The Ice Queen

by Alice Hoffman

was startled by how consumed with desire I was. I was thinking the kind of thoughts I hadn’t had before. So this was it. The thing that made people do stupid, ridiculous things; this was everything, here in the dark hall.

My stomach was lurching around. I was falling into something. Hard. If I stayed, my bones would shatter; I’d break into pieces at his feet. Stupid girl. Stupid me. I hadn’t turned to ice for nothing, for this, a stranger who wasn’t right for me in any way. It

When it rose too high and his fingers were being singed, Lazarus let the burning paper fall into the bowl of cereal, where it burned to ash. I’d never known fire had a sound, like a gasp, a sigh, something alive. “Do you have anything that can beat that?” he said. I could make a wish and turn it into blood and bones. What was that worth? I had ice in my veins; I was colder and more distant than a dark, sunless planet. If that’s what he wanted, then I might just be the perfect woman for him. I went to the table and took the glass of ice water. I filled my mouth with ice. A woman who stood in one place, who forever looked at the sky, motionless, frozen solid. If that’s what he wanted, that’s what he’d get.

I heard myself, my desire, and I couldn’t believe it was me.

How do you melt ice? How can you move when you’re frozen inside?

some tricks.” I was drawn to him, a sparrow to a hawk, a hawk to a sparrow. There was no logic when I followed him down the hall to the bathroom.

Except that I felt something. I didn’t think that was possible for me anymore. Not now, not ever. That I did seemed enough to excuse almost anything.

Now he craved it. A cold woman like me. I think he’d been dreaming of me and then I was there, in my red dress.

all I knew, this was the other half of my death wish—half fire, half water.

I wasn’t much different than that greedy, selfish girl I’d been years ago. Only now I didn’t want the universe, not the whole wide world. Just this and nothing more:

Want, I had discovered, was a country of its own. Everything else drops off the map: oceans, continents, friends, family, the before, the after—all of it gone.

“Are you alive?” Ned’s familiar voice asked one day when I played my phone-message tape. Actually, yes, I wanted to tell him. Amazingly, incredibly enough, I seemed to be.

Now when I went to the survivor group I felt nothing, no kinship. I wanted to run away from their sorrowful tales of lives gone wrong.

Lately, I’d been more selfish than ever. I had a secret dark world and it suited me. In my greed, I had forgotten about Renny. I was that sort of friend, I suppose, the bad sort, and I was embarrassed by my own self-involvement. Renny looked nervous and underfed. Not that he was my responsibility.

But how could I deny Renny, my friend, Renny the sorrowful? How could I tell him what I really wanted? Go away, go away. I’m in a different country now, one where no one can find me, one where there’s no difference between fire and water.

“I should give it all up. Architecture and Iris. Ridiculous dreams.” “Give up and it will never happen.” I sounded like a character out of an Andersen story, on the side of reason and goodness. I was his cheerleader, his friend, his familiar, his liar. Step up and make the leap. Don’t bother with a helmet or a life preserver. You can do it if you really try! Walk on glass, pull the sliver of ice from your heart, face up to it. Overcome.

Destruction was my game.

No

attachments, that was my motto. None at all.

know.” I was still the death-wish girl. Touch you once and you turn to ice. Twice and you might disappear.

careful whom you tell your story to.

with the fat and tissue under the skin. I’ll never get rid of it.” I gently took his hands in mine. I felt like crying. I wondered if damaged people ever got over what had damaged them. “So you’re made out of gold. It’s better than plain flesh.” “Yeah, right. I’m a freak.” Renny went to put the porch light on. He kept his back to me and pulled his gloves on. “And so is he, I’ll bet. Your friend Lazarus.”

“Don’t you get it? You

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

They can find it without seeing where they’re going, my brother told me. That’s how defined their senses are. They fly blind through the dark.

I could feel something hot behind my eyes. It was compassion. Something I didn’t want to feel.

What if Lazarus was hiding something? What if he was indeed a monster? The man I thought I knew could easily be a figment of my imagination, a bear, a snake, a spiny toad. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. Was it possible to know anyone, truly?

Could knowledge hurt, pierce your heart, break

your ...

always brought with me, the one of myself, the girl who stomped her feet on the porch, breath billowing out like smoke, little beast, long dark hair falling down her back, the stars in the black sky forever set in place, the ice forever shining, brighter than the stars.

I had spent my life feeling as though I were an accomplice to a crime. It was nothing new to me. Death-wisher, betrayer, liar, secret-keeper. I was death’s assistant, with no great skill of my own. A lackey, a

fool, the helpmate whose every move had resulted in tragedy. One step, one wish, one mistake, one icy night. And

I knew a book could make something real.

That’s why I’d been so mean to Ned. I had nothing. I hadn’t even thought to give her a present. I hadn’t thought at all.

Who knows where your advice, interest, love, might lead? Start and it might be impossible to stop. That was what was happening with Lazarus.

That’s the danger when you come to the middle of the story. You may find out more than you ever wanted to know.

Obsession did that, I presumed. The wanting of someone, something. The chances a person was suddenly willing to take, the lies so easy to tell.

could fight against cruelty, tooth and claw, but sympathy engulfed you, took you over, made you aware of all you’d done wrong.

I’d been so sure that our stories were the same, and now I wasn’t sure of anything.

I hadn’t understood what a mystery a human being was, how many forms love could take.

We looked at each other. We were both extremely cautious people. We’d learned the lessons of our childhood. Ask questions, only not too many. Look before you leap. Buy new tires. Be careful whom you love. “I’m just wearing the heart monitor for my cardiologist’s

Sitting there with my brother, I realized how little we knew about each other; we were like strangers who’d been forced into the same ditch during some vicious, bloody war, and as soon as it was over, we’d gone our separate ways. For an instant I felt like crying.

I always begged for fairy tales, which he’d claimed to despise. I’d thought he read to me only to keep me from whining, to shut me up so I’d go to sleep.

I wished my mother would step out from between the hedges. I wished I could take back everything I’d ever done or said or wished. I would throw myself at her feet and ask her to forgive me. She’d be kind, I knew that. She was that way, and would be still.

If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting.

windshield. I used to walk home from the library in New Jersey feeling lost even though I knew my way. Now I felt found.

He was waiting for me. That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine myself mattering to anyone.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

Wasn’t that part of the story? It is not what you feel or see but what you know in your heart? But my heart was abnormal, the rhythm was off. It thumped against me like a rock against bone. Cold thing, stone thing, thing that would not be red if I ripped it out of my own chest. A piece of ice. Clear. See-through.

slow. It was the before that I was in, that I was leaving. I could feel myself making my own future, a spider at work on her web. There was a finished woven pattern, one I thought I knew.