Gildi smiled, sensing the beatific radiance of her own contentment. “It’s just right,” she said.
FROSTED GLASS
Aurelia T. Evans
When I was a little girl, my father told me not to look into the frosted windows on winter nights, for I would see the face of the Snow Queen, the witch who freezes hearts of young women for eternity with her piercing eyes. He was a good father, telling his warning stories that his father told his sisters in their youth. But like all little girls, with the curiosity of Eve deep in our beating hearts, I carried the candle to the window and peered into the glass. The wind was whistling outside and the warped glass was white with the star growth of ice. I brought the candle close to the patterns and marveled at the intricacy and beauty of the winter frost. The heat from the candle was not enough to melt it, although the crystals seemed to change as it came near. I could see the faint lines of my reflection as though it had been frozen into the glass: my blonde hair in braids, my upturned nose, my round cheeks, my bright blue eyes. All color was muted gray, but I could still see that it was myself in the icy impression.
The closer I looked, the more detail I could see in the glistening crocheted lace. Although the fire was burning and the room was comfortably warm, the cold seeped through the window and made my nose numb so close to the glass. As fascinating as the icy windows were, though, I was still young. I sighed when I saw nothing of the Snow Queen in the window. My impatient breath fogged the glass and as the moisture faded, it was then that I saw the image of the woman. I never once thought I was simply distorting the image of myself. The outline of the woman’s face was faint but clearer and clearer the longer I stared. Although it was night outside, the Snow Queen seemed to glow with her own light. The hand holding the candle lowered and set it on the shelf—it was no longer needed—and I came closer to the window, to the soft blue glow in the frost, entranced. Her lips were moving, but I could not hear what she was saying, although there seemed to be whispers under the screaming of the wind.
I saw into the eyes of the Snow Queen. They were cold and empty, with the frigid beauty of blue ice, and a chill grasped my heart like fingers. I saw into the eyes of the Snow Queen when I was a little girl, yet I grew to love as fully and strongly, with the heat of my heart, as any woman.
My husband and I had a practical marriage, but it was not cold. Our marriage bed was warm and inviting after the vows and feasts. The warmth of Christian’s body covered mine, filled me until I was burning and crying out, my golden hair splayed on the pillow. He was a keeper of a small textile shop, and his mother taught me to sew. We had an ordinary life marked with a few extraordinary moments: The day my father passed away. The picnic on the hottest of our summer days—we swam in the pond, and our clothes were filthy as we walked home, but we were so happy, and he removed my dress as though peeling off my skin to the heat of his gaze. The day his mother passed away. The coal that jumped from the stove and set fire to our kitchen table. The fever that burned so hard I cut off my golden hair above my neck, sweat dripping down my face.
My heart was strong for ten years. It was after my winter fever, when I stood before the looking glass and my hands tried to touch the ghosts of my sheared hair, that Christian’s heart froze. While I cried in bed, mourning something that I knew was vanity, he shattered the fogged and frosted mirror with his fist at my pain. I pulled pieces of bezel glass from his knuckles without a word, and I swept up the pieces when he left the room above the store to visit the bar. When he returned his face was stone sober, although his breath smelled of ale.
It should have been nothing. I could have lost my life, and my beautiful hair would return in time. Christian was not a material man—he used to be content with what little we had, and he loved me. He did, I know it in the depths of my soul. But all it took was one day, one bad day to sour everything. He was irrational, silent, cold. His eyes were glassy as he stared away from me, not seeing the woman he had been with for the last ten years.
I began to hear whispers in the store when the gossips thought that I could not hear, hisses of pity and judgment as they lamented my inability to keep my husband in the home rather than in the pubs, or in the beds of other young women. I cannot say that he strayed. I held him close when he came back to me at night, but I could not warm him. His heart wasn’t mine, but it did not belong to another—it was just gone. He spoke, he ate, he talked, he sold, but there was nothing inside him that made him warm. And he never looked at me anymore. The scars from the shattered mirror faded into little white dots on his hand, but it was as though he had shattered me instead.
