Maybe I could finally freeze to death if Grandmother would just stop bringing me tea. I didn’t look at the fresh cup she set beside me, its warm steam slowing my mission.
How long would it take my heart to freeze? I wondered. Once mine was solid the shattering would stop and the ice would hold it all together. My current warm, pounding heart was simply not up to the task. I could feel it shredding with each beat.
Yes, cold was the only answer. I nodded my head, the math works out. I put my unbraided blonde hair behind my ear and pressed my cheek against the frosted window trying to pull the chill deeper, deeper. Maybe that would stop the pain. Was that frost forming in my hair already?
I could feel Grandmother shaking her head. She couldn’t read my mind, of course, but she could see me well enough from her warm spot by the fire. Her whispered worries would occasionally drift to my ears. I wasn’t eavesdropping but it was impossible to ignore her.
I heard the kettle boil and sighed. She employed the exact opposite technique as me in dealing with our dark grief. Always the tea. Always trying to warm me up. I didn’t care for her math. A warm heart was too much.
No.
No tea.
“I don’t know what to do for Gerda,” Grandmother said as she busied her hands with tea preparations. She had been talking to her best friend, Eliza Clint, for some time now and they kept circling the same topic: me. I didn’t turn as I heard my name but instead continued to lean my check against the frosted glass, wishing I could be colder still.
“I don’t know how to reach her,” Grandmother continued.
“What are her favorite things?” Mrs. Clint asked. I could see them in my mind’s eye without having to look. They were sitting at the kitchen table, close to the fireplace, with large warm mugs they held snuggled between their weathered fingers. Grandmother’s gray hair was tightly braided and pinned to her head, exactly how she wished I’d let her do my hair but I enjoyed the tangled mess that was accumulating. I just couldn’t be bothered to do my hair. It was the exact shade of golden blonde mother’s hair had been.
“She loves tea but won’t take one sip,” Grandmother said. “She loves her knitted blue blanket but when I put it on her lap she kicks it off. When I tell her her favorite fairy tales I can see her stiffen. She just won’t be comforted. She wants to be cold and uncomfortable and alone. I just… I don’t know what to do. She’s only nine. She is too young to be so… It’s like I’ve lost her, too.”
Grandmother’s stuttering breath told me tears were near but it was often that way and I didn’t move from the window.
“It’s only been one month,” Mrs. Clint said softly. “The grief is still fresh.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m too deep in grief myself to help her. I hate the cold and snow that took them from us and yet she presses those frostbitten cheeks against the window pane like she wants to fall outside into the snow. I just don’t understand her.”
“Grief is different for everyone. You lost a daughter and a son-in-law. She lost both parents in one day. She’s allowed to not be okay. Just hold on until the spring. Everything is easier to bear when the sun is shining and the daffodils are out. Keep trying. She’s a good girl. She’s just lost and needs her grandmother. Be strong, my friend. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Mrs. Clint left and the room was silent again.
The snow was falling in fat clumps now, no longer graceful and floating.
Grandmother thought I loved the snow but that’s where she was wrong. I hated every icy flake with every warm beat my empty heart could muster. Hating the snow but unable to move away from it, I wished I had been born on a warmer planet. A planet with no snow, like the Republic of Spring Isles or better yet Summerton. The everstay planets each knew only one season, every day the same temperature.
But no, I was on an everchange planet, switching from one season to the next. Speeding through spring, summer, and fall and lingering, unwanted, in winter. And this particular winter was never end. Each day was colder and darker than the last. Maybe I will never see spring again. Maybe my world has become Lapland, the planet of eternal winter. I sighed, glad and sad that things could still be worse.
My sigh brought Grandmother over with the cup of tea. Her favorite saying was ‘a cup of tea could fix anything’. She even had it embroidered on a small pillow on the couch.
I didn’t touch the teacup.
“Would you like to hear another story, Gerda?” Grandmother asked, setting the tea before me on the window sill. The steam fogged up the glass and added another shade of white to the snowy landscape outside.
The tea smelled faintly of ginger and honey. I didn’t want to drink it and I didn’t want to talk so I nodded for her to tell another story. It was better than the silence that seemed to radiate from my chest and fill my ears. The silence was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think sometimes.
“Once upon a time there was a young woman who was waiting in the wintery woods for her true love,” Grandmother started.
I turned my head slightly toward her. I had never heard this story and Grandmother had told me so many others over the years. A new story was more temptation than I could resist.
Grandmother started knitting and the tapping of her needles and the friction of the sliding yarn added a soothing backdrop to her words.
