The Empire of Ice Cream

by Jeffrey Ford

  Over a period of days, while the water remained solid, she pushed that crate to shore. She stood the wax woman outside her house, afraid the figure would melt in the heat from her fireplace. She called her new companion The Lady of Fashion and visited with her daily. From her collection of sea treasures, she dressed the woman in a violet shift and put dried flowers in her hair, a corncob pipe in her mouth, and adorned her with a pendant of rarest malachite. At first the two merely gossiped, but before long, The Lady of Fashion revealed her story.

  “I was made by a giant dollmaker to stand in the parlor of a giant child’s dollhouse at the front window, staring out at my two wax children while they sat, one at either end of a seesaw. Maxwell was ever in the ascent, his arms thrown out wide, a smile on his face, while Cloe dropped, every second, toward the ground. I understood I had a husband, but I never saw him. His voice would come up from the basement where he was working on some infernal project. And you know, weeks went by and I stared out that window. What was my choice?

  “Then, one night, in her play, the mischievous giant child picked me up and laid me on the bed in the master bedroom. A few moments later, she laid my husband down on top of me. She turned off the lights and left us there, perhaps in hopes of us making love and eventually siring another wax child. I only saw my husband briefly before the room went dark. He was a handsome man with a beard and long, black hair. ‘I’m sorry to be crushing you,’ he said.

  “‘Do you feel any excitement?’ I asked.

  “‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m made of wax. But I have been devising a plan for your escape.’

  “‘How is it you can move and make noise in the basement, but I can not stir even so much as a finger?’ I asked.

  “‘That noise you hear is coming out of my head. Through very hard concentration I have created a machine made of thoughts that will cast an aura of desirability around you that no giant can ignore,’ he said.

  “‘What about our children?’ I asked.

  “‘My dear, can’t you tell they are not real? They are merely dolls, no more than stylized balls of earwax.’

  “‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.

  “‘Enough,’ he said. ‘I must think.’

  “His mind sent up a racket then, a pounding, as if the headboard was rhythmically slamming the wall, with grunts and groans and protracted sighs. It must have been a marvelous invention. Eventually I fell asleep, and somewhere through the night, perhaps in my dreams, perhaps not, I felt something warm and inconsequential move between my legs.

  “Two days later, a parrot-head giant came to the giant girl’s house, traveling door-to-door, selling heart medicine in brown bottles. The girl’s father went to fetch his money pouch, leaving the salesman alone in the room where the dollhouse stood. By then I had been placed back in the parlor by the front window. Upon seeing me looking out, the parrot-head giant opened the front door and stuck his rubbery fingers into my home. He grabbed me, and hid me in his pants pocket just before the girl’s father returned.

  “Parrot Head left town immediately and traveled to another place where there was an open-air market. He sold me for five gold coins to a bearded giant who was a magician. This magician, Mar-el-mar, took me down the street to an open place and set me in the middle of a chessboard atop a table. I was barely as big as the other chess pieces. In a loud voice, he called all those in the market place to come and witness a miracle. When the rabble had assembled, he pushed back the sleeves of his dark robe and cast a spell beginning with the word Wendatamu … Instantly, I came to life.

  “The crowd of giants gasped, and the noise was deafening to me. I put my hands to my ears. Life, life, life was a strange, beautiful experience, being able to move, to breathe. My wax became flesh, and I heard myself scream, but just as suddenly as that sweet condition came to me, it was taken away. The Giant King’s personal guard pushed through the masses and seized the magician. Right on the spot, they forced him to kneel in the street. The captain of the guard announced that the magician was guilty of practicing the dark arts. Mar-el-mar spat on the cobblestones and said, ‘May the king’s wife flee his kingdom and lose herself in the world.’ They chopped his head off, and the life went out of me.

  “I was whisked off the chessboard and given to an old woman, who was ordered to throw me into the furnace at the blacksmith’s shop. This old woman went to the shop as she had been instructed, stood before the flames, but found she could not destroy me. Instead, she took me home and dressed me in the fine clothes from a doll she had bought long ago for a daughter, her only pregnancy, who had died soon after birth. She put me in a small box, and then at midnight, went to the stream that runs along the southern border of that town. She sang me a lullaby, and with tears in her eyes, set me adrift down the waterway that led to the ocean.”