Then one night he did not come back to me. I shivered under the covers, waiting for his body if not his love. But he never came home. I dressed in the light of a candle and wrapped his coat around me. The pub was still riotous when I arrived, shouldering my way through the throng of bodies and smelling sweat and alcohol and leather all around me. A hand pawed at my buttocks through the coat, or at least it tried. I continued on my mission, peering through the empty spaces, checking faces at the tables. I was not frantic or worried, but my face was flushed with intent. I did not find him until I stumbled up the stairs to the place where patrons went for a night or two to sleep off their hangovers and avoid the glaring eyes of their families. Very rarely were the rooms above the pub used as an inn—that establishment was on the other corner, a more respectable place.
I heard my husband before I saw him; a light, muffled slapping sound, and the breathy groans of a woman. I could smell her cheap perfume as I pushed open the door. They did not hear me, and if they did, they would not have stopped, so intent they were. Or she was, anyway, her head tossing with every thrust of his powerful hips, his cock entering into her in a rhythmic pace. Her expression was distorted in pleasure, but although Christian’s erection was hard and strong, his face revealed nothing, his exclamations simply an indication of effort. Heartstrings tugged at my palms and tightened in my lungs as I watched him, her, her large breasts jiggling as she brought him into her, taking in a part of him that had not touched me since the fever.
Watching the soulless body of my husband was more chilling than any frosted window. I walked out the same way I came, the coat bundled around me. My footsteps against the stone were lost in the snowdrifts. I passed by the storefront: cold floors, cold sheets, cold bed, cold sleep. I did not think I could take so much coldness. The wind was screaming by the windows, but there was no fire inside to make the winter beautiful, no warmth to make it wonderful. Snow settled on my eyebrows, my eyelashes, my lips. It coated my short hair, and the frigid air wrapped around my now bare neck. From a distance, I must have appeared a shadow, a dark figure in the midst of the white snow and faint outlines of buildings.
I should not have stayed out in the storm. My mind swirled with thoughts of broken mirrors and ice crystals. I thought of lying down in a pool of shattered glass, waiting in pain for my husband to arrive. Maybe those shared shards of mirrored glass would remind him of his responsibility or harden my heart as much as his was hardened. I felt hollow, but only because I knew there was a part of me that could still accept that warmth and love—I did not think Christian even knew how empty he had become.
My feet brought me through the numbing cold all the way to the pond. I could barely see it through the darkness and the moonlit snowfall, but I remembered where I was. Circling and circling and circling the pond I went, going nowhere but taking all the time that I needed to get there, barreling through each eddy of snow. I knew each twist and turn of the pond’s edge until I didn’t.
When I was a little girl, my father told me never to wander far from home. Home could be a house, home could be a family, and home could be the town that had surrounded me since my birth. I could have stopped walking when the familiar surroundings suddenly became unfamiliar. Maybe the twisting of the landscape would have stopped, and I would have seen through the misty darkness to the few lit windows of the village. Maybe I would have found my way back to those
stone-paved streets. But I didn’t stop; I kept moving forward because there was nothing behind me worth returning to.
The frozen pond expanded into a frozen lake, until I could not see its end on the horizon. The snow was packed more tightly around the ice than it had been at the pond, and my path led into an ice dwelling that was far more welcoming than the pub tried to be. I knew I was being called, every limb freezing underneath the inadequate clothing, because wherever I was, it was far colder than our worst winters.
She was waiting for me in the middle of the room, standing with bared skin on the iced lake. I could see the patterns of the ice crystals, giant stars on the surface. There were icicles coming from the ceiling like stalactites, and frozen snowdrifts that narrowed into sharp tips. In them I could see my reflection. If I looked closer into the glistening surfaces, I thought that I could see other reflections, eyes gazing through the patterns until their outlines became clear. The floor was a mirror, and I watched my feet meet their twins. I almost thought that I would fall through, so clear was the image of myself, colorless, expressionless, yet still with life in me. I could see it in the reflection of my eyes as they melted ice enough to see through the mirror. Under the ice, I could see human hearts that looked bright red and healthy. Perhaps they were even still beating. Perhaps one of them belonged to my husband.
