The Ice

The Ice - Tallulah Conolly-Smith (Stuyvesant High School, Tenth Grade)

He snaps his fingers at her sometimes, instantly summoning her to his side, where he rattles off orders. Sing a song for our guests. Take off my slippers. Pour my evening mix. She’d been a bartender for a while after dropping out. Not even of drinking age, but the owner had felt enough pity to let her stay for a tiny salary. One night, a man in brown fur was in the corner, smoking a cigar. He approached after everyone left, saying that she reminded him of himself. He had money. She had youth. The transaction was uncomplicated. A few days later she quit and moved in with him. Precocious children think that everything will work out for them. Precocious children with poor judgment quickly learn otherwise. 

The villa matches him. He’s lived there for decades and it shows. The halls are adorned with dead animals, foreign sculptures, and abstract paintings. I collect them, he says, smiling, because they don’t run away from me like people do. In the middle of it all is the sitting room, where he spends most of his time. He perches in his velvet armchair, watching her putter around the room. 

Sometimes he calls her over. 

He’s weathered, peeling around the edges. His posture is hard to look at, and he hunches over his eagle-headed staff. His greatest war in life is against age, and every wrinkle serves as a battle scar. But his eyes are still sharp and yellow. He’s stronger than he looks. 

There is a stray kitten who wanders into the kitchen sometimes. Alaska named her Denali. But when he sees Denali, he kicks her out the garden door again with pointy-toed boots that strike like fire. When Alaska begs him to take the creature in, he shakes his head, saying that he has “no room for strays.” Then he looks her up and down. “Except for you, my dear.” 

She takes care of him, and she takes care of the house. Her favorite of his eccentric collectibles is a board of pinned butterflies. Sometimes she slides out of their bedroom at night and removes the glass to dust them off, careful, always careful. They’ll disintegrate at even the slightest touch, but she loves looking at them, she loves the way their wings are spread in a permanently frozen dance, gilded in poetry by the moonlight that streams in through the skylights. 

But day would come again, and it would be time to throw another ball. The guests would appear one-by-one in masquerade attire, faces obscured Mardi-Gras style. They’d coo over Alaska as she carried in plates of shrimp cocktails. 

“You look so much like him,” his guests would say to her. He would smile back with the eyes of a bird of prey. 

And Alaska would try to smile too, try to think of some world in which that would be considered a compliment. It wasn’t even true. It’s not believable that we’re from the same family, she’d tell herself. Because we aren’t. Not really. He’d see the pause in her expression, and one night, he says, “you are of me, my dear, whether you like it or not.” And the guests laugh. Alaska tries to use her brilliant mind to read between the lines and find the joke. But it’s just not there. 

At least she’s still present enough to recognize that her state of being is not a mere trifle. That night, after the guests depart, she serves him his drink. He taps a long fingernail against the side table. She sets the drink there, ice clinking. The drink is a blueish white today, and he observes it with a critical eye, prodding at it with his eagle-headed staff. “Did you remember the bitters?” 

She nods. As he takes a sip, she moves into the hallway, closing the door behind her and watching him through the little glass window. 

He’s still in his armchair, and then the first cough comes. She takes the key from her pocket and locks the door. 

He tries to cough the burning away, and then he realizes what’s going on. Yellow eyes dart to meet Alaska’s through the little glass window. He lets out a bellow that sounds something like the goddamned stray. 

He stands and falls immediately, his staff slipping from his hand. Alaska watches him writhe on the carpet, her heart pounding staccato against her ribs. He screams and screams, and never breaks eye contact. 

But it doesn’t mean anything, because she doesn’t break eye contact either, and she isn’t the one dying. 

The poison’s in the ice, and his screams finally stop. And now he’s dead. 

Alaska unlocks the door and walks into the sitting room. She steps right over his body on the wood, where his limbs are splayed straight out and his skin is starting to get very cold. She goes to the butterfly case and opens it. Then, just for the sake of it, she dusts the butterflies off with one of his monogrammed pink handkerchiefs. 

She goes to the kitchen and leaves the garden door open. She hopes Denali will come in the morning. 

The villa is hers now, the art, the decorated rooms, and the man’s fortune. She can leave. She can start a new life. But she knows that she won’t. 

She is Alaska, the girl who let herself be bought for less than her worth. And now, she is Alaska, the woman who will stay and take in the strays. This is her home. Someone needs to rule over the gilded cage. Maybe she is of him, after all. 

Someone needs to dust the butterflies, and do the pink handkerchiefs not still bear his initials? 

Denali does not come in the morning. Denali never returns to the villa, and never comes back through the garden door, because in the eyes of a friend she now sees pointy-toed boots. No longer boots that strike like fire, but boots that strike like ice.