Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories by Nancy Christie

Author:Nancy Christie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780986064982
Publisher: Pixel Hall Press
Published: 2014-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

Skating on Thin Ice

“For the twelfth straight day, the high temperature will only reach single digits, setting a new record—”

I turn off the radio before I can hear the rest of the forecast. When I was a child, weather like this meant the pond behind my parents’ house would be frozen—glass-smooth and hard as tempered steel. We would gather on the shore, where some kind neighbor had lit a bonfire, and alternately toast our faces and our backsides while strapping on the high-topped, sharp-bladed skates.

The unsafe portions of the ice were clearly marked. Ominous red flags warning “Weak Ice” were posted on the thinner surface, and stiff brown ropes were strung from pole to pole, confining the young to the safer areas.

As a child, I obeyed the warning, but once safely into the invulnerable teenage years, I joined friends in daring each other to leap the cord and try their luck on the melting surface.

Most of the time, our luck held. Skate lines crisscrossed each other in ever-deepening slices, and sometimes the rifle-sharp crack from below the surface would scare us back behind the rope. But never for very long. First one, then another would tip-toe on skate point, and, seeing no widening breach, no ominous fluid darkness, venture back onto the thin ice.

But luck can not be tempted indefinitely without demanding payment. The year I was fifteen, eight older boys played crack-the-whip on the unsafe section, sending one of their own sailing out alone under the moonlight. A widening black line followed him, but there wasn’t enough time to stop. And, in the end, he was simply swallowed up like a long-awaited meal.

“Paul! Paul!”

The shouts echoed across the darkening night, until someone had the presence of mind to call a parent, the police, the ambulance.

By then, it was too late.

There was no more skating on the pond after that, and the following summer, the neighbors banded together to hire an excavating company to fill it in—the largest single gravesite I have ever seen.

I have since learned that thin ice is not only a condition of winter, nor confined to stretches of frozen water. There is thin ice everywhere—between lovers and friends, between reality and obsession, between hope and despair.

And sometimes, the only warning you receive is the sharp crack just before the ice breaks and you fall through—to nowhere.

When I was five years old, we moved from the sunshine and sand of southern Florida to this cold state of Ohio, where bare tree limbs cast stark shadows against the whitened landscape. Snow was an unfriendly stranger—chilling my suntanned skin, reddening my face—and the dazzling reflection of the sun off its white surface was painfully bright.

My father was taking me ice-skating on the frozen pond in the park—not because he wished to spend time with me, but to escape the house where my mother was.

My mother was “sleeping.” My mother always “slept” in the afternoon. Among the many bags and boxes we brought in our battered Ford wagon was the hidden truth of my mother’s sickness.

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