She continued on, “But he never came. On her way home she found a mirror lying in the snow. She picked it up and cradled it softly between her hands. A central crack spanned the glass and an inscription on the side caught her eye. It bore a warning:
‘Look not into this mirror.
No beauty can be found.
If you dare to see for yourself,
Your eyes will be uncrowned.
All beauty will turn ash to you,
All loveliness to rot.
You’ll lose yourself to ugliness.
Look not, I beg, look not!’
“For the mirror was cursed. Everyone who looked into it was transformed. From then on everything they saw was ugly to them. They could no longer find beauty in the world. When the young woman realized the danger she was in, she threw the mirror away from herself. But it was too late. She had already looked into its depths.
“One look and her vision was already changed. The once wonderful snow before her was suddenly repulsive. The endless white seemed garish and unsightly.
“But she was given a gift also. When she’d thrown the mirror, it had shattered against a tree. The snow and the glass shards swirled around her in the wintry wind. One snowflake armed with a tiny glass shard settled at her breast. The mixture melted and burrowed down to her heart, changing everything.
“As the destroyer of the mirror, the shards obeyed her. And being fused to the snowflake, so too did the snow. From then on she could control all winter weather. She was named the Snow Queen.
“Even now she can be seen on her sleigh, pulled by four white horses, flying through the air spreading winter’s chill and death wherever she goes. But beware, for she had gathered the broken pieces of the mirror and will cast them at all who offend her. She vowed to one day destroy the mirror’s creator. But until then she prowls through the snowstorms looking for her lost love, hoping he could thaw her frozen heart.
“But she is unable to ever find him. For all she once loved, she now hates. So were she to be looking right at him, she’d pass him by with only a sneer, unable to see him or love him.
“It is said that you can tell she is near because the snowflakes get bigger and heavier. Starting as snow bees and grouping together on branches until they fall with a crash, like owls made of snow leaping from the branches and then breaking apart into snowflakes as they crumble to the ground. When these things happen keep watch for the Snow Queen may be near.”
I waited for her to keep going but the story was finished. A shiver ran up my spine.
“I like that story,” I said, surprising both of us. My mouth felt dry and stiff from disuse. I did like that story. I felt like that. I felt like my heart was cursed and I’d never see beauty or feel love again. I didn’t think my heart would ever be fixed. And maybe the Snow Queen’s never would either. Poor thing.
After some time, Grandmother replaced my cooled ginger tea with a fresh one and I felt more than saw her eyes begging me to drink this one. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t swallow.
Because the action of swallowing somehow released the deep pools of tears I was always trying to hold back with my eyelashes. And if I started crying again it would take me a long time to stop.
My parents had been dead for one month and ten days. It felt like a million years ago and it felt fresh every morning. This winter was never going to end and the pools of tears would never dry up. I pressed my body closer to the panes, wrapping my arms around my knees. Why would I not freeze already? Where was the Snow Queen when you needed her?
Shivers ran through my limbs but I didn’t pull away. Grandmother muttered about me freezing to death but I ignored her. I didn’t want to die but I did want to be miserable. And it is very difficult to be miserable snuggled in a quilt next to Grandmother before the fire with a mug of warm tea in my hands.
I didn’t drink the tea.
The click-clack of Grandmother’s knitting needles was jolted to a stop by a loud tap at the window. It was a strange enough occurrence for a second-story window that I found my feet were moving before I even thought to do so. And the sight before me made a laugh burst out of my parched non-swallowing throat.
Kay, the youngest of the five boys who lived next door, had tied a basket to a long pole and was leaning out his laundry room window as he tried to reach his basket to our laundry room window. I pointed at him and then ran into the laundry room throwing the window open. I stretched out and reached for the basket. His short light-colored hair was sticking out at all angles from his head and he had his tongue half out as he concentrated.
Kay was swaying up and down and side to side trying to angle the basket just right. But the pole was too short and the basket too heavy. I reached out my arms and caught the basket with my fingertips. The sudden change in weight sent Kay tumbling backwards and then too far forward as he tried to right himself. But a quick grab of his shirttail by his mother pulled him back inside. His scolding was silenced for my ears as his window was slammed shut but his wink and grin stayed with me, tucked somewhere deep at a core level.
Inside the basket were bits of newspaper that had been cut or folded into flowers. The whole basket was full of paper flowers. It was like he had brought spring to my seemingly endless winter. I hugged the basket. Tears spilled out but I didn’t feel childish. I felt the sliver of a sunbeam shine from that basket.
Maybe spring will come. Maybe it won’t be winter forever.
Megan Allen Books 