I could have asked for her to return the heart to my husband, but the wish would have gone ungranted. The Snow Queen does not collect hearts unwillingly—shattered mirrors are hard to come by without a heart ready to rip from the chest, replaced with a chunk of ice surrounding stone. Once replaced, the body and the heart can never be as it was.
When I was a little girl, my father told me to never look into the Snow Queen’s eyes, lest my heart freeze to the love of a man. My man’s heart froze to me, and I looked into the Snow Queen’s eyes. I was neither the first nor the last woman to stare into those icy blue eyes, almost like my own. Her fingers touched my pale cheek that could not even muster the blood for a blush.
She did not speak or could not speak. But her marble white lips parted, and I could hear her in my mind. She told me that I was welcome to stay, but all things that stayed must die. Nothing living could survive in a wasteland. Her fingertips on my cheek were frigid, and for a moment, I thought the blood froze in my veins. She did not need a cloak to stay warm because she had no warmth, nor need of it. Her flesh was soft but cold as snow, her eyes the only glimpse of anything like life, her blood a frozen river. There was only frosty breath when her mouth came close to mine, becoming moist with the heat beneath my skin.
“I don’t want to die.” They were the only words that had been spoken in this room for too long, and they made the walls vibrate and tremble. Icicles fell from the ceiling, and some shattered, sliding across the ice like skates or sleds.
She told me that I could have warmth and die, or I could freeze and cease to live. At first I did not understand, because they did not seem to be two choices. But then her lips touched mine lightly, and the blood beneath my lips froze, numb and stiff, yet I could still move them beneath hers. Ice cracked between the creases, and when I shivered, it was not because the cold was too great. I felt the cold seeping into me, inch by inch. A thin sheen spread over my skin, star patterns that radiated out. I blinked and heard a noise like nails on glass. My breath was still warm, and it felt like fire as her tongue slid along mine, drawing it into her mouth. For a moment, when my mouth was still warm, I stuck to her, my fingers trapped to her waist, her hands to my face, my tongue to her tongue. But the freeze deepened until it was as though ice was brushing ice, slick and wet and dry all at the same time.
My husband’s coat fell from my shoulders, and the Snow Queen slowly ripped my gown from neck to navel. It joined the superfluous coat on the ice. My nipples were erect and hard, almost painful in the cold until there was no difference between myself and the air. I could actually feel when my heart stopped in my chest, as though there was a great stillness that would not be broken. But my heart was still there, not in her collection of shattered hearts beneath the ice. My lungs stilled, and I was unable to make a sound as the Snow Queen took a frigid nipple between her teeth, the pain as sharp as the cold.
My hips shifted as the warmth of pleasure between my legs swiftly froze, the moisture inside forming tiny icicles. The heat was gone, but the pleasure was not, caught in the moment when my flesh was engorged with blood. Her slippery tongue tangled in my hair there, tracing in a circle where the pleasure was greatest until I grew colder and colder, the freeze reaching my toes near where the Snow Queen knelt. I could barely move, but I pressed my hips to her face, my fingers gradually closing in the length of her white hair.
I thought of my husband, but the thought was brief, as his thought of me would be brief when he returned to the empty room and did not receive a warm breakfast in the morning. If he came home at all.
Something large and sharp pressed against my entrance, and I stretched for it as steadily as anything I or she could do. The long icicle inside me was bigger than my husband could hope to be, and every second felt that much longer than when I used to be warm, with my blood beating quickly in my veins. This was not a rush—this was a long, excruciatingly, exquisitely slow freeze. My mouth opened, but no sound came out—my lungs had frozen solid, and I could not find breath enough to speak. My moans stayed in my head, but the Snow Queen heard them, just as I could hear her soft exclamations. I was hers, one woman among many, a legion of Snow Queens in the vast frozen lake wasteland. No demons, no villains—just taking what was rightfully ours by divine law. The shattered mirrors, the frosted glass, the stone hearts, and the Snow Queens that neither spoke nor lived: walking ghosts, ethereal witches as ephemeral as breath on the window.
