Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

It was an unseasonably hot day when we left. The air was sulfur-colored, gray around the edges, and the humidity was at 98 percent.

“This will get you used to Florida.” Ned was oddly joyful.

There was sheet lightning ahead of us on the New Jersey Turnpike, the silent sort that is so vivid it can light up the whole sky. My brother was delighted by the weather; his de­partment was currently involved in a lightning study and he was one of the project advisers.

“Without thunderstorms, the earth would lose its electri­cal charge in less than an hour,” Ned told me.

He kept notes on the storm as I drove. I was used to being alone, accustomed to talking to myself; without thinking, I made another wish aloud, despite how it burned. I wished lightning would strike me.

“Like hell you do,” my brother said. One of the tasks of the meteorology department at Orlon was to work with a team of physicians and biologists, addressing neurological injuries found in lightning-strike victims. “You have no idea of the damage that can be done. None whatsoever.”

But it didn’t really matter. I had made another death wish, and I could tell what was to come from the bitter taste in my mouth.

It was too late to take it back.

The cat wasn’t at all happy with the move. I couldn’t blame her. Orlon was hardly a paradise. Cats, after all, are creatures of habit, said to become more attached to a place than to a person. This was certainly true of my alleged pet, who had never seemed to miss the original owner from whom I’d inherited her. Not for a moment had she sat by a window, waiting to be rescued. Why, she didn’t even seem to recognize the existence of human beings. My prize. My pet.

Giselle ,I’d call when she was out in the garden, but she’d only ignore me and flick her tail, as though I were another fly, one of the thousands that seemed to be breeding in Orlon. Even my own cat disliked me. What had I expected? Life was no better here in Orlon, despite what my brother had promised, only hotter, buggier, far more humid than New Jersey at its worst. The library where I found myself employed was underfunded: there was one other librarian, Frances York, who had worked at the same post for forty years and whose eyesight was now failing — hence my job. Untrustworthy as I might be, I was to be her eyes.

This is what I saw: Most of the shelves were empty. Bud­get cuts. Public’s lack of interest. I had more books packed in cartons and left in storage in New Jersey than the Orlon Public Library had in its entirety. There were no computers available to the patrons, only one ancient word processor at the desk, and an old-fashioned card catalog was still in use. As for the reference department, there didn’t seem to be one. After several weeks at work, there’d been only three calls of any kind: two concerning the proper use of fertilizer, and a third from a second-grader wanting to know what medical school Dr. Seuss had gone to. Maybe I should have lied to my young caller, but it wasn’t in my nature to do so. When I told her that her favorite author wasn’t a doctor, that in fact his last name wasn’t even Seuss, she hung up on me. I sup­pose no one had told her before that she mustn’t trust words, not even the ones in books.

Because we were a college town, the students at Orlon had their own high-tech facility, so our little building was all but invisible to them. And as our budget didn’t allow the purchase of any new editions, even the local folks stayed away. The only weekly activity was the nursery-school read­ing club, but that group was nearly disbanded after I read “The Goose Girl,” a tale in which a truth-teller, a beloved, loyal horse named Falada, continues to speak long after his severed head is mounted on the wall. Frances took back the position of reader, even though she was nearly blind and had to hold a book right up to her face to make out the story.

Frances was polite about my removal, and I understood. Death was my talent, not lively toddlers. I gratefully relin­quished the nursery group, happy enough to avoid the rush of noisy little creatures on Thursday afternoons.

During my hours at the library I found myself longing for questions about death. New Jersey had begun to seem like a dream rather than a nightmare. I stared at the phone, missing Jack Lyons and his calls; our longest, most intimate conversa­tions had been about diseases that were spread by mosquitoes, especially West Nile virus. As for my brother, he and Nina were busy with their work at the university; after they’d helped me set up the house — which my brother had failed to mention was not air-conditioned, there was only a ceiling fan — I rarely saw Ned and his wife. I hadn’t expected more, and why should I have? They had their own lives, after all.

In the evenings, I listened to the radio and busied myself with killing flies, using a flyswatter I’d bought at Acres’ Hardware Store. A bit of death at home. Something I un­derstood. Something I was good at. I’d killed hundreds of flies in no time. I kept piles of bodies on the windowsill. That’s what I was doing when it happened. I was holding the flyswatter when I saw something that appeared to be a tennis ball right in front of me. The window was open, the ceiling fan was on, the sky was heavy with heat. I thought perhaps some neighborhood kids had thrown the ball through my window. I didn’t care for children of any age or size. I knew how they thought and what they were capable of. I was about to shout out for the culprits to get off my lawn. But then I saw that the ball was oddly bright, so shim­mery I had to squint. When my gaze shifted I noticed that the flyswatter I was holding was edged in fire and that the fire was dripping down onto the floor, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

I was paralyzed, I think, helpless to do anything but watch as the ball fell to the floor. I heard a huge noise: an ex­plosion of some sort, like a shotgun. I thought of the ice that had ricocheted off the roof when my mother drove away. Death sound. The thud of what cannot be stopped. For a second I thought, It’s the end of the world . My world, I meant. In a way this was true. In a matter of seconds, everything changed. If I had turned left instead of right, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened; if the fly I’d swatted had never come in through a hole in the screen, if I’d never left New Jersey, if a butterfly in South America had never unfurled its wings and with a single beat altered everything, now and forevermore.

When I awoke in the hospital I knew at least part of my wish had come true. I could taste it, the burning flavor of death. The wish I’d made in the car traveling down to Florida had accomplished half of its mission, but I was still half alive. I couldn’t move my left side. Arms, legs, trunk, had all been affected. There hadn’t been a multi-organ dis­ruption — no kidney or lung effects. But my heart had been affected and there had been neurological damage, the two most frequent causes of mortalities in lightning-strike vic­tims. All the same, I was informed that I was lucky to be in Orlon, where there were more lightning strikes than any­where else in Florida — glorious Florida, the top state for deaths and injuries caused by lightning. Because of this, the medical care in our county was expert. I was supposed to be grateful for that. I would need physical therapy and a seri­ous relationship with a cardiologist, since my heart now skipped a beat. I could feel it fluttering inside me — torn posterior pericardium, they said. It was as though a bird were trapped inside me, one that belonged in a place outside the cage of my aching ribs.

While I was being told about my condition, with my brother and Nina looking on, the only thing I could concen­trate on was the clicking inside my head. That wasn’t un­usual in cases such as mine, the doctor assured me when he heard my complaint. Neither was my nausea or the pain in my neck or the swelling in my face or the fact that my fin­gers were numb. But look at all I’d escaped! Pulmonary edema, tympanic membrane rupture — deafness brought on by sound and shock — thermal burns from ignited cloth­ing, serious vascular effects, heart attack, cataracts, lesions on the brain, the eye, the skin.