A sunbeam lit the carpet with a fiery streak never seen on school days. He jumped out of bed and rushed into hallway, bare toes cold on the hardwood. The dusty scent of heat pumping from the vent by the stairs burned his nostrils as a radio crackled from behind the bathroom door. A muffled list of school names was being recited off in alphabetical order.
Sam put his ear to the door just as it opened.
“Good morning!” His father spoke cheerfully. He was folding a towel. Pine-scented aftershave drifted into the hallway. “We let you sleep late.”
“Did they cancel school?”
“They sure did. There’s six inches of snow out there. It rained until midnight and then turned to snow. Honestly, we haven’t had a temperature drop like that in years.” His father clicked off the radio and stepped into the hallway. “It’s single digits right now…”
His dad’s voice faded as Sam ran back down the hallway. He tore open the curtains of his room.
The sun was blinding—the snowy street, the white sidewalk, the half-buried mailbox, the blanketed football field in the distance. The first storm of the year was always a surprise, but it was the trees that truly caught him off guard that day. The oaks, old and gnarled, bare for the season, were glistening. Their branches, crystalline in the morning light, were laced with long, sparkling icicles, frozen tendrils of diamond-like clarity. They hung from the trees as if the neighborhood had been cursed, as if vines had grown overnight and then been cemented in ice. All the way down the street it was the same. The trees sparkled in the sunlight, glasslike, pristine, a world become fragile overnight.
Ten minutes later Sam was outside.
The sun had risen over the goalposts of the football field. No other kids were out yet. Sam’s feet left the first careless prints on the snow as he ran from end zone to end zone. He warmed himself with his own breath as his wool scarf scraped against his cheeks. He left white pockmarks on the scoreboard, tried to hit the thin goalposts, made two snowmen, shook icicles from beneath the bleachers, and threw more snowballs. He eventually found himself breathless on the stands, shaking snow from his gloves in the shade of the bordering woods. He looked around.
The trees under which he sat were actually the edge of a small grove, thick enough in the summer to get lost in and build forts. There was a grassy clearing in the center where his parents had taken him for picnics when he was younger. He thought about the woods and how the trees looked in summer: tall, green, immobile. Now the little forest must be covered in icicles. He rose from the bleachers.
At first the woods seemed no different than usual, no different than after any other snowstorm. In some ways it seemed less snowy, the canopy of branches blocking out the previous night’s storm. But as he walked farther into the grove, it became clear that it was not like other storms. When he reached the edge of the clearing, he stopped short.
The rain that had beat against his windows at midnight had done something peculiar. At some point overnight, as the neighborhood had slept, the dark clearing had flooded, creating a swamp. That swamp had now completely frozen over. As it was, Sam found himself standing on the edge of what was once a grassy picnic grove and was now a pure sheet of ice. The clearing was a perfect frozen oval, only lightly dusted by snow, with blades of grass poking up here and there as proof it were not a nascent pond.
Sam wasted no time. He slid across the ice on the heels of his boots. He traced the oval from side to side and did a figure eight. He did another oval. The sun rose higher. Voices of children wafted in but no one entered the woods. By mid-morning Sam had armed himself with a broken stick and a pine cone, slashing at imagined goals while sliding across the ice. It was only when his fingers began to numb that he lay down his stick and crept slowly from the grove, sneaking under the bleachers before running home.
He breathlessly entered the kitchen.
“I need ice skates!”
His father was washing dishes at the sink.
“For what?”
Sam quickly told his story.
“That’s amazing. Maybe we can get you skates tomorrow. The stores aren’t going to be open today. Not if it’s that icy.”
“Dad, I told you I needed skates, like, a month ago, and that I wanted to do hockey this winter. And now I really need them. Can’t we go today?”
“Not if it’s that bad out. Maybe this weekend. I promise you’ll get skates eventually.”
Sam paused.
“Don’t you have old ones? Those black ones in your closet?”
His father paused.
“You’re right. They might fit, too. Though you may need two pairs of socks.”
“Let’s go get em!”
Sam pulled his father upstairs.
Five minutes later they were back in the kitchen opening a tattered cardboard box. The skates were old, laces threadbare, blades tinged with rust.
“These’ll work,” said his father.
Sam stuffed two pairs of socks inside the skates and flung them over his shoulder.
“You wanna go?”
His father hesitated. Dishes floated in the sink.
