The Ice Queen

by Alice Hoffman

She’d cut it herself, straining to see the back of her head in the mirror. She couldn’t afford a real haircut at a salon; still she was pretty. We didn’t talk about being poor; we never discussed what we didn’t have. We ate macaroni three times a week and wore heavy sweaters to bed; we made do.

I went to the state university a few towns over, then to City College for a master’s in library science.

Hurrah for libraries!

rigor mortis set in within four hours.

Andersen’s world was filled with virtuous, respectable characters.

I didn’t believe that people got what they deserved.

I agree. Karma is none sense.

I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn’t die; she’d have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of.

What a pretty thought.

“Without thunderstorms, the earth would lose its electrical charge in less than an hour,” Ned told me.

I suppose no one had told her before that she mustn’t trust words, not even the ones in books.

I had completely lost the color red. Whatever had once been red was now cloudy and pale.

Magic makes sense. Lightning does not, even to the experts.

Did you know that five percent of strikes take place on golf courses?”

had read all of D. H. Lawrence.

You dont know if they actually read the books.

You don’t hide what you think is beautiful. You hide what’s broken. You hide when you’re a monster.”

What did it mean to have a lover who would embrace you only in the dark? Who wanted to conceal not only his deepest self but everything on the surface?

It means he does not want to see you and does not want you to see him.

Was it situational blindness—I couldn’t see red; he couldn’t see ugliness or deceit.

Sounds like that dumb movie.

“Secrets are only knowledge that hasn’t yet been uncovered,” he told me. “Therefore, they’re not in fact secrets, but only unrealized truth.”

“You want to know what love is? It’s the thing that ruins you.”

the uncertainty principle, a theorem that predated and informed chaos theory.

“Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else’s business,” Frances said.

And now all those records are electronic and therefore can be accessed.

At first the meteorology society had refused to accept his paper, “Chaos Theory and Fairy Tales.” I

At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory—if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible.

“Eucalyptus,” Carlos said. “It’s what attracts the butterflies. The groves.”

The best way to die is while you’re living, even here in New Jersey.