The icicle stretched me, its smooth ridges catching on the lip of my entrance and rubbing against a place in my body that had only been reached once and quite by accident. This time, though, the Snow Queen found it and used it until I felt like my flesh would shatter into a hundred jagged pieces like mirror shards. When she brought me to my climax, mouth still pressing to the hooded nub of flesh and icicle sliding in and out like I was liquid within, I heard the thousand cracks in my head, and I thought I saw someone in my mind’s eye, a woman who had dropped her looking glass on the ground and pricked her finger on the ice of my gaze. The vision faded, but I held the stranger’s heart in my hand, as hot as a burning coal.
The Snow Queen stood, guiding me to a place in the ice that opened for the new resident. Her bluish lips curved into a smile that was icily beautiful. I knew that it looked like mine. Pale skin against pale skin; blue eyes staring into blue eyes: it was like staring at my reflection in frosted glass.
GINGERBREAD MAN
Carol Hassler
Emily swayed as the sun filtering in through her half-shut kitchen blinds teased her awake. Shit. She had been sleepwalking again. David always told her she needed to tie herself down in bed. Often, grinning, he would do just that. David. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her head hurt. Everything, even her stupid sleepwalking, reminded her of him. “At least I didn’t leave the apartment,” she murmured, rolling her neck.
She opened her eyes and gasped, then staggered to catch herself on the edge of the table. Her hands, clutching the weathered maple of the large worktable, were covered in flakes of dried dough and her feet were unseen beneath the empty flour sacks that littered the floor like clouds. Emily clapped both hands to her mouth and stepped back hastily. The rational part of Emily slumped in the corner of her mind. So this, that tiny and coldly logical part mused, is what it must mean to go mad with grief.
The kitchen burned pinkly from the light filtering through the shades, flushing the sculpture on the table with an almost healthy glow. Stretched along the maple lay David—or rather, a life-size replica of him. Her hands, still pressed against her mouth, smelled strongly of spice: cinnamon, ginger, cloves. She thought she might vomit. Two months of her silent apartment after David died a
nd she thought she had been getting better.
Emily flinched, remembering now the trip to the store, the piles of flour and sugar bags and spices swept from the rack into her cart. And the blessedly mindless act of kneading the dough, forming the legs, chest, head.
Oh, yes, she remembered now. Bright white lines of light had crawled along the floor, crept up the legs of the chairs and skirted the edge of the table by the time she lowered her hands. She stepped into the sunlight, so that her shadow loomed large against the kitchen wall. In her mind, rational Emily turned away politely. She ran her hand up the arm posed casually on the table, hand draped over the sculpture’s stomach. The city hummed outside the window but the kitchen was close and private. Nobody needs to know, she thought, that I’ve gone crazy.
She bent her head until she hovered over the lips of the figure. The air, so heavily scented with cinnamon, clung to her hands and dusted her skin, blending her hand into the torso as she rested it lightly there. She closed her eyes, then pressed her lips against the model of her late husband, letting her mouth sink into the groove of his lips. She sighed at the familiarity. And then the dough began to settle under the pressure of her kiss and reality began to intrude. She flexed her fingers over the chest, ready to tear down the sculpture, break it into balls for the trash and then go have a good long cry in the shower.
The dough quivered. She would have dismissed it, so slight was the change, had she not still had her lips pressed against the sculpture. Startled, she drew back. The sculpture was changing somehow. The dough seemed to adjust, growing tighter in some places and flexing outward in others. As she watched, the soft impressions of features in the warm dough became hard lines of bone structure, then softly rounded muscle, then skin pocked with fine pores. The chest rose once, body arching upward at the waist in a sharp angle, and she lifted her hand in shock.
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