another world, not quite ours: The official website of YA author Megan Crewe

Frozen

by Megan Crewe

The rite always begins in warmth. We gather around the fireplace and its wafting heat, every one of us with Grafton blood. Sparks spit through the iron grill and snap at our hair. The glow floats over the painting of Great-Great-Grandpa: stiff and young in brilliant oils, gazing across the room with lips slightly parted, as if He's about to grin or sing or breathe us in.  

This evening, it was my turn on the stool. The stool wobbled because one leg was too short. I could still taste the icing of my thirteenth birthday cake on my lips. The hall wavered with the sole dim light of the fire, because Grandma Grafton didn't want us to remember the water stains on the wallpaper or the spidercracks in the ceiling plaster. I looked for Billy's face, for his eyes to hold me steady, but I couldn't find him. Then we all--aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, Grandma, Great-Aunt Doreen, and Dad of course--went still, because Grandpa Grafton had cleared his throat. He stood behind my stool, beneath the painting of Him.

"A long time ago..." Grandpa said. His voice was rough in my ears. "...three score and seven years, there lived a man."

"A great man," said Grandma, rising beside me.

"The greatest man," said Great-Aunt Doreen, on the other side.

"Do you know his name?"

"We know it," said the aunts and uncles and cousins and Dad.

"We know it," I said.

"Do you know it?"

"We do," we cried.

"Tell me."

"Richard Grafton!"

The name rose and fell against the muted hiss of the fire. A little one twittered and an aunt pinched him quiet so the name was not disturbed. It had to settle over us like a drift of gauze. No other time may we say it. Every other time, it's Great-Great-Grandpa. Great-Great-Grandpa watches and listens. If you push or steal, we may forget, but Great-Great-Grandpa will remember. Keep all the secrets you like; Great-Great-Grandpa will find you out. And it is He who will decide.  

He stared down from the portrait, the wood smoke rose, and I remembered how Lenora had looked through the mist of evaporating schoolyard snow, the day she'd smashed the disc of my science project under her glossy shoe. How afterwards she'd pursed her lipsticked mouth as I picked the icy shards out of the gravel, and her clot of friends had called me a geek-baby.

Maybe they were right. Maybe I am a baby. Now I can't remember anything. The cold is squeezing into my eyes like two twisting thumbs, suckering my skin raw like a giant leech. My nerves prickle, my bones ache. I think there's a sob stuck in my throat. I can't suck it in. I can't let it out. He will hear.

I wouldn't cry in front of Dad, even though he thought I did, coming up on the train to Grafton Manor. The passengers were strolling the aisles and debating who was most overwhelmed by the experience of riding a train. They were all grins and toothy excitement, but I must have looked sad, staring out the window. Dad asked if I missed Mom. I didn't answer.

He ruffled my hair and said, "It's just for the weekend. This time is special."

"Mom never comes when it's special," I said.

"It's not your fault," he said. "She wouldn't understand about it."

"About Great-Great-Grandpa?"

Dad's voice went all stiff, the way it does whenever Mom mentions Him.

"Yes," he said. "And other things, too."

"She thinks they should bring Him back," I said. "Couldn't they? We learned about those new microbot medics in school last week. Mrs. Carson said they can fix all sorts of things that doctors couldn't before."

Dad frowned. "The procedure should work," he said. "But it's not perfected, especially the cryo part. Sometimes there's damage to the organs when they do the warming. Sometimes people come out wrong. We don't want to take that chance. Until there's no risk..."

"We'll leave Him be?"

"Yes," he said. "He went through so much. He deserves his rest."

Dad looked at me then in a way that seemed so far away it made my skin itch. His eyes wavered between laughter and tears. "My Fanny," he said. "Almost grown up. We'll have to wait for you and see."

He must be waiting now, somewhere outside the cold dark world and the tingling in my nose and teeth. He and Grandma Grafton and Grandpa Grafton and Great-Aunt Doreen, all half-cousins and second cousins, aunts and uncles, Billy, and Rachel, too.

When Aunt Millie picked us up in the train arrivals lot, with her stretched-toffee grin and Grandpa's ancient blue minivan, Rachel was already waiting. She watched me through the windshield, from where they'd folded her wheelchair into the passenger seat. Her head leaned to the side and her bangs tipped across her eye, the one that never opens all the way now. I wasn't sure she was looking at me. Her look went far off.  

