Birthday Wishes
Bright red candle wax had melted and hardened into pools on the white birthday cake.
It looked a bit like blood, honestly. And the icing, it looked a little like snow, but outside, there was no snow. It was gray and miserable, and if there had been any blood, the ceaseless rain would have washed it away.
Outside.
And inside, well, there are different ways to bleed.
The birthday cake sat on a dining table laden with pretty china and heavy, ornate silverware. The china was littered with sandwich crumbs, the knives and forks smeared with butter and jam. Napkins crumpled like fallen roses beside each setting.
It had been such a lovely party.
#
“Where am I?” asked Agnes Agnew, who hated her name and her shoes and had hated her birthday party, which was why she’d made that wish. It had all been so boring, and her mother’s sandwiches had been dry and they’d still had the crusts on. Both her parents forced her to give pretty little scallop-edged invitations to all the silly girls at school, absolutely none of whom liked Agnes.
She had no idea why. And it didn’t matter. She didn’t like any of them, either. So there.
Here, all around her, was a sort of thick white mist. Somewhere in the depths of it, something went thump.
Agnes looked around, but she couldn’t see a thing. “Hello? I asked where I am, and it’s polite to answer.”
Something went thump again.
Two somethings.
Agnes’s first impression was of…stars. No, that couldn’t be right, but the woman’s dress glittered like a thousand of them, twinkling ice-blue, catching little pinpoints of light, though there were still no lights here that Agnes could see. The woman stomped out of the white mist, dark hair in tangled disarray, pale skin flushed at the cheekbones.
“My, my,” said the woman. “Impatient little thing, aren’t you? I’m coming. Four hundred and twenty-three birthdays I’ve done today, and it’s no lark, I can tell you. Where do you children even think up these things to wish for? Do you know how difficult it is to snap my fingers and create a perfectly crisp toffee apple after November the first? There are laws, I can’t just go running around bending all of them. And everyone expects me to do it all in these ridiculous heels, even though no one ever sees me. Because that makes complete sense, of course.”
“Who are you?” asked Agnes, momentarily distracted from the bigger question of where, in fact, she was.
“Your birthday wishes don’t grant themselves when you blow out those candles, you know.
“So you’re, like, a birthday fairy? And what kind of idiot wishes for a toffee apple when they blow out their candles? I hope it made them sick.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “A poor little boy who’s never had one, I expect. You must be Agnes.”
“Yes. And for the last time, I want to know where I am. What is this place?”
“It is…a place,” said the woman. “I suppose you could say it is my home.”
“Love what you’ve done with it.” Agnes sneered, glancing around again into the vast swathe of fog.
The woman-fairy’s hand twitched. The mist cleared.
And Agnes gasped.
The high, stone walls of a magnificent castle rose around them. It had turrets and everything. Below Agnes’s party shoes and all over the courtyard, green grass grew. A huge tree grew in one corner. In another, a table not unlike the one in Agnes’s home was set for a party.
Including a large, white cake with red candles.
“You have a very interesting mind, you know.” The sparkles on the dress shone a hundred times brighter in the sunlight that now poured down. “It’s really very rare that someone can do what you did—wish for two things at precisely the same moment. You wanted everyone to go away and you wanted to be somewhere else. Unusual. And most children do enjoy their birthday parties. Just a friendly tip, there, for next year.”
“It was horrible. And Jessica tried to pin the tail on me instead of the donkey.”
“Astonishing.”
Agnes sensed she was being insulted, but for perhaps the first time in her life, she chose not to say anything. There were too many other important questions, and she wanted to run off, to explore the castle, if she could just slip away…
“Don’t even consider it,” said the woman. Fairy. Whatever she was. “When someone like you comes along, thankfully rarely, I bring them here for a wee little talking-to. A chat, you might say. Come, sit down.”