“Hm. You know what? Sure. Give me five minutes.”
The neighborhood was full of kids at this point. Sam urged his father across the football field by the arm, telling him to duck as they passed behind the bleachers and entered the woods.
“Get lower, I don’t want anyone to see us,” Sam said.
They disappeared into the trees.
The grove was just as Sam had left it. His stick was resting on the ice.
“Look at that,” said his father. “I’ll be damned.”
“I know, right?”
Sam hastily pulled on his skates and slid onto the ice. His blades skimmed over the clearing as if they’d been freshly sharpened that morning. The rust soon wore off and Sam did oval after oval, figure eight after figure eight. His father found a seat on a fallen log. The sun traced across the sky as Sam played hockey with the pine cone. His father eventually joined him, in regular boots, and they spent the rest of the afternoon swatting at the makeshift puck, keeping score with scratches on the ice.
School was cancelled the next day, and that night saw them sitting by a fire. Flames flickered off the charred brickwork as Sam spoke.
“I need a real hockey stick and puck now,” he went on, “but I can make a goal out of branches like I said, so I don’t need a net. Then we could actually have a game.”
“That’s a great idea,” said his father, stretching his legs toward the fireplace. “Honestly, I’m just glad the skates fit.”
“They fit perfectly,” Sam continued, “with one pair of socks they’d be fine, but with two pairs they’re perfect.” He now turned to the fire himself. “Do you think I could invite Peter over tomorrow? He plays hockey and I know he’s got sticks and pucks. Then we wouldn’t have to go out tomorrow. What about that?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Should I call him now?”
“Well, it’s getting late. Why don’t you call him in the morning? You’ve got to be exhausted. Let’s get some sleep. You can call him after breakfast.”
The next morning Sam awoke before the sunbeam had traced across his floor.
His father was already downstairs making coffee.
“Dad, you ready to go skating?”
“Let’s have some breakfast first.”
“I’ll eat after.” Sam grabbed his skates from beside the door. “I want to get there before anybody else finds it.”
“Well, just eat a little something first.”
“I’m fine, seriously. I’ll be right back.”
“OK. I’ll get breakfast ready. But come back soon, so you can call your friend. You’ve got all the time in the world. There’s no rush.”
The snowlight was softer than the previous morning. Amber. There was more wind. Most of the icicles had fallen overnight, leaving the oaks looking somehow older. Sam crossed the football field while dodging patches of grass where snowmen had been rolled the previous day. The fifty yard line was exposed. He quickened his pace as the grove came into view.
It didn’t take long to reach the edge of the clearing.
His pine cone puck was still there, along with his stick. But there was no reflection of the sun. Instead, a dark stretch of hard, frozen grass lay before him.
The water had melted overnight and absorbed into the ground.
The rink was gone.
At this point, Sam’s first instinct was to cross the dying grass and pry his stick and puck from the sunken earth. For some reason, however, he didn’t. Instead, he adjusted his socks, put on his skates, tied his laces tight, and stepped into the clearing. He tried to push off into the hard dirt with hope the cool wind would hit his face like the day before. His blades skittered half an inch before slicing into the earth. He fell face-forward into the ground and landed with a thud. And yet, inexplicably, he rose and tried again. He tried three times. Four times. Each time his skates stopped short and pitched him head over heels into the dirt. There was nothing to skate on. It was only after a fifth attempt that he found himself walking back across the clearing, ankles weak, to sit on the log.
Sam sat for a long time. He stared across the clearing to the trees on the other side. He looked up at the sky, at the growing daylight. His stomach twisted with frustration. He kicked the ground with the tips of his skates. He sat with weariness, bitter at his inability to recapture what yesterday had offered so freely.
In the years that followed, as winters grew shorter and snows became less frequent, that day refused to leave Sam’s memory. It was as if, in some error in the flow of time, the frozen clearing still existed, with the wind curling its way around the trees to bite at his hands while he loosened his skates. The stick was still there, and the pine cone. And all Sam had to do was rise from his seat, because he knew his father was back in the kitchen preparing breakfast. The icicles would return another day.
All that was left to do was emerge from the trees and walk toward home.
A.E. Milford is a writer originally from Delaware. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, Milford has written for various film projects and has had fiction published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Welter, Philadelphia Stories, and Cobalt Weekly, among other publications. Milford is currently working on a novel. Visit www.AEMilford.com
