Ted Kosmatka - Prophet of Bones

It was a crazy thing to do, to play on the river ice. They knew this.

“Come on,” Rebecca said.

“I’m coming. Hold your horses.”

They walked the ice like a winding roadway.

Even in winter, the wetlands teamed with life; you could read the signs all around—animal tracks like lines of grammar on the snow. Sometimes deer came bounding through, graceful as dancers—just another shape in the woods until a white flash of tail drew your attention. Where one ran, the others followed, by some instinct staying clear of the ice.

Months from now this place would be unrecognizable. A burst of foliage, and the low shrubs would hide their bones in green. Everywhere he looked, Paul saw it—the endless cycle of birth, growth, and senescence. A cycle old as the first day. Old as God saying, Let it be.

The children’s feet crunched on snow. They hunted lures that day, knives in hand, serrated edges making short work of twenty-pound-test line.

For three seasons of the year, the river belonged to fishermen—casting their lines into coffee-colored water through a web of low-hanging branches. Inevitably, some lures got hung up, and the fishermen would curse and pull on their lines, until those lines snapped; the lures would dangle over the river like unreachable, low-hanging fruit. The anglers fished three seasons of the year, but winter belonged to the children.

So they walked the ice like a roadway, serrated edges parting twenty-pound-test like strands of spider silk. They gathered red-and-white bobbers, and colorful spinners, and desiccated egg sacks wrapped in white nylon mesh.

The first to see the lure earned the right to claim it. There was no running on the ice. No rush to grab. They moved slowly, six feet apart to disperse their weight. They respected the ice and worked hard to learn its rules.

Paul was larger and heavier than Rebecca, so some lures only Rebecca could dare.

That Saturday, they walked the river south.

Here are some of the rules of ice. The ice is thinner near the shoreline, so getting on and off can be difficult. The ice is thinner near bends in the river, where the water moves quickest. In places where the snow cover is darker, slushier, the ice beneath is sure to be rotten and soft.

Last year, when walking alone on the ice, in that last leap to shore, Paul had broken through, his leg plunging into frigid water up to his knee. He’d been close to home, but by the time he’d been able to peel off his boot, his foot had been blue. A warm bath had brought it excruciatingly back to life.

But today he wasn’t close to home. Today they were miles out to the south, and the day was colder. Today they walked in the middle of the river, like it was a roadway, knives drawn, tempting fate.

“Do you have science fairs at your school?” Paul asked as they rounded a curve.

“Yeah, every year,” Rebecca said.

“Have you entered?”

“No, never. Why are you asking?”

“Because I’m going to enter this year. And I’m going to win.”

“You sound sure.”

“Sure enough,” he said. His steps slowed. “Be careful, the ice is weak here.”

Their feet made crunching sounds on the snow.

Rebecca touched his arm. “I see one.”

Paul stopped. He looked to where his friend was pointing, up the river, near the bend. “Yeah, I see it. Green spinner bait.”

They walked slowly. Rebecca moved ahead.

“Getting thin,” Paul warned.

“I know.”

“Slow down.”

“Come on, Grandma. Don’t be a wuss.”

They inched forward. Paul stopped again. He studied the ice with his feet. Like Eskimos, they had a dozen names for ice, their own private language—the jargon of ice walkers. There was slick ice, and new ice, and chalk ice. There was rotten ice. There was ice-you-did-not-walk-on. You could feel the give, the gentle flex, a kind of sag. Ice on the river didn’t break without warning. It wasn’t like the movies: one minute you’re standing there, then a loud crack—and splash, you’re under. In reality, the ice had flex . And the sound… the sound was more of a creaking, like old leather, or the sound a tree makes in the two seconds between when it starts to fall and when it hits the ground—the low cry of rending fiber, of nature bending, failing. Of that which had been structured becoming unstructured.

In truth, you only heard a loud crack when the ice was good and strong. That’s when you hear the cracks like gunfire, invisible beneath a layer of snow—a shotgun sound that propagates forward so fast that you hear it beneath you and up ahead at the same time.

They advanced.

Near the bend, the snow was darker, revealing a cycle of freeze and melt.

Paul walked until the ice creaked like old leather. Rebecca looked back at him. The wind blew through the trees, clacking branches against branches.

“You should stop,” Paul said.

“It’s not much farther.”

“No, you should stop.”

Paul spread his feet. He watched his friend; he listened.

Rebecca inched ahead. The ice groaned. She turned and made eye contact with him, her cheeks rosy with the cold. Long brown hair spilled out from beneath her knitted hat. She smiled at him, and something fluttered in his stomach, and it occurred to him at that moment that she was pretty. Her smile shifted into a look of determination, and she turned back toward the lure.

The lure dangled just ahead of her, ten feet forward at chest level.

Ten more feet and she’d have it.

Rebecca shifted her weight and took another step as the ice creaked like an oak in a storm. She paused, as if unsure of herself, before stepping again—a slow, gentle sag forming beneath her feet, barely perceptible. She stopped. You’d only see it if you knew what to look for, but Paul did see it—the way the whole area beneath her seemed to give, just a little, as she stood balanced in perfect equipoise. A bare centimeter at first, then more, a slow downward flex of the ice. There would be no warning beyond this. Rebecca shot Paul another look, then shifted her weight again—

—and took a long step back.

And another, and another. Backing away, accepting defeat.

The lure would stay where it was for another season.

“Next time,” he told her when she was back on the thick ice again.

She shook her head. “It was this time or nothing.”

Paul clapped her on the shoulder, and together they turned and headed for home.

As they walked, the sky darkened, evening coming on. Paul looked at his friend and imagined what it would be like to die that way, to drown in the cold and dark, carried forward beneath the ice by the force of the current.

He imagined crawling out on the ice on his stomach and reaching for her through the hole, because he couldn’t have left her there to drown, not without trying—and he imagined the ice breaking and both of them going under.

The dark and numbing cold. An end to everything.

It wouldn’t be so bad.

An hour later they were at her door, shivering from the cold.

“Shut your eyes,” she said. It was dark now. The only light came from the streetlamp on the corner. Her face was a shape in the shadows.

Paul closed his eyes.

Her lips touched his. A gentle kiss. The first of his life.

She pulled away. “After today, I’m not allowed to spend time with you anymore.”

Paul opened his eyes. “Why not?”

“Your father visited my parents.”

“He what ?” Paul stared at her, horror-stricken.

“He came and told them he didn’t want me over there.”

“But why?”

She shrugged. “He said we’re getting too old to be playing together. We should play with kids from our own schools.”