Agnes felt her feet being pulled along, as if by an invisible hand, toward the pretty table. The woman waved her hand again and two chairs slid out. Agnes tried to take the one at the head, but it shifted at the very last minute, and only by grabbing the table did she manage to stop herself from falling right over.
The woman pointed at the other one. Agnes sat. A teapot raised itself into the air and poured its contents into two mugs.
“Milk? Sugar?”
Agnes shook her head.
“Right then. I work very hard,” said the woman, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin and then crumpling it like a fallen rose beside her plate. “So did the one before me, and the one before her. It’s not easy, running around and granting wishes all the time.”
“That’s really what you do?” asked Agnes.
“Oh, yes. Parents are lovely, you see. And grandparents, friends, aunts and uncles. Throw the child a wonderful party, most of the time. But some wishes…some wishes are just for us.”
Agnes thought of that morning, when she had pulled on her dress and tights and shiny, buckled shoes, never telling her mother and father that she didn’t want the party to begin with. She would have been happy with just the presents.
“And of the wishes that are just for us,” the woman continued, “some are easy, and some are…not. But we grant them all, no matter what.”
“So?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed again. “So, young lady, I brought you here to tell you there are a great many worse off than you, and some, like me, who work harder. Stop being such an ungrateful little brat. I spent an hour on you alone today, not just bringing you here, but sending all the others home, where they’ll have memories of a lovely afternoon, nothing out of the ordinary. Your parents are having a nice nap.”
“You can do that?”
“Not the point!” snapped the woman. “The point… The point is that I’m a generous sort, because I have to be. So you get another chance. I’m going to light the candles on that cake, there, and you’re going to make a nice wish. A good, proper wish, befitting a good little girl. I don’t even care if you don’t mean it. You’ll do it, and then we’ll all get on with our day, shall we?”
Agnes considered this. Deep down, in the darkest corners of her heart, she knew she’d been just a little bit awful to her parents, and Jessica had only tried to pin the tail on her because Agnes had pinched her first. And at school…she didn’t exactly speak to any of them, ever.
She put on a big, bright smile. “All right,” she said.
The candles flared to life. Agnes took a deep breath.
#
Agnes’s second first impression was of stars. They flared all around her as she twirled in the dress. The high heeled shoes did thump when she stepped.
Her wish echoed in her head. I wish to be you.
She thought of the little boy who had wanted a toffee apple.
Oh, this was going to be marvelous fun.
January: And The Year Comes ‘Round Again
It was a year ago this very week–said the wrinkled hag, pulling her threadbare cloak closer against the freezing wind, and somehow simultaneously pointing a crooked cane at you in warning–
–(figuratively, of course: in reality, I am wearing a rather chic wool raspberry-colored coat, and pointing at you with one long, elegant finger and shiny, plum-painted nail)–
–anyway: it was a year ago THIS VERY WEEK that we four Cabinet curators first began to share our delicious and horrifying story collections on this website.
Much has happened in that year: we have fought with bad luck, poison flowers, lizard people, rightly furious whales–oh, the list goes on. Why in the past year, nigh-on to fifty terrifying tales have scrolled down and down these death-blue pages! cried the wrinkled hag, etc etc.
This year we have also begun preparations for a book of our adventures, including a number of new tales too dreadful to have been included here in public. That book will assume physical form in your trembling hands on May 27 of this year.
In honor of this anniversary, and that significant day, this month our stories will focus on calendars, and anniversaries, and other important dates.
So happy anniversary to us. Put on your party hats, boys and girls.
But be very, very, careful when, quite suddenly, all of the lights go out.
The Carolers
(Dear readers: Curator Bachmann froze off three of his fingers this month while in pursuit of a deadly sort of child who pulls winter around itself like a cloak and wanders the deep forests of Kazakhstan. He therefor opted to give you a poem instead. He is not a poet, but he hopes you will forgive him this deficit. And now, all of us at the Cabinet wish you very happy and curious holidays.)
