Back on the Ice - Flash Fiction by Kathryn Gossow

 

Back on the Ice

Flash Fiction

by Kathryn Gossow

 

She misses that glacial air. Skirting the skating rink, her skates shredding snowflakes of the ice.  Her new classmates, with their sunburnt noses and freckled shoulders, are desert rats, stupid, backward, ugly. Except for Kay, of course. There is something special about Kay.

Outside her classroom, the hot wind explodes into her face. She rolls a can of soft drink between her hands, cooling them. She presses the can against each of her cheeks, chilling the red of the wind-scorch from her face, bringing back, she hopes, the alabaster white of her skin.

Across the quadrangle, she lifts herself onto the low brick wall beside Kay.  He turns to her and says, "It's the Snow Queen."  It's his nickname for her. She doesn't hate it. Their legs dangle together.

She opens the soft drink, and it hisses with the freshness of a waterfall. With a cool hand on his forearm, she offers him a drink.

He takes the can, their fingertips brushing. He tilts his head back to drink, revealing a new pattern of bruises on his neck. Fresher, blue fingertip-shaped alongside the matching set of yellowing old bruises she'd noticed last week.  He hands back the drink and adjusts his frayed collar over the marks. 

She places the drink on the wall beside her and kicks her heels against the bricks. The gritty wind sweeps a ball of dust at them.

She wipes the grit from her eyes and blinks, frowning the acid smell of cow dung stings her nostrils. “How can you stand it?"

He shrugs. “You get used to it."

"I never want to get used to it." She twirls a tress of her peroxided hair around her finger. It is pretty, she thinks, like white tulle. "Do you understand the math assignment?"

"A bit," he replies.

"Of course you do," she smiles tilting her head to the side, a move she has decided makes the most of her long and graceful neck, "algorithms and equations are your friends. What does a simultaneous equation mean?"

"It just means there are two equations with two unknowns," he rubs his hands together and crosses his arms as though ashamed of his smarts. There used to be times when her fingers twitched, wanting to lift his eye patch and see where they say the broken glass pierced his eyeball.  But she has since realised she doesn't need to look under his eye patch to see his injuries. She can see his injuries in the murky brown of his remaining eye.  She’d seen them the day his father pulled up in front of the school, mine dust on his clothes and his car, his voice harsh on the searing wind. She had watched Kay shrink into himself.

"Maths!’ she grumbles, “why so complicated?"

He shrugs.

"So," she continues, "how do I do them, simultaneous equations? Do I use the square root because there is, like, two of them?"

"No!" he laughs and shakes his head.

She sighs, "I need at least a B on this assignment, to you know…"

"Pass, get a good score, and go back to where you came from," he says gravely.

She bumps his shoulder with hers. "You know me so well."

"I can help," he says. "Be your tutor."

"After school? But you have Greta to look after. Maybe if we work at your house, I could help?"

"No, not my house, it's too far out of town."

She knows where he lives. One weekend she made her father drive her out there, out past the mines, past the scarred hills, beyond civilisation.  She'd seen his house, the drab of the curtains that fluttered out of the open windows, the brown dry of the paddocks around it, the flat emptiness of it. She'd imagined Greta, his sister, inside the house, bedridden and damaged. She imagined Kay, her only companion, reading to her. Did he resent the responsibility? Would Greta miss him? It didn't matter either way. She was his Snow Queen and she would have her way.

"You can’t come to my house, my father won't allow boys in the house," she lies. "He thinks they all want to seduce me."

He blushes at that. She knew he would.

"How about the library? At lunchtime?" he suggests.

"We could, but would that be enough time?"  She sighs.

"I could do the assignment for you."

"That wouldn't be right, would it?" She picks up the can and holds the cool drink against her lips. Dust twists around them in a strangled dance and slams in gusts against the school buildings. Nothing at all like the delicate dance of snowflakes on a breeze.

The bell for the next class rings and she springs off the wall, landing with the elegant poise of a ballerina.  She stands in front of him, face to face, leans in and kisses his forehead with her ice-cold lips.

"You're a good friend," she says. "When I leave, you could come with me."

He blushes again, and she gives him her drink. "Have this," she says, "it'll cool you down."

She heads to class, a half-smile on her lips. She would get back down south to her city with the glittering glass towers and flashing lights. Back to where the cold southerly winds blow up from the Antarctic. She slides her feet along the cement, skating in the red dust. Back to her beloved ice rink.

Kay will tag along.

Kathryn Gossow loves jonquils, decaying buildings, sarsaparilla, lemon curd, cold winds, warm spring days, music festivals and true crime. A committed genre hopper, Kathryn Gossow’s novel Cassandra was a fantasy finalist in the Aurealis Awards. Her collection of short stories, The Dark Poet warns of the dangers of charismatic men. Her third novel, Taking Baby for a Walk is a small-town thriller. Kathryn is a co-editor of South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21^st Century anthology. www.kathryngossow.net.au