Excerpt: The Snow Queen

[erastes]

This is an excerpt from the story I have in the "I DO!" anthology in support of marriage equality.

The Snow Queen

We don't get snow much anymore. That makes me sound like some old fogy reminiscing about how the summers were always warmer and better than now. I don't know about the summers. Summer for me meant enforced boredom at some aunt or uncle's house, an unfamiliar garden and the smell of dying grass. But the winters? The old men in London pubs wrap swollen-jointed fingers around their Real Ale and say that kids don't know what cold is. They nod, and take bright brown tobacco from stained tins, wrapping their cheap roll-ups easily without dropping a syllable. You're too young, they tell me – the winters they knew were cold enough to freeze your balls off.

No, I'm not quite as bad as that. But I do remember my childhood and it was snowy every year. I don't hail from London originally, and where I lived as a young child - before I was brought to English summers and dog turd lawns - snow was like clockwork, blew in on the tail end of fall and didn't leave till summer was knocking on its door. Here, in anarchistic London, they are surprised by the white stuff every year and the city grinds to an undignified halt, bumping its nose against Christmas. When I was a kid, I had clothes "just for snow," special clothes that had to be replaced in the fall, because I outgrew them each year. Thick corduroy trousers, padded boots with soles made like animal tracks. Beautiful sheepskin jackets with hoods. I was a clothes whore even back then and, unnatural child, I looked forward to the fall break when one of my aunts would take me shopping.

Then there was my sledge . I didn't see Citizen Kane until I was a grown man so I never thought of naming the thing, but it was my most treasured possession none the less. I warm even now when I think of its heavy, honey-coloured beauty with smooth slats of solid warm ash. Two sturdy runners with shining steel covers. She was fast, and she was so very beautiful.

When it did snow, I'd always know, somehow. I'd wake, like a child hearing sleigh bells overhead and I'd rush to the window leaving puffs of vapour on the glass. Wide-eyed, I'd see the first flakes fall and I'd pray to the Snow Queen that it would settle. Fanciful kid? Yes, I suppose I was. Being an only child will do that, I guess.

I used to watch for hours at time, tracking the progress of every flake that I could, hoping that it would not land only to melt away. Sometimes I was lucky, and the ground would swiftly turn from black to white, but other times and bitterly, more often than not, all it would end with was wet pavements.

When it blizzarded, and it did a lot in the memory of my childhood, huge bird-sized flakes fell faster than I could follow with my eyes. It was then that I felt safe. I didn't need to watch and hope, then I could bounce back to my bed and fall asleep knowing that when I woke, the world would have changed, and it would all be mine.

Outside in the white bright light, I was Kay, but a Kay who had taken the Snow Queen to his frozen soul and loved her with all of his ice-stricken heart. I would break off icicles and kiss them in childish homage, imagining they were her stately fingers. Or sometimes I was Gerda – battling through the frozen waste on her beloved sledge to try save her brother, never knowing, never guessing that his heart was given irrevocably to an ice maiden. I never saved Kay in my stories; when I finally reached the Snow Queen's palace, I would always switch my play to being Kay and I would abandon my sister for the glory and magnificence of the Snow Queen.  Gerda brought warmth and thaw – whereas the Snow Queen could give me what I wanted. Eternal winter.

Everything wonderful happened in winter. Christmas. Hot chocolate. Presents and hot, hot water, blankets so warm as to hurt, and someone who held you and rubbed your hair so hard your eyes stung.

Everything wonderful happened when it snowed.

#

People talk about loss. Or rather – they used to. If you aren't grieving, you find that people will talk about the death of their mother or the time their grandfather died, and how they felt, how they coped. The sudden silence was like a burn; people's eyes glossed over me the first day I came back to work and I could almost hear their unspoken words.

"I don't know what to say to him."

"It's not like he's lost a wife."

"I can't just say 'Sorry for your loss' – it seems so – inadequate."

Well, yes – it was inadequate. It couldn't do anything, anything constructive. It didn't raise the dead. It didn't make a time machine. It didn't make the bed warmer. Or smaller. It didn't compensate for the terrible falling feeling I got when I turned over in the night and his back wasn't there – his omnipresent back, curved and so tactile, skin strained over each kissing bump of his spine.