Do you hear them in the moonlight—
Hear their footsteps in the dark?
Seven voices deep as thunder,
Seven faces split like bark.
They wear cloaks as red as berries,
And their eyes are black as night,
They have bells upon their fingertips
That glimmer cold and bright.
They have come to sing a carol,
Sing it right into your ear,
In their misty, twisty voices,
Deep as thunder, dark as fear.
It will start quite soft, like velvet,
‘T’will be cold as any snow.
It will whisper up the staircase
And slip underneath your door.
And then all at once they’ll shriek it,
And you’ll hear it in your dreams.
And you’ll have a little heart-attack;
You’ll wake up with a scream. . . .
For their song, it sounds of stealing,
And of empty living rooms,
And of broken, torn-up presents,
And of trees, like twiggy brooms.
*
They are singing on the street now.
They are gliding down the way.
Silent footsteps in the moonlight,
Sending snow up in a spray.
They are floating at your window;
See their hands against the glass.
They are coming! They are coming!
Pull the covers, pull them fast!
*
But wait, fear not, they won’t come in.
They’re not allowed, you see:
For there’s a little mistletoe
To guard the room for me.
The carolers will glimpse it,
And will hiss and swoop away.
They’ll find another child to haunt,
Another place to stay.
For where houses glow with kindness,
And with laughter and with light,
There the presents will stay lovely,
Through the long and wintry night.
But where houses drip with sadness
Brim with anger and regret,
There the carolers come singing,
And turn everything a wreck.
All the fancy little baubles
And the wind-up type-machine
Will be corkscrews and be coal-dust
By the sun’s next golden beam.
*
So then when you hear the tinkle
Of their gleaming finger-bells,
And the carolers are near you,
Though no one ever tells. . . .
You can smile a little secret
And curl up into a ball,
And can sleep ’til Christmas morning
And you need not wake at all.
The Cold Witch
The day the cold witch came began with a gray, gaspingly cold dawn.
That morning, the entire world seemed made of frosted iron–black buildings and black roads, black trees and people bundled up in black coats and scarves and hats, and through it all, fat white flakes that managed to find their way into even the most cleverly fastened boots. There was not a warm, dry foot in the city that day, and everyone Timothy encountered seemed lost in a storm of their own grumpiness.
Timothy, however, was not. In fact, Timothy spent the day quietly, jubilantly happy. Winter had always been his favorite season.
It was not a popular choice, as far as favorite seasons go. There is the matter of slushy streets and shoveling snow, and having your breath slammed out of you when you first step out of the house on bitter cold mornings. Most people find winter unpleasant, and even emotionally exhausting.
But Timothy was not one of those people. There was something about this time of year that resounded within him like bells. Everything about the season seemed wrapped in secrets: pedestrians encased in bulky coats, doors and windows closed tightly against the elements, the earth itself hidden away by a blanket of frozen white.
There was also the idea that everything died, or went to sleep, or changed somehow, during a certain time of year, only to come back again. There was that whole idea of things coming back to themselves, of life being created out of brown grass and naked branches and gray skies. The concept of this appealed to Timothy in a kind of primal fashion he was not yet able, at eleven years old, to describe. Maybe it was that all the dead things surrounding him made him think about death, which made him feel small and tremendous at the same time. Maybe he was just an especially imaginative boy.
But whatever the reason, when Timothy felt his boots grind fresh snow against the pavement and heard the accompanying muffled crunch, he felt that anything was possible. He felt that the door between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the hidden, was cracked open a bit at this time of year. He felt closer to the secret parts of the world when his breath puffed in the air before him and he woke to a neighborhood quiet with snow.
Quiet, as if waiting for something to happen.
And, one evening, it did.
One evening, Timothy was sitting around the table for dinner, with his mother and father and sisters. Bored by their conversation, he glanced out the window at the snow sweeping furiously along their lamplit street. He felt the wild urge to go out into the thick of it, and explore snowdrifts, and venture into dark forests where naked branches clacked against one another in the wind.
