Dreams Under the Ice (Revised)

Winter, and once again alone on the ice. This is where she came to forget about her troubles, to forget her responsibilities, to avoid her future. This is where she felt strongest. Guiding power into her legs, Mara glided across the frozen pond, leaving little white lines and circle arcs on the surface. Her childhood was spent there, scraping and spinning, falling and learning. The sound of splitting ice spitting snow and carved designs thrilled her in the chilled air. Arms outstretched, bitter wind on her face, she breathed in energy and breathed out art. She shifted her weight and started flying backwards over the light dusting of snow on the ice. The banks, trees, all brilliant white, deadly silent, her thoughts painfully traveled through her mind.

“You should just go into the business field,” her father had told her. “I can’t supply good money for you to go dance on ice.” Practical and frugal, he wasn’t about to hand over thousands of dollars for a skating school. “That’s final.”

“But Dad, I have a shot at the Olympics. You know how I feel about skating. This is the only thing I know how to do. I can’t do anything else.” Her father shook his head and walked into the TV room. “Please, Dad, I’ve never asked for anything else.” That was the last time Mara saw her father.

Skating around the pond, she was surpassing the speed of light as she turned and flew and jumped into a split. Now going backwards, she pumped her legs to gather the speed she needed and pushed into an axel jump, something she had done countless times. Up in the air, she spun, her churning world a blur. Arms pulled in tight, she was in control. The blade on her silver skate blade caught a chip in the ice, and her carefully arranged world came crashing down. Falling hard, she hit the ice amid the white lines and circle arcs that made up her life and came to a standstill lying on her back.

Deadly silent as it was almost a year ago.

“Momma, please don’t die. Please don’t leave me alone,” she said by her mother’s bed, tubes and wires running across the pillow and alongside the bedrail. “Mom, I can’t live without you.” Her father long gone, Mara looked to her mother as her savior and best friend. Her mother smiled at her, squeezed her hand a little, and closed her eyes for the last time. With no family left, Mara buried her mother last spring when everything else in the world was coming back to life. She had no one to turn to, no shoulder to cry one, no arms to embrace her.

Back on the hard ice, Mara’s eyes opened, and she blinked to get the flakes of snow out of her ice gray eyes. “That was not the most graceful landing,” she said to herself. She leaned up on her elbows and looked around; the deafening quiet began to feel unsettling. Snow around the pond muffled the sound of even the wind in the trees. Turning over, she put her hands on the ice to push herself back up. Looking down, she saw something moving under the ice, a dark form, just below. Her eyes must be playing tricks on her; perhaps the sunlight reflected her shadow. She turned over completely and used her gloved hands to wipe away the soft snow from the ice as one would erase the misty fog from a window.

She looked again and terror seized her; had the ice become a mirror? A woman’s face appeared, eyes wide open in horror, bubbles escaping her mouth as her hands scratched at the hardened ice. The desperate woman was shaking her head and attempting to break through the ice. Her face seemed familiar, but Mara didn’t recognize her. Mara’s screams for help echoed across the deserted pond, but no one was there to assist. She violently pounded the ice, trying to find a weak spot, a place for this poor woman to escape the frigid water. Panic started setting in, and Mara redoubled her effort. She pulled off one of her skates and tried to pierce the ice with it. Her sweat froze as she kept hitting the ice, pieces of the frozen pond exploding into tiny bits. After moments of full desperation, Mara heard the ice begin to split. She had to be careful that the split didn’t engulf her as well, the ice as fragile as broken glass.

Water and ice mixed, and crackling sounds filled that moment. The ice caved in a bit, and an arm reached out from the pond, feeling around the top of the ice like a starving child grasping for bread. Mara tried to catch the arm, but instead the hand clutched onto Mara’s wrist, pulling her down. A piercing voice from the water escaped, "This moment in time, it doesn't belong to you.” Terrified, Mara screamed as she struggled to stay on top of the ice, with nothing on the ice to anchor her. The voice bit again, “It belongs to me.” The icy hand was stronger, and Mara felt herself slowly getting closer to the hole in the ice, a crossroad into another world. Her shoulder was next, pulled farther down into the pond. She turned her head, struggling for her life and gasping in the last of her breath before the final moments fell. Her head down, the rest of her body was pulled through the hole. Facing the stranger, she watched as the other climbed out of the hole.

Her eyes open, she blinks to get the flakes of snow out of her dark brown eyes. “That was not the most graceful landing,” she says to herself. Leaning up, she looks around. Looking below her on the pond, she sees the hole that birthed her in the ice, and a single ice skate near it. Gingerly she gets up and skates over to the other skate, and checks out how much the ice is cracked, making sure not to get near it. She stares at the hole and whispers, “Wouldn’t want that to happen again, now would we?”

Out loud she muses, “It’s my turn to live, girl. Never say goodbye to my part of your life.” Her life fresh again, she shakes out her wet hair and skates across the frozen pond, her dark smile never fading from her face. New memories begin, and she looks back over her shoulder and laughs, “Where on your palm is my little line when you're written in mine as an old memory?” Turning forward, she skates away from her past and embraces her new future away from the intimate connection that once pulled her down.