It didn't do that. But it would have helped, maybe a bit. People don't think that you want to talk about the person that's died, and perhaps in the spring - when Sam slid away – when I was left with only the shell of him to dispose of and the vacuum of our life – perhaps I couldn't have talked about him then. But by the time I'd dried myself out, got my crying under control and got back to work, I could've done with talking with someone, even if they hadn't known him.

Angie patted my shoulder as I slid into my chair. "You okay?"

I shrugged, but I knew what she meant. Out of all the people I'd called friends, she was the only one who had really been there. For the midnight phone calls, the Friday night visits that stretched into weekends because I couldn't go home, the whole sorry mess that I had been throughout the summer and fall.

When the leaves started to fall, I sat in her loft cocooned from the world with a duvet and Debussy - and I told her about the Snow Queen. She had the grace not to laugh; maybe she'd played with dolls in the same way, maybe she was just kind. All the same, I was grateful.

I lost myself in work, the way I had dived into chardonnay. Some people need crutches. I tried to ignore the silences, the averted eyes and the way people no longer stopped at my desk for a quick gossip, but it cut deep, it was loss on top of loss on top of loss.

"If I'd lost a wife, would they have acted differently?" I railed at Angie that night at the wine bar.

She paused, then looked me in the eye and said, "Probably, I don't know." Her hands slid down to the Claddagh ring I rubbed constantly, as if it were an itch I could scratch or a magic artefact that would grant a wish I dared not voice. "Don't be too hard on them, Josh. They didn't know him. You kept him so secret."

"Because he was mine." I'd said it a thousand times before, but Sam had been mine. I could share TV shows and sports results. I could give my opinions on the news of the day and the typists' clothes. I let people know my opinions on Bush and Blair and the weather and films, but I never asked people for details of their love lives and I never spoke about Sam.

It wasn't through any sense of shame or concealment; it wasn't as if I were some hot-shot celebrity who was protecting someone from the glare of the paparazzi. It was simply there were things I couldn't share. A throwback to a solitary childhood; box of treasures under the bed, sealed with tape. I didn't know if straight men talked about these little things that turned the day from Sunday to sundae, I had no way of knowing. Surely wives and husbands shared the little sweetnesses of a day apart that we did; the soggy Post-It notes in onin my tuna sandwich, the unexpected e-mail with exploding balloons, or the daily joy when I switched off my computer and left the office, feeling the warm buzz of my phone going off with the message, "Comin' home, darlin'?" in that cheesy way he had. None of that was anything I could share. I kept it sealed in a box, hidden under my heart, sealed.

I still carried the phone, but it never vibrated in the same way. It was a thing of metal and plastic, cold to the touch.

"You need to start going out," Angie said. Her fingers played with her drink distractedly.

Something thrummed in my chest. "You're kidding, right?" My tone was light, but my stomach felt cold, like she hadn't been there for the summer, hadn't really been there.

"I don't mean dating, you plank," she said, looking shocked. "What? Oh you idiot, how - .... Forget it." She shut down like a steel trap.

I had to touch her hand to get her to look at me again. "Sorry," I said, hardly knowing what it was I was sorry for.

She shrugged it off, with an edge of irritation, "I mean, just out. Fresh air. Walks. Get a dog."

I slugged my beer with a well-practiced wrist. I had a retort on my lips but nothing that would help us progress. "Sure," I said, "sure." I trusted myself less than her right that second.

She caught my hand as I went to ruffle her hair and she kissed it, and I knew right then that I couldn't impose on her again. "Night, Josh," she said. "Tomorrow will be easier."

"Sure," I said again, like some stuck record. "Call me."

It was cold that night, but it smelled like hope. I went to bed when I couldn't stand the TV any longer and the phone sat accusing and neglected on the nightstand. My sheets were as cold as ever I remembered, the draught extreme, as it always was when the wind turned. The sash windows rocked against the buffeting wind and I found myself sitting up and leaning against the window sillwindowsill, looking into the heavens in the same way I did every year. My breath ghosted the glass and for a fraction of a second I imagined that I could feel Sam breathing just behind me, and that his fingers were moving soft and light on my shoulder the way he did before he kissed my neck. I didn't look round; I tightened my grip on the windowsill and I prayed to my Queen for snow, and for Kay's iced heart and for Kay's frozen soul.

#

I woke with my cheek stuck to the windowsill and such a crick in my neck I could hardly move my head. The light in the room was the claustrophobic greyness that I recognised like an old friend. Without looking, I knew, I just knew that the world was blanketed in white and my Queen had listened - to half of my plea, at least.