He did not understand these urges he so often felt when the nights were long and the sunlight was scarce.
But he would soon. He would that very night.
For there she stood, out on the street, huddled beneath a lamp and gazing longingly at his house. His house. Timothy’s house, out of all the houses she could have chosen.
She wore hardly anything–a dark dress, torn and thin. She wore no shoes.
Timothy stared out at her, and she stared back. She was only a girl, not much older than he. Her eyes were dark, and reflected no light. They held something of danger within them.
She was, as he would soon find out, the cold witch.
*
Timothy went outside to her. He had no choice! Something about her slight, strange figure in the snow compelled him. He put on his coat and boots and hat, and snuck out while his father washed dishes, while his mother and sisters chatted in the living room.
They wouldn’t miss him; they never did.
He didn’t blame them; they weren’t mean-hearted people. It’s just that his sisters were far more interesting, far more talkative, far more normal than he was. He wasn’t bitter about it.
And, now, he was glad for it.
Now, he stood outside in the snow with his breath coming high and thin because it was too cold to breathe too deeply. Snow stuck to his lashes and his lips, and snow stuck to the girl before him, too–to her lashes and lips, to the ends of her long dark hair. It outlined her in white. She did not seem cold; she shivered not at all.
“Who are you?” Timothy asked. “Aren’t you cold?”
She didn’t say anything for so long a time that Timothy worried he had offended her somehow. Then she said, “I am always cold,” and her voice was as thin and fragile as a sheet of ice over warming water.
But there was a strength to her eyes–those dark, tar-thick eyes. They did not reflect the lamplight. They did not reflect Timothy, or the snow, or the light of the windows of his house.
They dared him to do . . . something. They watched him, waiting, testing.
He took off his coat, and winter flew into him–arrow-sharp, arrow-deep–but he gritted his teeth and swallowed his gasps and handed it to her.
And as he stood there, teeth beginning to chatter–after only a moment, when this barefooted girl stood calm and completely without frostbite, for who knows how long!–her expression changed.
It changed to one of great sadness.
“No,” she said, and gently pushed the coat back at him. “I cannot.”
Bewildered, Timothy stood there gaping, stubbornly holding out the coat even so. “But you’ll freeze to death!”
The girl smiled, again with that sadness that looked strange on the face of one so young. Or was she young? Timothy couldn’t tell. She seemed, somehow, to have many years etched into her smile.
“I won’t. I never will die from the cold, but I will always feel it.”
“Who are you?” asked Timothy, putting his coat back on with clumsy, half-frozen fingers.
“I am the cold witch,” said the girl after a moment, and when she said the words, she held herself a bit taller, and lifted her chin into the air. Her dark hair whipped about her like brambles.
The way she said the words made it sound to Timothy as if “cold witch” was not a way to describe herself, but was rather a kind of title.
“What’s that?” Timothy asked, feeling stupid.
“It’s all right,” the cold witch said, sighing and turning her strange black eyes back to Timothy’s house. “You’re not supposed to know what the cold witch is. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you right now, but I’ve found that I would like to stop caring about such things.”
And Timothy found that the cold witch’s voice held within it a tone rather like the howl of a lonely winter wind. “About what things?”
“About the rules.”
“The rules of what?” Timothy was beginning to feel frustrated. This girl was answering his questions, but not really, not enough to understand the answers.
The cold witch turned to look at him. Her expression was careful. “If I tell you a story, will you get bored? Will you laugh at me? Will you sit with me on your porch while I tell it? It’s not as cold up there, out of the wind, but it’s cold enough that things won’t . . . happen.”
“I will do neither of the first two things,” said Timothy indignantly. “I love stories, and I’m not so rude as to laugh at someone out of nowhere. And of course we can sit on the porch, but . . .” Cold enough that things won’t . . . happen. “Couldn’t we go inside instead?”
