"Something grabs a hold of me tightly..."
Vanilla Ice
Content Warning:
Infrequent Strong Language
"Something grabs a hold of me tightly..."
Vanilla Ice
Content Warning:
Infrequent Strong Language
Sid, An Ice Tale
Sid was a strange one. He didn’t really seem to fit in. He came, frozen, glassy, and perfected, from the godly laboratory into his first winter what seems a long time ago. He began life in the North Pole, so he was used to tough conditions from the word Go. He hung from an overhang, quite far to the left, over a crevice, gleaming, dangling like a large knobbly crystal carrot, held fast (not swaying even an iota in the polar winds).
Yes, in the beginning he was a proud icicle. All the other icicles, his chilly neighbours, hung blankly beside him, not seeming to do very much. They all shared the same opinions, opinions on what seemed to Sid a very small number of subjects. They didn’t talk much because each icicle believed quite correctly that their neighbour shared their views on everything. So they had little to talk about, and little reason to talk in the first place. Sid on the other hand liked to chat, he liked to recite, and soliloquise, and diatribe. He wished to confess to his coworkers how fearfully beautiful he found the empty, vast, pale leagues of sky, and tundra, and desert white. He longed to discuss and describe the tusked walrus, the starving polar bear patrolling the lonely plains, even the cold impotent sun crossing the sky, the green squiggling ecstasy of the Northern lights in the night. He longed to share in the beautiful moaning of the archangelical winds, the twinkling breezes.
All the other icicles did make small talk before work. Occasionally they uttered to one another their concerns about global warming and the melting ice caps. Sid didn’t care about global warming. He hung there in the North Pole, perfectly stiff and cold and content. He hated hearing about fucking global warming. He did not get along with the other icicles. He was always making strange demands on them, testing their patience, even the crystals way down in the crevice- called The Bottom Crystals- found him a pain in the arse.
The icicles went in droves to their supervisors, and line managers. We hate Sid was the general idea. Sid was the most disliked shard of ice in the North Pole. His supervisor didn’t mince words. Everyone hates you Sid, you fucking loony climate change denying arsehole. Adjustment counselling was suggested. It was of paramount importance for Sid to learn trait agreeableness, particularly regarding climate change.
I’m a sharp shard of North Pole ice, Sid protested, why do you expect me to be all peaches and cream? It’s not easy being me. If I had an arse I’d tell you to climb on down out of it.
Following Sid’s insubordinate response, something a little drastic took place.
It was a morning like any other when the ice began to quake. A low drone and a rumble, leagues below in the frozen sheets, began to sound. The icicles were all hanging from their usual spot, in glittering ensemble. On the sunny horizon, a skua swooped with a resounding shriek. The bird had been sailing, and then had dropped, in a terrifying, predatory arc. Just below, in the ice nearby, there was rupture, a sudden sound of splitting, cracking, crashing, as the churning pressure that had been tremoring unreleased reached its culmination, forcing up, into the air from beneath the snapped and wounded ice, a great gloved hand. The wrist of The Hand was pale as alabaster, like marble, but covered in human hairs. The sleeve of the tight, eggshell, medical glove barely reached beyond the base of the giant hand’s palm. The gargantuan fingers, all tightly bound in the glove’s sterile material, flexed wearily, curling and uncurling in sluggish, massive motions, always with great clicks and clacks, the same that sound from the stressed boughs and trunks of old trees when they sway.
The Hand had come for Sid. It revolved in the ground, from the damage of which gushing springs and sudden fizzing celebratory floes like champagne foam shot in crazy jets. Then The Hand loomed fearfully, ensuing towards the icicles like a severed, reanimated whale fin, like some fearsome approaching spirit, a colossal fan of fingers spread wide, casting upon the overhang, the crevice, the ice, a great terrible shadow of itself. Quite daintily, even dextrously, between forefinger and thumb, The Hand picked Sid off the overhang with a pop, dislodging him quite effortlessly, and, between forefinger and thumb, began to take him away. Sid was a large icicle but he was tiny in the digits of The Hand.
Ow, Sid said. The top of his head smarted slightly from the disconnect.
Hooray! the icicles cheered.
Good riddance, The Bottom Crystals cried.
Huuuuuuuuargph! A starving polar bear grunted, lying down to die.
He definitely deserves it, a lone voice squeaked from the ice.
Anaesthesia of a kind prevented Sid from experiencing the journey that followed. The Hand withdrew back into the ground out of which it had burst and subterraneously carried Sid away.
Curiously, when The Hand arrived with Sid in the square of a small seaside town, it emerged from the sky, not the ground. The Hand descended from the clouds to the cobbles of an English coastal settlement. It was summer. The Hand deposited Sid upon a little dais at the centre of the square and was quickly off before anyone noticed the appearance of a giant hand.
Sid was hardly an icicle at all now. Naked, jobless, shorn of his arctic home and his cold friends, he was just a shard of ice. Human people with strange, sad eyes got up from café chairs and pub outside areas and fish and chip stands and gathered around Sid, the shard of ice, as he succumbed to the sun.
He writhed with his torture, as he relinquished his hold upon solidity. His substance glimmered, the moisture trapped for so long within the defining glass of his frame, began to erupt from him, lubricate him. It hurt to feel his form degenerate, devolve like this. The forces of heat deranged him. He had not had the time to feel fear, to feel any apprehension about the hoisted midday sun, bright, large, and hostile above in the blue sky, but he felt the agony of dying. He widened but flattened, dripping all the while. His face fell into his body and his body became the floor, and his shape was overwhelmed by its substance, as his composition, his cold entirety of being, pooled outwards, and he became nothing but a stain of dark, void wetness on the ground. The sun saw efficiently to his final and complete erasure. The stain dried, paled, was gone.
The humans had gathered in great crowds to witness Sid’s demise. Tears filled their eyes. The sun dried their tears. When the ordeal was finally over, and nothing but peace and a kind of forgetting lay upon the stone spot where he had suffered, the humans were not content. They twitched, and they looked about nervously. Children begged for ice creams and parents didn’t hear them. People attempted to return to their beach trips, their days out, their maritime pursuits. But unease hummed like electricity in the air. Necks turned, faces glanced behind shoulders. Even the surreptitious rustle of a strange bird’s wings over their heads, caused the human people to look up, confront the eye that saw them, scamper away from its sight, clutching their children tight.
Back in the North Pole, all the icicles and bottom crystals and shard shapes breathed a collective sigh of relief. An apprehension of a new sort of cleanliness warmed their collective hearts. All genders and orientations, ice of size and ice of colour, shards and crystals and glaciers, permafrost, icebergs, bay ice, bergy bits and bights, all rejoiced that peace and tolerance were majesty again.
As the chilly sun descended in the west that day, the starving polar bear lay, a spreadeagled corpse at last, upon a blistering icesheet. Ultimately, he had succumbed to starvation. In the orange evening, a crepuscular skua flurried down with a clatter of wings and claws and inspected the body. It was beginning to stink but would soon find itself preserved, freezer-food in the freezing night. Faint tracks of wavering green aurora began to wiggle and coil like water snakes in the twilight sky. The skua plunged his barbed beak into the bear’s entrails, stumbling back in a small spouting eruption of flesh and blood-jets. Then he leapt quickly forward, and began to feast. He was alone for only a very short while. His friends rallied around him soon enough. There was more than enough bear for all the birds. Until a skeletal fox, furiously hungry, showed up.