fiction

by Dawn Erickson

The ice is smooth and dark and the girl skates the edges. Up river and back down. There are a few other skaters and a game of hockey off in the middle of the river. She watches the players glide out with their sticks, watches them play, the whooping and hollering. They all enter the ice in the open spot between the oak trees, where a path leads to a smallish beach and it is easy to step onto the ice.

 Her boyfriend tells her it is a bad idea.

 “I got a bad feeling about this,” he says, and shakes his head when she says she wants to go skate on the river. He has bad feelings about many things. Like riding the train into the city or choosing a restaurant or walking around town. Driving. Errands. It is all bad or about to go bad. He worries about what she wears and how she cuts her hair and what she says. How much ice cream she eats and is she gaining weight? ‘Cause it looks like she is gaining weight. A little pudgy around the edges, he says.

She puts her skates on near the edge of the river, under the oak trees, then ventures out toward the hockey game—skates a big slow circle around the players before gliding back to shore—trying to forget what it is the boyfriend said. The ice has been forming for weeks. She silently celebrates each cold and clear day. Each temperature drop. For the ice to freeze like this, so early in the season, and before a snowfall, or without wind, is unusual. She tries to explain this to her boyfriend, the rareness of what is happening. While they eat breakfast or make dinner. Usually snow precedes a deep freeze. Or wind. Snow that freezes into the water’s surface making it lumpy and useless for skating, or wind that causes slushed up ice to ridge like wash boarding on a dirt road. Miles, she says, there could be miles of skating. Not just going around in circles on some shoveled off rink. One night he suddenly gets angry about the whole thing and tells her to shut up. Enough already. Like she is a little kid.

 Days became weeks of watching the river. On her way to work or the way home. At first, an almost imperceptible layer of ice grows out from the shore. Blueish, then darker, almost black. Temperatures tumble ever lower and one day the center ices over. Of course, that doesn’t mean it is safe. There might be a current running beneath. But then she sees skaters. Just a few at first, the brave or foolhardy. Then hockey games. Fishermen scatter up and down the ice, bundled and hunched over holes bored through the ice. She watches crowds of kids, like flocks of starlings, flitter here and there. She knows it is time or past time even. That any day it might snow and cover up the ice and then even though it was lovely underneath, one would have to shovel a path.

 She tries to get the boyfriend to try skating. He has lived here all his life and has never even tried and this she can’t really fathom. It’s like flying, she offers, but he shakes his head, no. So, she goes by herself one afternoon. Afterwork. Parks the car and walks across the browned and hard lawn of the riverfront park.

Near shore it is easy to tell the depth of the ice. She guesses nearly six inches. Out further the occasional leaf or air bubble indicates depth, secreted as they are deep in the ice. Every now and again a white streak like a crack crisscrosses the ice, buried below the surface. Every now and again a buckle of ice booms up from the depths—barks out into the crisp air as if the river was fracturing and breaking open, making her jump and start to scurry back to shore even though she knows it is what ice does as it thicken into its cold, expanding and growing stronger, then settling back into its wintery bed.

Her skating is tentative at first. Slow and watchful. Then she tucks and leans forward—pushes one skate blade firmly against the ice, one arm resting against the small of her back and the other in front, swaying a rhythm. Push and glide. Push and glide. She goes like this, building speed, astounded by how quickly she builds momentum. When she looks backward, she can see the bit of beach where she started, and the long shadow of the oaks falling across the ice. A desire to leave the chatter of everything takes hold—the yells of the hockey players, the drone of cars out on the highway, the flocks of kids. She slants into the motion, soaring down the ice. All the world sparkles and dissolves into a breathtaking beauty or not even beauty but near enchantment. Her existence a kind of haunting pleasure. It is what she suspected she might find out here on the ice. She has felt this before—swimming at night under a full moon, or once when she was camping with her family, a thousand tiny lights of fireflies lighting up the night woods and they spent what seemed like hours chasing them before they simply disappeared.

She flies upstream toward quiet coves and back channels. She passes a secluded beach with a leaning willow, bare now of leaves. There are more oaks and maples and then a smattering of pines. After a bit the river narrows and carries her upstream through a series of ponds ringed with the large homes of wealthy families. She skates by kids and hockey games and listens as one by one they are called off to dinner. She watches the lights in the windows come on, little squares of yellow. She can see bodies moving around and wonders what it is they do and why and are they happy? She turns in circles. Skates backwards. Watches the sky turn red then purple. It is as effortless as she imagines flying must be for birds, for the eagles that occasion the river here, the push of her leg against ice something like the flap of a wing against air. There is nothing like it, she thinks, except to be a bird. She wants to continue forever and knows she should turn around and go back but she goes onward. The only sound now is tiny scrape of the skates’ blades against ice, push and glide, push and glide.

 Finally, at the end of the last pond, she tires. She comes to what she thinks must be a refuge maybe, or park. The ice disappears into a thickness of cattails and tall grass and she lays down on the ice to rest. Lays on her back and looks up. Listens to wind clatter through the dry cattail shoots. Listens to her heart beating through all her layers of warmth. To the small noises of evening. A dog barking, the distant bustle of the city. She watches the blinking lights of a jet lift into the sky. Watches stars appear. She knows she should fly back to her boyfriend out there somewhere, presses her mittened hands against the ice and feels the cold come through, feels the cold against her legs, the way it nearly pierces through her long johns and down coat. She thinks about how she knows that there are ways of living and there are ways of dying and there are ways of dying while you’re living. She knows that when she returns to the man in their home, he will tell her she is foolish and foolhardy and selfish and rude. That she has made him wait and dinner is cold and ruined. They will eat their food and watch tv and move silent into sleeping. She knows he will never understand the magic of skating, the miracle of a naturally perfect freeze, of smooth ice and a river like a lake to skate. She knows these things grumble and groan within her. That she strains against it and that one day she will have to fly away. From him. From this living that is not living. That if she doesn’t, she will lose herself into the piney-dark, shadowed river of him. Settle into the thickening freeze, perfectly caught, like a fallen leaf or burble of air. She will start to believe the things he says. She recognizes the world can sparkle, she does. That it is possessed of a mysterious beauty that she should find and follow, no matter how foolhardy, or risky it seems, because there is nothing else really. Somewhere her path, like this grace of ice, exists. But she wasn’t ready yet. Not quite. To admit any of that.