  “But what became of the dress the old woman had put you in?”

  “I’ve been sailing so long, it rotted away, turning to mere threads. Pieces of royal blue thread litter the oceans of the world.”

  In the early days of the following summer, during an unusual heat wave, The Lady of Fashion melted. Amidst soundless shrieks of agony and pleas to Mar-el-mar to spare her soul, she dripped away into an ugly puddle that eventually seeped into the sand. Nothing could be done to save her. The violet shift blew out to sea one bright and blustery afternoon. A beach rat stole the corncob pipe, and all that was left was the pendant of malachite lying on the sand to mark the presence of a missing confidant. Anna wept bitterly at the loss of her friend.

  To the south lay the ocean. To the north, past a few hundred yards of sand and then a line of boulders, lay the woods. To the east, at some definite distance, but she was not sure how far, sat a rusted car, if it had not already been washed out to sea, and a path to the interstate. To the west, though, lay nothing but dunes, an immeasurable vista of rolling sand hills, some cresting in the far distance to magnificent heights. She decided, after the demise of her wax friend, that a journey might be just the thing to drive off her grief and loneliness.

  She set out due west early one morning, carrying a knotted silk kerchief with enough dried fishes and berries to last an overnight stay. At first she did not take to the dunes, but made her way along the shore in order to save her strength, the better to climb in amongst the hills when she was farther from home. She found the act of walking, of simply moving, curative, and she covered a great distance before the sun began its descent. In the late afternoon, she turned toward the dunes and began to explore them.

  Just before nightfall, she came to the base of a dune so tall, she could not see the top from where she stood. She realized then that the challenge its ascent presented is what she had been looking for. Before beginning, she sat down and had some dinner to rebuild her strength; as darkness came, she started up the slope. The stars were resilient that night in their beauty, and she felt as though she were climbing toward them. The wind was mercifully cool.

  As she drew close to the top, she could feel beneath her that the sand was giving way to rock, and when she crested the peak the moon was visible, hanging low in the sky, having been blocked from her view all evening. In its pale light, she made out that she stood on the edge of a kind of ridge that snaked like a path to the east. She followed this path, and soon there was no sign of sand or sound of the ocean in the distance. Mountain ranges lay on either side.

  As she traveled through this strange place, she heard from up ahead a noise not unlike a woman sobbing. The sound grew to near-deafening proportions. Then Anna came to an obstruction in the middle of her path: a giant boulder with a strange growth—some kind of long stringy moss, like hair, covering the top of it. The mournful vibration seemed to originate from within this huge formation. She stepped forward and placed her hand upon it, and when she did, she realized it was not a rock at all.

  Stepping quickly backward, she saw two cracks form in the mass and open wide. She soon recognized they were eyes. What she had mistaken for a boulder was in actuality t
he head of a giant. Anna froze with fear, remembering her imprisonment in the birdcage. The giant, a female, looked up and saw her standing upon the path. The sobbing ceased abruptly.

  “Hello,” said the giant, pulling herself up to rest on her elbows. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry to have awakened you,” said Anna, hoping she would not be eaten.

  A simple conversation ensued, and Anna soon learned she had nothing to fear, for this was the giant Ybila, and the path she had been traveling was the famed Dog Spine.

  “Why are you unhappy?” asked Anna. “I have heard you are a great singer.”

  “True,” said the giant. “But I want desperately to escape this prison.”

  “You can’t leave?”

  “My husband, the magician Mar-el-mar, is a jealous man and has put a spell on me so that I cannot descend from this remote ridge. If anyone wants to see me perform, they must travel up the impossibly steep cliffs. He says he does not want me mingling freely with other giants because he does not trust me, but I know the truth.”

  “What’s that?” asked Anna.

  “The art of my song is more perfect than that of his magic. He’s jealous, all right.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  Here, Ybila gathered herself up into a sitting position, her legs crossed in front of her. She leaned low over Anna and whispered, “I have a plan. A traveling salesman found his way here one day when Mar-el-mar was down in the world creating mischief. This giant was selling magic beans that when planted, sprout stalks that reach into the clouds where the giant giants live. Of course, my husband left me no money, but I used something else to pay for them. There is a type of royal blue thread found here and there floating willy-nilly atop the oceans of the world. It is highly prized, for it is said to give good luck in any enterprise. I had been given three very long strands of it by the human pirate captain of the junk, Jade Bloom. He was so entranced by my voice when he traveled here to listen that he made a gift of them in admiration. These I traded to the salesman. At first he was reluctant to take them, but then he said he had considered a foray into the world of men, and each of the three strands of blue thread might stand for one each of the items he wished to acquire there. The deal was made.”