“We could. We could, but it wouldn’t be a very good idea.” And yet the cold witch licked her lips as she turned once again to gaze at the house, at the glowing windows and their frost-framed panes. A sharp look crossed her face–one of hunger, Timothy thought, one that made her young face look older, and not quite so girlish anymore.
He thought, for an instant, he had seen a flash of sharp teeth. He thought he had felt a surge of energy come from this girl, not unlike how he imagined it would feel to receive a mild electrical shock.
“But we could go inside,” the cold witch mused, and then her black eyes locked with Timothy’s beneath his hat, and before Timothy knew it, he had taken the cold witch by her small, pale hand. He was leading her up the stairs and into his house, and into the living room, where his mother and sisters lounged before the fire.
“Who is this? Timothy?” His mother sat up, her cheeks pink from warmth. His sisters, piled up against each other like rag dolls, also sat up, rubbing their eyes, stretching their socked legs.
“Well,” Timothy began, but then stopped. For he couldn’t just introduce her as “the cold witch,” could he? His reputation for being the strange one of the family was solid enough already. His father stood now in the doorway of the living room, and Timothy could feel his disappointment from here.
But there was no need for Timothy to speak; the cold witch spoke for him.
“I am the cold witch,” she said, and there was nothing funny about it. Her voice deepened, and there again was that flash of something ravenous across her face, and when she raised her arms, all the lights went out.
The fire extinguished. The light bulbs burst in their lamps.
And the cold . . . the cold from outside.
It was outside no longer.
The cold rushed in as though the cold witch had, with the movement of her arms, opened a great door to admit a beast made of sharp wind and stabbing ice. It had an immense presence to it, like that of drowning. This was not Timothy’s winter of quiet white woods and frosted glass.
This was a winter of anger.
Timothy collapsed, his legs knocked out from under him by the sheer force of the wind slicing at him. There was so much snow in the air that he felt suffocated. He tried to grab for his coat and draw it more tightly around him, but his fingers were stiff and cracking with ice. He could not breathe; he could not move, or open his eyes more than a sliver. His eyelashes were weaving together with cold.
Was he about to die?
He searched for his parents, his sisters, but he could see nothing but storming white and black. He had failed them. He had led this girl into the house–why?–and now there was a feeling of death in the house, as this storm of wind and snow raged, and it was his fault. He let his limbs collapse and pressed his face into the carpet; ice coated the fibers like glass. The cold was wrapping him into darkness.
But then . . .
A warm glow, as from amber light.
He turned toward it, forcing his eyelids open. He was sobbing, somewhere inside himself, but he did not have the energy for tears. Was there light still, in this house of winter?
There was.
It surrounded the cold witch. It was the cold witch. And even in his misery, Timothy felt his heart stir at the sight of her. She had fallen to her knees, and her arms were outstretched. Tears streamed down her face, and she was smiling, and shaking, and her cheeks were no longer pale but pink, and when she opened her eyes to look at Timothy, they were blue. Not black, but blue.
She glowed with an inner light. She glowed with the light of fire, and with lamplight, and with the light of the afternoon sun.
“What are you?” Timothy tried to say.
The cold witch turned toward him, her face full of sorrow. She hurried toward him, her limbs like willow branches, her face like summer. “I am the cold witch,” she said, and gathered him into her arms. And then Timothy did cry, for with the cold witch’s warm skin pressed to his, some of the feeling returned to his frozen arms, legs, toes, fingers. The pain of thawing out was almost as awful as the pain of freezing straight through.
“I am the cold witch,” she said again and again, her cheek pressed against the top of Timothy’s head, her hands rubbing warmth back into his arms, “and I have a story to tell you.”
*
Once there were two worlds.
One was full of people so fragile they should not have existed, but for some reason they did. They called themselves humans.
The other world was full of sorcerers so powerful they were a danger to themselves and to everyone around them.
