Eggshell
“A story about dealing with life changes, learning to be yourself, finding unexpected companionship, and, most of all, eating ice cubes.” - Will Leemkuil
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Through the window of her kitchen she sees that not a single blade of grass is stirring in the cloudy and starless night. She stands there chewing ice.
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Ever since she was a little kid she'd loved the crunch and borderline unbearable sting and feeling of cold in her mouth which eventually gave way to numbness - a border which, once crossed, could unlock a state of nirvana and oneness with the ice.
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Aside from its total lack of nutritional content and its unfortunately minimal benefit to hydration, it was the perfect food. Maybe, she thought, considering the aforementioned qualities, it was the perfect snack food. A snack being something that you eat as much for entertainment or comfort as you do for sustenance. Ice, like the ideal snack that it was, could be consumed indefinitely.
The only similarly inexhaustible snack she could think of were ice's cousins, mints. Altoids specifically (other types of mints were not worth eating). In their astringency and airy yet hard bodies they also bore that nip of discomfort that ice trafficked in. This nip was the sign of the
most refined consumables - the burn of liquor or the tactile bitterness of cigar smoke. In her more pretentious moments, she took pleasure in the thought that anything that went down without this flashed edge were just slop. Most foods: meats, cheeses, potatoes, fruits (not mango or pineapple) were utilitarian caloric slop. She had little time for them. What she did have time for was ice.
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She empties two full trays of ice into a large bowl and eats cube after cube. Crunching them down. Not allowing them to fully melt, feeling her gastroesophogeal junction chill and lose feeling, and then her stomach.
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What limits ones ability to consume ice is one's pain tolerance. Which, after years and years of this behavior, was quite high.
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Her mother had tried and tried to get her to stop, convinced that this habit would ruin her teeth, tragically invalidating the unaffordable sum she'd spent on the girl's braces that their dental plan refused to cover. And it was simply not becoming for a young lady. At some point her mother had gotten so desperate that she'd discarded all their ice trays, dooming everyone in the household to lukewarm beverages. But the seven pound bags of ice they sold at the gas station down the street were cheap enough that scrounging up enough change for one was hardly ever an issue. She'd buy one and sit in the park. Often, birds would wander up, interested in a share of whatever she was enjoying. She'd toss out a handful, perhaps hoping for some connection with an avian cousin, and the birds would rush up excitedly but then look at it quizzically, maybe peck a little, before flapping off in confusion and disappointment. Eventually, her mother relented because her stepdad had raised a stink about there being no ice in the house for him to use in his 7 and 7s. So once order had been restored, they'd sit side by side, her and her stepdad, on the couch, passively watching the game or whatever was on tv, him with his double cocktail in a plastic pint glass, her with her ice in a bowl, the two of them lost in whatever cotton worlds they retreated to in their moments of comfort, bathed in soft glowing snowy light.
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It's a hot and humid summer, overrun with insects. But tonight they're too tired to bother with singing. Far away snow is falling in record amounts, wrecking municipal life. Tropical tarmacs are freezing over and ruining vacation plans. Things are unbalanced. Here, the night holds its breath in anticipation.
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Not everything builds community.
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Of course, she'd met people over the years who had shared her proclivities, but it wasn't the type of activity that could really connect anyone more deeply than acknowledgement of a mutual affinity for the same individualistic and by many accounts aberrant behavior. They'd share a laugh at their odd habit, maybe trade a tip or two, and move on to the next topic or end the conversation, either way never speaking of it again.
Most people she had talked to liked nugget ice, formed from frozen vapor pressed into lumps. She'd eat that in a pinch of course but had always preferred the hard cubes that came from a tray.
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She opens the window to let in a little air, but none comes in. Another handful of ice.
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Soon after her family had left Arizona for the great green north, she'd experienced her first snowstorm. The November day had begun bright, chilly, still - as dry and empty as the vacuum of space. But then the clouds drew in and the air started to feel almost damp. The snow started to float down, faster and faster, quickly piling up on the lawn and covering what little grass remained after the frost had set in. She stood watching it through the window, a little scared of this unfamiliar phenomenon which seemed much more momentous than she'd ever imagined.
It was cold enough inside that her breath was visible before it fogged up the glass. She scraped her finger across its surface and was shocked to find that the vapor had frozen. Her mother retrieved a new puffy coat and scarf and gloves from the closet and, after some coaxing, she had been convinced to go outside. The snow fell from clouds that seemed as dense and close as fog. It held onto the small town's light and and turned a dim pinkish gray. Other kids in the neighborhood ran around hooting, the snowfall having awakened something lawless and primal in them. They fished cardboard boxes out of recycling bins and rode them downhill, right in the middle of the street, until the monstrous plows came to push it all aside and salt the earth. She stood back and watched white hills form along the curb. She saw her mother watching through the window and tried to build a snowman but didn't know how to get it started. She tried to press a snowball in her gloved hand but the snow wouldn't congeal, it just ran through her fingers like dry Mojave sand when she opened her fist.
They ended up getting almost a foot of snow, and despite the great efforts of the plows who had valiantly returned time and time again throughout the night, school was canceled. As the sun climbed in the clear sky the temperature rose with it and the snow began to get a little melty. Her stepdad watched with childlike glee and took her out into the yard, excited to introduce her to the best kind of snow for building snowmen. You wanted it to be a little sticky. They rolled up a big ball to use for the base, laughing aloud as they pushed it further and further, and they managed to get it nearly four feet across. It must have weighed a million pounds, and they really felt it. They left the giant ball sitting there unadorned and went inside for refreshments. On the couch, in accomplished and content silence, they drank hot chocolate, hers with marshmallows and his with a little whiskey.
Overnight, the temperature plummeted. She woke up in the middle of the night, freezing even under her hill of covers, but she didn't know where the thermostat was and was afraid of entering the room where her mother and stepfather slept, so she just went back to bed. Under the blankets she curled as tightly as possible but it was to no avail. Finally, feeling the wretchedness of insomnia, she impulsively got up and put on a sweater and her jacket and snow pants and her boots and went outside to look at the snow. The snowman's base was still sitting there at the end of the canyon it had been dug from. It glistened in the light of the full moon. She walked up to it, removed her glove and felt it with her bare hand - it was as smooth as glass, glazed over in a layer of ice. She put her glove back on and knocked her fist against its surface. With a bit of force it cracked. She peeled away a chunk and bit into it. The texture was sublime. Hard and pure, but with a layer of soft snow beneath. As cold as anything. She tossed the chunk aside and watched it softly shatter on the frozen snowbank. Its pieces scattered and rattled, spinning like figure skaters. She peeled away more of the encasing and scooped away snow, which came out easily in loose handfuls, until she had formed a cavity large enough to crawl into. She climbed in, safe from the wind, looking at the back of her new house. Every single light was off, and everything she could see was lit by the moon. She thought about her mother, her stepfather, and the friends she'd left behind in Arizona. She sat in her egg in the silent void of midnight and waited.
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She feels around in the bowl but comes up empty. The last tray exhausted. Through the open window she can hear her neighbor's windchimes gently singing. There's a low rumble in the distance. She looks out at the pitch black sky, still waiting.