I dressed warmly, clothes and boots I stored for days like these; most Londoners, like their city, were caught out by a harsh winter, and struggled through the streets on leather soles, slipping and sliding like Harold Lloyd, or picking their way in fashionable Wellingtons which were not up to the task.

Then I just let my feet take me, finding patches of virgin snow so I could be the first to imprint them, but as the morning woke the sleeping city, the pavements turned from white to brown and even the continuing blizzard could not renew the overtrodden carpet. So I turned aside and made for Regent's Park.

A few children were playing here and there, playing hookey, their squeals carrying over the landscape made alien by the snow. I cast a longing look at Primrose Hill; already there were lines of people trudging up to the best sledging area this close to the central London area , but I walked on, pushing my hood down and letting the snow blind me to the sight of people sliding down on sledges, skis and tin trays. The last time I'd been up the Hill I hadn't been alone.

I found I was walking past the outside of the wolves' enclosure before I realised it and on impulse I turned into the zoo. The snow was stopping at last, although the sky was grey and full of the sweet promise of more.

I sunk on the first bench I could find; the café, I discovered, didn't open for another ten minutes and my stomach was calling for a coffee. The bench was wet under my legs. I was almost alone in the zoo this morning; a crocodile of uniformed children went east from the gate, their tutors hurriedly studying maps and shouting instructions to the rapidly fragmenting group. My breath was dragon vapour; and I sat there - the last ice dragon in the world, lost in my thoughts.

A little girl of about six clambered onto the bench next to me and I got that horrible sense of invasion of personal space that children never understand. She was dressed in a dark pink coat, the old-fashioned type with a big velvet collar. She sat there for a moment, swinging her legs against the wooden slats and humming tunelessly. I was just about to move when she was gone again, a pink blur in the white, leaving me to wonder who she was, and why she was unattended. Within seconds I realised I was wrong, as a man picked her up and swung her around, and she squealed happily before wriggling free of him and running towards the aviary.

Her father, as I assumed he was, sat down and stuck his hands in his pockets. I had to smile inwardly that he'd wrapped his daughter up with gloves and a hat and yet was wearing nothing warmer than a fleece. We sat there in silence for a while and my stomach reminded me that it was empty, so I glanced toward the café, which was finally opening. I stood up and bumped right into him, and there was one of those awkward moments where we both apologised together, then we both laughed.

He said he owed me a coffee for putting muddy prints all over my shoes and I looked at him and grinned and said, "Hell, why not?" The pink child ran to him and grasped his hand, her face cheeks as rosy as her coat; she looked up at him and the look he gave her threatened the ice chips in my heart.

And then it started to snow

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Oooh, so nice! Thank you!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Thank you, sweetie! Glad you liked it.

[baritonejeff.livejournal.com]

So lovely, melancholy, and evocative... :)


(typo alert - in the tuna sandwich sentence...)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

as to the typo, Well, it's from my draft word version, so I hope it's not in the finished version.

[sleveen.livejournal.com]

My breath ghosted the glass and for a fraction of a second I imagined that I could feel Sam breathing just behind me, and that his fingers were moving soft and light on my shoulder the way he did before he kissed my neck. I didn't look round; I tightened my grip on the windowsill and I prayed to my Queen for snow, and for Kay's iced heart and for Kay's frozen soul.

Oh, my...this is unspeakably lovely...the poignant longing is so real, so heart-achingly real that I can feel a sympathetic temblor in my own chest...and then:

she looked up at him and the look he gave her threatened the ice chips in my heart.

And then it started to snow

Mmmmm....oh! renewed hope! Maybe not 'hope' as such, and he certainly wouldn't think so - more like a gentle easing open of the heart's door, just a crack, hardly bigger than a goose quill, enough to allow just a sliver of light...

This is really, really wonderful. I do absolutely love, love, LOVE your writing and as soon as I begin to read anything you've written I am immediately drawn into it. You have such a powerful gift! Thanks for sharing this with all of us. :)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Thank you, hun - what a lovely thing to say. *beams*

[enolabloodygay.livejournal.com]

This touched me so much.

Thank you. xxx

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Thank YOU!

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

I think I suffer from snow addiction...
I love everything about snow-even people writing about snow!

That was beautiful-thank you.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you liked it, thank you!