Good days are ahead, Jonsi.” Mother Carushe had suggested that I compose a eulogy in the form of a poem in Mrs. Strellop’s honor and though it was begun, I could never find the words to finish it. Instead, the bargeman, Bill Hokel, played a dirge on his mouth organ. When the last mournful note had wavered away, there was a moment of silence before we heard the rain begin its patter on the corrugated tin of the roof. In that brief span, I wondered if Mrs. Strellop’s taking of her own life was an act of courage or cowardice.

  The rain was cold and unforgiving. For the first two days of the monthlong downpour, I simply sat on the veranda of my small apartment, drinking and smoking, and watched as the large, relentless droplets decimated the last white blossoms of the trailing vine that grew like a net over the facade of the abandoned fish market across the street. Mushrooms sprouted out of stucco, and great, gray seagoing birds huddled under the overhangs, heads beneath wings as if ashamed not to be flying. At times the wind was wild, lifting pieces of roof tile off the old buildings and buffeting off course anyone unlucky enough to be out on the street. On the second morning, Munchter trudged along the street beneath me and I called to him, but it was obvious he could not hear my voice above the howl of the wind.

  With the death of Mrs. Strellop, my usual feeling of blankness gave way to a kind of depressive loneliness. I knew others in the district much better, but she and her tea and our nightlong sessions had always centered me enough to keep that damnable sense of desire at bay. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it therapy, because as I understand it the therapist does the listening. It was she who always talked, telling me those long, intricate stories I would never remember. Somehow, they worked their way into my system invisibly, without a trace, and alleviated me of any judgment concerning the state of stasis that was my life.

  On the third day of the rain I was awakened by a knock upon my door. I knew it couldn’t be Meager come up from the shop below to share a cup of coffee and peruse my latest fragment of verse, since he always went west for the drowned month and gave his two assistants the time off as well. I dressed and answered the door. Standing on the landing of the rickety wooden stairs that led up from the back of the Glass Works, drenched to the skin, was Maylee. Her usually wavy locks (Mother Carushe knew a thing or two about hair fashion) were slicked and stringy from the downpour, making her already large eyes more prominent. Her fair complexion had a bluish tinge and she was shivering. I stepped back and let her in.

  As soon as the door was closed, I went into the back room and brought a blanket to wrap around her shoulders. She thanked me, her teeth still chattering, and I ushered her over to a chair at the small table near the veranda. Shutting the glass doors to keep the chill off her, I then sat down in the opposite seat. Before I could speak, she lifted a small leather pouch with a drawstring onto the table.

  “From Mrs. Strellop,” she said.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “She told me many times, especially in her last weeks, that if anything should happen to her, I should give this to you.”

  “What’s in it?”

  She shook her head.

  I reached out and grabbed the satchel, pulling it along the table toward me. As I undid the drawstring, Maylee said to me, “Would you like me to leave?”

  I laughed. “No, at least get warmed up before going back out in it.”

  She nodded, looking relieved.

  Then I opened the pouch, and a familiar scent wafted up. I lifted the bag and held it to my nose for a moment. “Foxglove tea,” I said with a smile.

  “Oh, yes,” said Maylee, leading me to believe that she had tasted the strange brew.

  “Shall I make some now? It might warm you a little.”

  “Please,” she said.

  I went immediately over to my stove, got a fire going, and put a kettle of water on. As I filled the big copper tea ball, I noticed for the first time that the stuff was multicolored, made up of flecks of red and yellow, a pale green and some miniscule blue nuggets, suggesting that there were other ingredients in it besides the dried petals of its namesake. It struck me then that perhaps there was no foxglove in it at all, that it had just been a name the missus had assigned it.

  I rejoined Maylee at the table while waiting for the water to boil. “You knew Mrs. Strellop quite well, didn’t you?” I asked, lifting my cigarettes off the tabletop. I offered one to her, and she accepted. Striking a match, I lit my own and then reached across to share the flame.

  She took a drag and nodded. “I saw her every day. I would bring her vegetables from the barge that comes down from the farm country. She gave me three dollars for my effort, which I had to give to Mother Carushe, but then Mrs. Strellop would also give me a cup of this tea. ‘Just for you, my dear,’ she’d say.”

  “That tea is something, isn’t it?” I asked, laughing.

  “I’d take the tea and sit with her for an hour. She always had some story to tell. It was so relaxing. But when it was time for me to leave, I could never remember a single word she had spoken.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I sat whole nights with her and can’t recall a blessed thing
.”

  “I think she was a witch,” said Maylee.

  I laughed, but this time she didn’t. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “When I would return home in the afternoon from taking the vegetables to Thanatos, Mother would bless me with a special holy water she kept in a bottle that had the shape of a saint before accepting the three dollars. Then she would take the bills and put them in the icebox for a day before spending them. I think she was afraid of Mrs. Strellop.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how is it working for Mother Carushe?” I said, trying to hide behind my cigarette. I thought for a moment I had offended Maylee, but then I realized she was really considering my question.

  “I have been in the district for only six months, and … May I be frank with you, Mr. Jonsi?”

  “Please,” I said, “just Jonsi, no mister necessary. And there is nothing left in the world that will offend me. I’m not after the details; I just like to hear how others live. You know, sort of as a barometer for my own life.”

  “Well, I and the other three young women who work for Mother, we are supposed to be prostitutes—no sense in trying to dress it up. Not the life I had at one time envisioned for myself. There was a period when I had designs on being an actress and saw myself delivering great speeches from the stage. I might even have had some talent for it, but I allowed myself to be drawn away from my dream by a loathsome man who eventually left me stranded and broke.”

  “I can commiserate,” I said.

  “But that’s all in the past. One needs to survive. But, sir, there is something wrong with the gentlemen of the Bolukuchet,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, feeling some vague offense.

  “I have had only five commissions so far in the time I have been here, and every one of them …” Here she grinned slightly and stubbed out her cigarette. “Limp as dishrags.”