The sorcerers experimented with their power often, performing greater and wilder tricks to impress each other. For it is easy to become bored, when you are that mighty and existing is such an easy thing to do.
But they forgot themselves, once. They forgot that theirs is not the only world there is, and that not everyone is as powerful as they. That day, their magic erupted into the human world.
Mountains toppled, and seas flooded the shores. Storms raged, and the sky was made of fire, and winter–true winter–spread across the human lands like a plague.
The humans–dear, delicate things–stood no chance of surviving this. They died in swarms, begging for mercy from the heavens, begging for help from . . . where?
From us, though they did not know it.
Twelve of us were chosen for the task. We could not undo the damage caused by our careless actions, but we could keep it from worsening. We could control it.
Twelve of us: the fire lord and the sea queen; the mountain king and the lady of the skies; the keeper of beasts, and six others, knights, who guard the gates between worlds.
And the cold witch, who holds true winter at bay.
True winter is the greatest villain of all, cunning and hungry. In the world of sorcerers, it is mild, tame as a mischievous cub. But in the human world, it is vicious, a titan with no regard for life. It is impossible to control entirely; tendrils of it snake out now and again, leaving destruction behind.
The cold witch cannot stop true winter from existing, but she can keep the humans from feeling it. She can prevent their suffering.
She can take their cold from them and endure it herself.
So she does, and she will.
*
“Even when it hurts her,” the cold witch murmured into Timothy’s hair. Her voice was full of tears, and it was a child’s voice, somehow, even though she spoke of centuries-long ages, of sorcerers and titans. “Even when it hurts her, even when it hurts her, she endures it herself.”
“Except,” Timothy began, his warming breath coming up in coughs, “for tonight.”
“She accepts the pain, because it is her fault. It is our fault. We did this to you. We did this to you, my dear.” The cold witch cupped Timothy’s face and raised it gently so that they could look into each other’s eyes.
“I am sorry,” whispered the cold witch, and when she blinked, fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. “I didn’t mean to do it, to unleash the cold upon you tonight. That is, I did mean to, but now, now that I see you before me, with your tears and your pain . . . And you were so kind to me, boy. You were so kind to me tonight, and this is how I repay you?”
She is beautiful, Timothy thought, and she was–but that did not excuse her.
“It hurts you sometimes,” Timothy said, “doesn’t it? It hurt you tonight. It was hurting you, so you let yourself give in.”
“It always hurts,” said the cold witch. “But isn’t that what I deserve, for what we did?” She put the back of her hand against his forehead. Her smile was wistful. “Such fragile creatures, and yet so strong. I don’t understand how you endure each day.”
Something about her words triggered awareness in Timothy. He shook the fog from his mind–the fog of the cold witch’s beauty, of her lonesome voice telling the story of two worlds.
“My family,” he croaked, looking wildly about as best he could, weak in the cold witch’s arms. The house was a confusion of white; the furniture had been transformed into jagged towers of ice. He could not breathe without immense pain. True winter. “You have to save them! They’ll freeze!”
“Don’t worry,” said the cold witch, and she pressed a kiss to Timothy’s forehead–a kiss he would never forget. Nor would he forget the sorrow in the cold witch’s eyes as they darkened from blue to black. Her cheeks fading from pink to white, her face sharpening with the look of someone in constant pain–he would forget none of these things.
“But there has to be a way,” he said, even now, after what she had done, after what she had almost done. Even now, he would have given her his coat. “As powerful as you are, there has to be a way you can help us and not have to hurt yourself. I mean, you’re a sorcerer, right? I bet you can think of something.”
A thought occurred to him then–a wild, desperate thought. A longing thrummed through him that he had never felt before.
“Maybe,” he suggested, as winter faded from the house, and his parents and his sisters, huddled together on the floor, began to stir awake, “maybe if you had someone to help you? Someone who could take some of the pain so you wouldn’t have to feel all of it.”