  “Have you planted the beans?”

  “Yes, but they take years to germinate. Then overnight they will shoot up suddenly into the clouds. All in a night. Mar-el-mar has blocked me from descending, but I, as is only right considering my voice, will ascend.”

  “I’ve heard a recording of you,” said Anna.

  “So then you know.”

  Anna nodded.

  Ybila took a deep breath and sang her signature song, “What Is My Name?” Anna lay back on the ground, staring at the stars, and listened. The power of the giant’s voice, the power of the meaning of the lyrics moved around Anna like a strong breeze. Before the first stanza was finished, she was floating above the ground on a cushion of air. She flew back along the Dog Spine to the crest of the enormous dune, and then descended like a feather. As the last phrase ended, she was set gently down at the base, asleep, the ocean sounding in the distance.

  On her journey back along the shore to her home the next day, she wondered if her meeting with Ybila had been real or merely a dream brought on by the exhaustion of attempting to climb the huge sand hill, for she had brief flashes of memory in which she would climb a few feet and then slide back to the base due to the drastic attitude of the slope. Her memory of the giant singer’s sorrow was much more real, though, and she found she could easily banish any doubts of the journey by merely humming the tune she had heard.

  In the evening of the day on which Anna accidentally knocked the mirror off the wall and cracked it, she met herself picking berries in the woods. A miasmatic phantom of exactly her met her beside the blackberry bramble. She bowed to herself as a tentative greeting, and she bowed back. The phantom did not speak, but could understand her words. She invited herself back to the shack, where she made a splendid dinner of eel in blackberry sauce. She and herself drank from the keg of grog. They wound up the music box and waltzed to its plinking crystal tune of “The Last Time I Saw Paris” as the tiny dancer at the contraption’s center tirelessly pirouetted. When the creepers ceased their chorus, the two retired to the single bed. The next morning, well before sunrise, when even high summer is cool, the phantom departed, traveling a path that was the light of the moon, out across the ocean and back to her apartment in the city.

  Years more passed in the small house by the ocean. No need to tell of her startling revelations concerning the metaphorical nature of humans in relation to the citizens of Giant Land or her study of the natural history of the dune rat, the sea gull, the feral dogs that came for scraps to her back door on autumn evenings. It is, of course, indecorous even to mention the petrified log, fallen among the willows, with one perfectly formed nub of a branch severed close to the trunk, that she rode now and then for self-gratification. The scarring caused by her nails against this old log while she moved in the throes of passion, over time, etched a face in the smooth, gray wood—a bearded visage—and eventually she came to realize that it belonged to the necromancer, Mar-el-mar.

  From the moment that she recognized the giant magician, he was ever in her thoughts. His enormous black robe flapped like the wings of a bat as he flitted from one end of her mind to another. She could find no peace from him, and she knew he meant to put a spell on her. Every time she tried to conceive of a plan to rid herself of him, his presence was there, in that part of her mind where the plan was being shaped, and he’d step on the spark of an idea and put it out.

  One night while sitting in her parlor, the magician’s voice boomed from her fireplace.

  “Anna,” he said.

  “Leave me alone,” she told him.

  “Anna, I want to bring you to life.”

  “Why?”

  “I have journeyed so long in the hold of your imagination, my head encased in a crystal globe, I need to be free.”

  “And how will bringing me to life make this so?” she asked.

  “It is impossible to explain, but a long, intricate series of events will follow your birth and after a century or two they lead to my being released.”

  “I am alive,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” said the voice, “you will find a small box in your beachcombing. It will be covered in mother-of-pearl. If you open it, you will find yourself back in your car on the interstate, heading home.”

  “This is my home,” she said.

  “Someone waits for you there,” said Mar-el-mar. Then his voice went silent, and, soon after, she noticed him in her head, circling like a bat.