I smiled at her and her lips twitched, and I felt a lump in my stomach like I'd swallowed a rock. Then Dad said, "Let's go," and I clambered into the back of the van. Matt and Tobey in the middle seat stared at me as if I was covered with polka-dots.

In the back was Grandma. She tapped the seat beside her and I sat down. In the shadow of the window shade, her face looked small and wizened as a dehydrated peach. Her gaze darted over me.

"You'll do fine," she said. "I can see the strength in you." She patted my knee with her cool hand. I couldn't speak.

She was wrong. I'm not strong, and He will see. He'll see how I fell when the boy shoved me, as I skidded over the iced cement of the schoolyard. I couldn't even hold onto the disc shards. Lenora had gone, all of the girls, the teachers too. It was just me and I couldn't stop it, couldn't stop the pieces from scattering, couldn't stop him from grabbing my skirt, couldn't stop my feet from slipping. The ground tasted the way my mouth tastes now, like cold.  

My teeth are numb; no matter how I try to shut my mouth, it's yawning open with an icicle jabbed in my jaw. I can't open my eyes. I can't feel if they're closed. The dark is still black, either way.  

It's darker, darker even than the sky after the sunlight died on the way to Grafton Manor. The Manor that is not really a manor but just a big house, with ivy crawling across the curling shingles, and windows that arc into little crumbling peaks like perpetually raised eyebrows. But even on the porch you can hear it, rustling through the rotting floorboards: the hum of His machines. Like one long exhale vibrating through the walls.

Our last visit, Mom called it a health hazard, and Dad kept his voice calm and said his parents couldn't afford to fix it up, what with the medical bills--they were nearly as poor as Great-Great-Grandpa had been once. They were talking so quiet that I had to pretend I was asleep. Dad said they didn't want to make a mistake, like His children before. Like His son. The son, Dad said, had been greedy for money. Great-Great-Grandpa said he needed to stand on his own feet, earn for himself the way He had with His new jet engines and motor designs, and the son thought he'd earn by inheriting. Which had something to do with the thing that made Great-Great-Grandpa so sick he had to be put in the cryo-chamber, except I couldn't hear everything Dad said. And I thought, I've made so many mistakes already.

Does He know? I'm only thirteen with frost cramping my lungs, and He is going to decide. Does He see the great big mess in my head that I try and try and can never get untangled? Does He see how my hands shake when they're not numb, when I get the wrong answer and the teacher's face goes all flat and disappointed? Does He see that I only stared when Lenora flirted with the cute guy from the high school, and I wished I was her? All I feel is the sliding and the sharp bits on the inside, and my pulse as it scatters. I'm scared.

Did He see the same in Rachel? Is that why He took from her?

No one really knows what's left in Rachel. All you can see is what's on the outside: her legs floppy like a doll's and her lazy eye. I can remember when she joked and argued and pinched me so she could take my spot at the kiddie table. Now her sentences come out scrambled. At dinner, she goes in her wheelchair to sit with the grown-ups. He judged her and she came back, even if not so well as the others. So still she gets to eat with all the grown-ups, which means Frank and Alice and Billy, too, even though they're not much older than me. Billy always notices when Rachel needs help cutting her meat or pouring the gravy. Even before he went into the basement four years ago, his eyes were cloudy and the pupils drifted like bottle caps in the canal, but he sees.

He came over when the grown-ups were clearing their table and gave me his smile, a little ragged around the edges. "You ready?" he said.

"I think so," I said.

"Nobody is."

I thought of how he'd come up the stairs between Grandma and Grandpa, his face beaming like a new May morning, so it made me glow on the inside. "You were, weren't you?" I said.

He shook his head.  "They thought my eyes were weak and I'd fall asleep. But I didn't. I stayed awake, and you know what? It was like I'd woken up, without even knowing I'd been asleep."

When we got to the hall, he stopped in the doorway and kissed my forehead.

