The Ice Queen

by Alice Hoffman

didn’t believe that people got what they deserved. I didn’t believe in a rational, benevolent world that could be ordered to suit us, an existence presumed to fit snugly into an invented logic. I had no faith in pie charts or diagrams of humanity wherein the wicked were divided from the good and the forever after was in direct opposition to the here and now.

When I let the cat out in the yard I could feel the

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’d like to ask you something. Maybe you know—is there a reason for everything?” We all looked at my brother, the scientist, for an answer. “Just because we don’t know it or understand it doesn’t mean there’s not a reason,” Ned said. “There you go.” The Dragon was pleased with that response. “My sentiments exactly.”

The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upward, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

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.

The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of

it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, a...