  As the magician predicted, she found the box with the mother-of-pearl facade. She brought it home and laid it on the table in the parlor while all the time he whispered from inside her ear to open it. She was tempted, first in order to remember the past, and secondly to put his persistent presence to rest, but she managed to stay away from it. Days passed, and it became more and more difficult for her to resist the urge to open the box. She knew he was slowly gaining control over her and would eventually have his way.

  Then, a week later, the drowned captain’s pocket watch that hung by its chain from the mantle in her tiny parlor, suddenly began to tick, and she knew, not in her head where Mar-el-mar could smother the notion, but in her heart, that something remarkable might happen. In her fishing that morning, she had no luck. Cast after cast was reeled in with an empty hook. On her last attempt, she did not bring in a fish, but knotted about the end of the hook was a length of the royal blue thread. She did not think about it, but picked it off, rolled it into a little pill, and swallowed it.

  As soon as the blue thread was inside her, Mar-el-mar realized what she had done, but it was too late, for the single shred of lucky blue material made its way to her imagination and bound him like a fly in a spider’s web.

  All her thoughts circl
ed in a slow, gray twister behind her eyes as she set fire to the shack. With what energy she had left, she stumbled down to the ocean and waded out into the deep water. The waves rose over her and she drowned easily, without fear, like going to sleep. Her body sailed the currents of the Gulf Stream for years, her features more perfectly preserved than those of The Lady of Fashion. Of course, at one point, she was swallowed whole by a whale, and traveled in its gut for decades before being released when the creature finally died within the radius of the Arctic Circle. There was a season on an iceberg, a weeklong beaching on a crab-infested atoll, the brief embrace of a kraken. And smooth sailing from pole to pole, tropic to sea to bay and back, while Mar-el-mar, eyes rolled upward, watched from his crystal prison at the bottom of the world.

  She was discovered, floating off the southern shore of the Woven Islands, by pirates of the junk, Jade Bloom. They sold her for a small fortune in malachite to a giant who placed her in a glass box on a bed of dried violet petals. Since it was the most beautiful thing he owned, he would open the box at night and pray over it before turning in. He believed the odd curio brought him luck, and he told the other giants her name was Mother Paradise. In later years, when the crops of Giant Land failed in spring, as a kind of sacrifice and plea to her spirit, he cut off her ring finger, leaving the beautiful ruby intact, placed the jeweled digit in one of the small brown bottles that had held his heart medication, along with a note that read HELP!, sealed the top with wax, and set it adrift on the ocean.

  Giant Land

  Story Notes

  Alex Irvine, author of the novels A Scattering of Jades and One King, One Soldier, got the independent-press publishing bug a while back, and he and his friend Thom Davidsohn, an illustrator, decided to put out their own anthology—The Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. He asked me to send him something for the first volume, and I said I would, but when the deadline drew near, I had nothing. He told me he would be extending the deadline and that I should still send him something. I couldn’t come up with a full-fledged story, so instead I wrote him a one-page story that was all just one grammatically correct sentence, titled “Spicy Detective #3,” in keeping with the pulpy concept of the book. The day after I sent him that story, I got an e-mail in which Alex told me that he and Thom liked it, and as they knew I really didn’t have anything to do, I should write them a few more. So I did, writing one a day (for a total of four more) after my regular work and sending it off to him in an e-mail each night. They were all in the same format as the first, only after the second one I could no longer vouch for the correctness of the grammar. They each dealt with a different pulp genre—Horror, Westerns, Science Fiction, etc. The anthology, once published, looked great. Thom had done these beautiful black-and-white illustrations for it. If you happen to come by a copy of it, check out Leslie What’s “Grease and Sex at the King of Chicken,” one of the funniest stories I’ve read. In fact there’s a bunch of really fine fiction in it. The first installment of JPPN sold out and Alex and Thom decided to do a second one. They asked me for another story, and this time I felt I really had to come up with a story, because although some people dug the one-page, one-sentence stories, I’d seen some feedback on them and they had a unique effect of really pissing a lot of readers off. So I wrote a story and sent it to Alex, and then waited for volume two to come out—and waited, and waited, and waited. I think it’s been like four fucking years since then. I hear that JPPN #2 is really coming out next month (from this writing), and if it does, I’m going to be disappointed, because its inability to materialize was such a great opportunity to bust Irvine’s stones whenever I’d see him.