The Ice Queen

by Alice Hoffman

I had lost something before I’d known its worth, and now it was too late.

Inside, my heart felt frozen.

I couldn’t even get the death wish right this time around. I was like a person who’d tried to commit suicide by jumping out a third-story window, succeeding

only in breaking every bone. Still alive, still more or less intact, still trapped in the same life. Before she left, Nina

door. Maybe I didn’t want to be healed. Maybe I deserved whatever I got. Maybe this was the fate I deserved.

I was stubborn; I suppose I tried to fail, and yet I did improve slightly, at least on the surface.

My life was empty and that was fine.

It was what I was used to.

Mine seemed to have been a splash—the flyswatter, it seemed, had come between me and the full force of what can be as much as 120 million volts. Ninety percent of lightning-strike victims survived, but 25 percent suffered major effects, some of which weren’t apparent for months or even years.

think they were all trying not just to educate me but to let me know

Perhaps to him it was nothing, but to me the loss of red was staggering; the emptiness I was left with made me weep. In my world, a cherry was no different from

myself. I couldn’t articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness.

Maybe I wanted help; maybe I was desperate for it. I was trapped behind glass, cold, empty, dead inside.

It was as though the girl in my childhood story had suddenly lurched forward against her casing of blue ice.

There it was, every bit of who I was: blood, panic, sorrow.

It was as though I were a cloud instead of a human being.

Guilt and desire, a bad combination.

There were myths that lightning-strike victims became hypersexual, electrified, in a manner of speaking, but most often there was the opposite effect—impotence and depression.

Did you know that five percent of strikes take place on golf courses?” “Really?” These people couldn’t talk enough about their experiences.

We were in the center of all the bad weather in Florida. No wonder my brother was delighted to live here.

I didn’t like stories in which Death was a major character. Even for me, this tale seemed too illogical. Who on earth could look at death and be unafraid?

I let them think I was a cancer survivor; it was easier to accept than the truth: the living room, the fireball, the burning flyswatter, the way fate had singled me out.

I still felt the wish I had made so long ago. It had been there all along, settled in my chest, in the place where my heart should have been, just below my strike mark.

All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything?

cried, I needed to know the difference between what was real and what was a dream. I

was ready to get what I deserved.

All I knew is that I wanted to fly away. I wanted to be something brand-new. I felt like those human beings in fairy tales who suddenly find themselves in another creature’s skin, trapped in sealskin, horsehide, feathers.

“He wasn’t,” I said. Just beautiful, filled with ashes, shutting the door in my face. Only that.

to people shrugging him off. The sun was in his face, blurring his features. All in all, Renny wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but not a single girl walking by had glanced at him. The limp, the withered foot, the hole in his head, the gloves. That’s what they saw. Would it hurt me to give him something? Just a tiny bit?

Was there a part of my brain that could still sense red, just as it sensed desire?

But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.

I suppose what I really wanted to know was if she despised me for the wish I’d made, whether it was possible in any way, in any world, for her to ever forgive me.

I tried to define what was happening to me. I had decided never again to drive out to the Jones orchard, and yet I could see the map that led there simply by closing my eyes.

At night I dreamed of things that were dangerous: snakes, stepladders, horses’ heads nailed to the wall.

I suppose I had begun to feel something, just an itch. Just a sting. That was the problem. I was such a novice I didn’t understand what it meant when I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, when my racing thoughts were too often of Lazarus Jones.

Since I didn’t believe in love, I soon enough defined my state as a delusionary preoccupation. Obsession.

That was my nature, to take something bad and make it worse. I looked up which novels my physical therapist most enjoyed,

York had known what I was doing, I would have been fired on the spot. What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.

was a model employee: polite to our patrons, cheerfully running books out to those who were housebound or in the hospital.

Turn around, that’s what he’d wanted me to do. If I had, would Death have passed us by?

I’d come to realize that I was comfortable speaking only to people who’d experienced disaster, at least in a secondhand way, like my physical therapist, Peggy, whom I occasionally met for coffee. And of course Renny, not that he was a friend, not even close.

I wondered if he’d found happiness in logic, in this well-ordered world created from scratch in a land where there was no ice. Perhaps Death stood outside the windows in Orlon. Perhaps he couldn’t get through the glass.

It was because I was a failure in each and every thing I undertook, including being a guest at a dinner party, that I happened to spy someone standing in the grass.

Perhaps I could pretend I hadn’t seen her. Perhaps she could pretend as well. Wasn’t that the way most people went about their lives? Put it in a box, tie it up tight, walk away. Please, oh please, let’s do.

Look at them all. I barely speak their language. Math and science. I do not fit in.” “Library science,” my brother reminded me. We both laughed. Had we ever done that before? “Well, you seem much improved.” Ned sounded hopeful. I hated when

That’s the way truth always surfaces in fairy tales, written in glass, in snow, in blood. As I came to consciousness I had a feeling of dread, the way I had on the morning after my mother’s accident. You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you’re dreaming of butterflies.

One visit and Lazarus Jones thought he knew me. Fairy tales are riddles, and people are riddles, too. Figure one out and he’s yours forever, whether he likes it or not.

Now when I thought of her she seemed so young, almost as though she were the daughter, gone off to

I thought I had never seen such a beautiful man in all my life. Everything seemed unreal—the white oranges, the sound of trucks in the fields, the way he was looking at me.

My left side was crooked, my hair patchy, my skin blotchy; I was ten years too old for him. But I was here at the door. I was the one he’d sent roses to.