Timothy reached for the cold witch’s hand.
She shied away, a strange smile on her face.
Winter had always been his favorite season.
He felt that the door between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the hidden, was cracked open a bit at this time of year.
His house, out of all the houses she could have chosen.
Timothy’s hand, so near the cold witch’s hand, tingled with a strange energy.
Magic?
Or maybe simply warmth coming back to cold fingers?
Timothy’s father mumbled his name in a perplexed question, and the fire sprang back to life in the hearth, but Timothy ignored these things.
“What’s your name?” he asked the cold witch, but before the words could leave his lips, she had gone, the front door cracked open in her wake. Footprints of frost marked her path on the tiled floor.
“What’s your name?” Timothy called out, running down the street after her. The crunch-crunch of his boots against the snow, the clouds of his breath in the air.
The last look the cold witch had thrown him–her black eyes, her sad gaze, the flash of teeth too sharp for a girl.
He stood there, in the light of the street lamp, searching the snow for her. He would always search the snow for her.
And maybe, he told himself every year, when the first frost iced the ground and the world turned from gold to gray, this would be the year he would find her again. Maybe this would be the year she took his hand instead of moving away from it. Maybe she would give him the gift of her name.
Diamonds and Dimes
The boy had waited over an hour. First he sat alone in the December dark, watching as the other orchestra students were swept into parental cars: a car door opening, a whoosh of warmth, and a slam as the car spun back into the darkness.
The woman in the last car popped her head out the window. “Is someone coming for you? Can I call, or help, or—?” Her nose was red, and she looked cold, and like she was hoping he would say no. So he said no. Thanks anyway.
Snow began falling, large delicate flakes, seesaw-swinging down. He tried once more to call his father, got voice mail again. He held his violin case in front of him as the snow piled up in silent drifts.
Since he lost his job, his father had been getting less reliable, less predictable. Anything made him angry, some days; other days he laughed too loud and hard. Once, when the boy got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he had found his father sitting in a chair with a can of beer in his hand, head thrown back, asleep. His mother worked late most nights, now, and had developed a tendency to slam doors.
The boy stood up for his long walk. Which way? The field was a shorter walk, but scarier, with no lights to guide you and greater possibility of getting lost. But the road was scary, too, especially in the snow and darkness—trucks roaring past too close on the narrow shoulder, cars skidding on black ice.
So the field, then. The boy heaved up his violin, heading into a wind that slipped like a sharp knife under his coat and skin. Snow crunched under his boots.
He walked for some time. The wind swept the snow into a veil that swirled around and around him. The lights of school and road were long gone. He was walking lost, maybe not even in the right direction. His boots plunged on through the thickening drifts. He tried not to be afraid.
Then, as happens, his right boot plunged straight through a snow crust and down. He stumbled, trying to straighten up. But it was too late—his foot could not find solid earth. And now neither foot could. He had broken through the crust of snow, and was falling impossibly, falling and falling and falling.
He landed, hitting hard on his back, violin in his arms. He lay on the snow. Stars glittered above him.
Wait, no: not stars. A man was standing over him, smiling, tossing tiny glittering objects from hand to hand, objects made of silver and light. That was the stars.
I must have hit my head quite hard, the boy thought.
The man was snowy pale, with hair as black as trees in snow, and silvery-cool eyes. His suit was as black as his hair.
“I’ll pay you,” said the man, dreamily. “I’ll pay you to play, in dimes. No, that’s not right—I mean, in diamonds. One of those two. Oh yes, that’s it: I’ll pay you to play in diamonds or dimes, your choice. You choose. But choose carefully.”
Now the boy saw: it was diamonds and dimes the snow-pale man was tossing from hand to hand: thin silver dimes, and diamonds like tiny shards of ice. He tossed them in a slow arc like playing cards, back and forth, back and forth.
