AllFreeNovel
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After about a mile of walking, her chocolate was almost entirely gone and she was getting lightheaded. Memories kept flickering through her mind. She was with her mother in Indiana, the day Mom won a hundred dollars at Lotto and took everyone out to breakfast. Then she was in the closet, holding her breath while her mother’s new boyfriend raged over a missing joint.
Then she was laughing with her friends, the only people who accepted her. The four weirdos—Molly the poor stinky one. Ani the one in the leg brace. Charlie the gawky giraffe. Lila the good witch. She wondered if she’d ever see them again. She loved them so much.
But there was someone else she loved now too. Another love wanted to burst from her heart. Sam. Sam. Was she ever going to see him again?
Then she was running down the track at high school, running away from the boy firing rounds at everyone in his path. Except that wasn’t a real memory—she hadn’t been there, thanks to Lila.
Keep your focus, bitch, she told herself, like a slap in the face. Stay in reality. To keep her brain active, she began reciting New York civil statutes in her head. After ten, she allowed herself a sip of water. But only one. Her water bottle was nearly empty.
As time passed and the distance between her and Fire Peak shrank, her mind drifted more and more, and she became entranced by the interplay of ice and sun. The sun relentlessly worked its magic on the mass of ice known as a glacier, which responded with its own shine of surface melt. It was like an intimate, timeless love affair in which sun and glacier joined for long stretches of time in the summer, but barely spoke in the winter.
Did the glacier miss the sun during those long dark winter months? Did it know that if the sun kept on shining, if it never went below the horizon, if it never entered its low-angle winter phase, the glacier would melt away for good? This entrancing sun, so warm and brilliant, would be the end of it.
Correction: not the end, just a transformation. The glacier would become flowing water. Which would be very very bad for everyone and everything in its path.
“The key,” she lectured the ice under her feet, “is to always hold onto yourself and who you are. Never change your essential nature. Sure, you can melt a little, you can compromise, you can enjoy the sun’s company, but please stay a glacier. We need you. Oh my God, I’m talking to a glacier. I’m losing it. It was supposed to be a metaphor. For me. And Sam. Not that he’s the sun, I think I’m more like the sun in that scenario. The red hair, you know? But he’s the sun, too. My sunshine. My only sunshine. Do you know that song?”
Oddly enough, the glacier didn’t answer.
Or maybe it did.
A wet patch appeared before her, and before she could avoid it, she skidded onto her back heels. Trying to catch herself, she windmilled her arms and staggered to one side and landed on her hip, then slid. And slid. Why was she still sliding?
She stuck out her hand to stop her momentum but to her shock, felt nothing but emptiness where there should have been solid ground. A gap? A crevasse? Oh God. Whatever it was, she was slipping into it and no matter how much she scrabbled her gloves against the ice, she couldn’t get a grip.
Changing tactics, she twisted her body around so she could thrust out her legs and jam them into the other side of the crack she’d slid into. That worked, though it took a long moment for her to realize that she wasn’t falling anymore. Instead she was wedged into an ice crevasse, about two feet below the surface of the ice.
Below her…she craned her neck to peer down, then quickly decided it might be better not to know. The ice had angles and bumps and curves, so it wasn’t a straight shot down to wherever. Her fall might be broken if she kept going, but she didn’t want to go that direction at all. She wanted to go up. Which meant she had to keep the pressure of her legs against the wall of ice, while inching her back up the other side, hoping not to slip in the process.
No easy task, especially when she was already exhausted by her hike across the ice, and everything that had come before.
Her legs quivered with tension. Millimeter by millimeter, she shifted her backside up the ice. It took all her energy to press her back against the wall behind her as she changed the placement of her feet.
After a few minutes of this, her legs started to cramp and twinge, crying out for release from their duty of keeping her from tumbling deep into a glacier. She used her muscle control to relax her quadriceps and call on her glutes to do the heavy labor, as they were designed to do.
“Hot stone massage when we get out of this,” she promised them out loud. Her voice echoed strangely off the ice walls. Sound was weird in here. She kept hearing something she thought was a mechanical sound, like a generator or an engine. It must be a weird auditory trick, making her think there was something human-made here, when she was immersed in the alien world of the glacier.
She fought against the despair that wanted her to release her legs, to let go, to become one with this massive chunk of ice.
“You know what, Korch Glacier? I respect the hell out of you. You are a force. But I don’t want to carve my way through mountains anymore. I’ve done it all my life. Alone, like you. Always alone.”
What about us? She could practically hear Lila say. We love you and we believe in you. We need you. I didn’t save your life back in high school for you to lose it in a glacier in Alaska. You have more to do in this life. A lot more. Things you never imagined or expected, beautiful, wonderful things. You have to come back to us. You got that?
I get it. But I’m so tired and I’m hearing things. Like you. I think I’m losing my mind.
Just keep going. Reach for the light.
Reach for the light? Isn’t that what people do when they’re dying? Am I dying?
Just do it! Reach! Reach!
Without arguing with imaginary Lila anymore, she thrust one hand upwards, toward the surface, even though she didn’t dare to tilt her head up because it was helping to keep pressure on the ice behind her. The gesture unbalanced her and she let out a cry, sure she was going to plunge down into the unknown depths of the ice.
“I got you,” said a voice. A strong, male, reassuring voice. Sam’s voice. A hand gripped the wrist of her upheld arm. “Hold onto my wrist. Can you do that?”
She could do that. She did that. With all her strength—more than she thought she had left—she wrapped her hand around the solid bone and muscle of his forearm.
Up, up, she was being lifted up, an icy breath following her from below, her legs scrabbling against the ice wall, until she was surrounded by light and sun glare and beautiful, beautiful Sam. She rolled onto her back and let tears stream down her face.