Maybe that was all the boy wanted, three months ago, when I'd run to the wrought iron tree and he'd run after me. My palms froze to the metal as I climbed. The skin tore and bled. He tugged my ankle and leered, and my grip started sliding. Three months ago or three minutes ago, I don't remember. It seems like hours and I can't feel the tick of my watch against my wrist. I can't tell if I'm breathing, even. There's nothing. Nothing but me and Him.

We all know His story by heart, the tale Grandpa tells as the humming swells, the tale of His sacred life.

Grandpa said, "And in His youth He learned from great scientists, and machines leapt to life beneath His fingers..."

Grandma said, "And then He heard of the distant struggle in the city of His birth, and He returned though His parents begged Him to stay away..."

Great-Aunt Doreen said, "And through the jungle He fought to reach the tyrant's throne, and the devices of His invention led the way..."

All three: "And though He was a hero to the people, and they rejoiced for the freedom, yet He was betrayed, infected..."

We all joined in. "And He said through the swirling mist, 'Let those of my blood follow me in my path, and learn what it is to live.'

"Those will follow Him in His path, and learn what He wills that they know."

It's my turn to follow.

"May He judge her worth returning."

I should have run, vanished behind the scuffed velvet curtains that line the basement walls. But Dad was standing proud at the top step, and I kept stepping, down, down, into air that smelled of mildew. The cryo-chamber looked like a giant chrome bathtub, the dials and plugs and blinking lights. Dimpled pipes snaked into the floor. Grandpa yanked a lever, and the lid whined back with a gasp of icy vapor.

"No," I said. "I can't." Grandpa took me by the hand.  "No," I said, but still I walked, up the tin stepladder. I saw Him, His stone-blue face, in the glimpse before my eyes squeezed shut and they rolled me in, and the lid snapped shut on the last sliver of light. Leaving me with Him.

His chin is touching the bridge of my nose. His ribs arch against my chest. I could sink into Him, sink in and seek out the warmth He must be hiding, somewhere, inside. Pretend the cold is just a frost duvet and His lips a frozen pillow.  Let the darkness steal over.

Wake up, says Billy. That's what he did. But I'm not sleeping. Not yet. It's He who's asleep. Maybe I could make Him let me go. He wouldn't know.

The trick is, don't fall asleep. Don't fall...

Those are his arms, clamped around me. They clench so tight. Ice-hard, they crack my lungs, and the air just gushes out. The cold floods in. I'm falling into the solid wall of His chest. He's judged, He's judged, He will take my eye and my legs and my tongue, He's dragging me down, I should have run. Now I can only grab. It feels like clutching steel, like the wrought iron tree, where I thought I knew the boy would never stop tugging but still I held.  

So I hold on. I hold and I remember how I ran, how my legs skittered but held me up, how Rachel's legs dangle limp over the front of her wheelchair. How her hands flutter like mindless birds. She was the one who let go. She let go in the cold dark crushing and fell down into the black, and He decided. But my legs are mine. I need to stand on them, the way I stood when the boy swore and wandered off, and I dropped from the tree simply because I wanted down.  Lenora was skulking by the fence. Her fingers, that have tied knots in my hair, trembled around the yellowed cigarette. I saw that she would rather have fallen than held on until her palms bled.  I looked at her and I was glad I was different.

I must keep seeing.

Great-Great-Grandpa tugs, and I hold on. I push Him away, His ribs, His lips, His arms. I hold onto His name. Richard Grafton. I say it in my head. It's mine, too.   Fanny, Fanny Grafton.

The grip loosens. I push and I feel it's not so crushing. It's like when Mom squashed me against her before I left this morning with Dad. Except He has no warmth, not for me. I push and I feel the pulse flicker in my temple.  

He lets go.

I curl up on his frozen skin and hold strong to my heartbeat and the gasp of my lungs.   He will lie beneath me until I scramble out into the light.

He's judged. I've decided.

I will not be frozen.

The End

mark

Originally published in Thou Shalt Not... Anthology (Dark Cloud Press, 2006)

Author's Note: Written in 2003, this story was something of an experiment in tenses--jumping back and forth between Fanny's present situation and bits and pieces of her past that she remembers as she goes through her ordeal. I will let you judge how successful that experiment was. Still love the idea of this family and their warped futuristic initiation ritual.

mark

Back to Short Stories