The boy’s head hurt badly, but he thought: diamonds. If their money troubles were over, wouldn’t his parents . . . ? His father . . .?
“I choose to play for diamonds,” said the boy.
“Ah: for diamonds, then, you must play for the lady,” said the snow-pale, tree-black man. He turned and strode off, thrusting hands in his pockets jauntily, letting the diamonds and dimes drop to the ground.
And yet they did not drop to the ground. They hung in the spot where the man had been standing, like snow in a photograph, like stars come back to earth. Diamonds and dimes, slowly twirling in the air.
Carefully, the boy plucked starry diamonds from the air around him, until he had fistfuls, until he filled his pockets. The dimes he carefully avoided. That was the agreement.
Then he ran across the dim snowy space to find the man.
The pale man stood now beside a single black tree. The tree bent over an ice-covered lake, as if it were leaning down to look within. The man walked a few steps out onto the snow-crusted ice and bent over, just like the tree.
The boy with the diamond-stuffed pockets joined him.
Beneath the ice lay a frozen woman. Long white hair flowed from her head, mingling with the white ice. Her ice-colored eyes were wide open. She stared up at the man, the boy, the tree.
“Play for her,” said the white-and-black man.
The boy warmed his fingers under his arms for a moment. Then he lifted his violin from its case and played. It was a simple melody, threaded with yearning and tenderness, a melody that folded back into itself over and over, each passage reflecting the one before, like a hall of mirrors.
The boy didn’t see, because he looked only into the woman’s icy, frozen eyes. But as he played, each note became a snowflake twisting up and away in the cold wind. Snow poured out of his violin into the black sky.
The song ended. The boy looked up at the man; but the man’s eyes remained upon the woman in the ice. The boy looked back down.
Slowly, very slowly, the woman smiled.
And when she smiled, just to the left of her mouth, a tiny crack appeared in the ice.
Within seconds, the crack had spread beneath the boy’s feet. And before the thought had time to cross his mind, I’d better go— the ice beneath his feet groaned, and cracked, and collapsed.
So cold, the water. Gasping, the boy felt his heart had surely stopped. He knew his breath had stopped. For a moment, everything held frozen.
Then, in a split second, icy water, raging with its new freedom, dragged him under the ice.
Underwater, the current handled him roughly, turning him upside down, backwards, and around again, as if it were searching for something. Then the water found what it was looking for. Helplessly, dragged backwards, his hands outstretched, the boy watched as his pockets were turned inside out and the diamonds poured away from him like a school of wild, translucent fish, into the vast and icy lake.
“I didn’t say you could keep them,” said a silvery voice, far away.
The lake tumbled and turned the boy for a long time. It threw him up to catch his breath only just often enough, then pulled him back into its freezing depths.
Eventually, it spit the boy up onto a snowy bank. He stumbled toward a road, where a car swerved, horn blaring, and stopped.
In the hospital, in his fever, he kept saying, “My diamonds, my diamonds.”
“Darling, you’re dreaming,” said his parents, worried by the slivers of ice that flashed in his fevered eyes (slivers that would always flash there, afterwards, for the rest of his life).
Just before dawn, when the fever broke, the boy ran his hands through hair matted with sweat and lake water. Caught within its tangles, he found two small diamonds.
He gave one diamond to his astonished parents, who sold it. The money did solve some problems, but none of the important ones.
The boy kept the second diamond and used it to pay his tuition at a famous music school. He grew up to become a renowned violinist, who toured around the world.
But he never accepted concert offers in December, no matter how much they paid. During that long, dark month, he played only for himself, alone in his apartment high above the shimmering city. As he played his December music, snow poured out of his violin, a single delicate white flake for every note.
Someone glancing up from the street below would have seen, sitting in a lighted window, a man with a violin, snow swirled around him like a veil.
And for every December of his life, as he played alone, the famous violinist, who was once a cold and abandoned boy, would wonder what would have happened, if he had chosen to play for the dimes.