The Sinking Blades by Bryan Jones (Appeared in the January 2010 Issue) The father lived with his little daughter in the ice-bound village near the river. Glaciers strangled the surrounding mountains. The winter storms were merciless. Despite the adversity, the father had dreams for his eleven-year- old girl. He hoped she would become a great ice skater. On Saturdays, he took her down to one of the frozen ponds and taught her to twirl on the pair of skates that had been his when he was a boy. It was the only pair of skates he had ever owned. It gave him great satisfaction to see her laughing and twirling with her arms flung out wide. He wanted to join her, but he didn’t dare venture out because, in the last few years, he had put on weight and he couldn’t be sure about the strength of the frozen surface. He was content to dream of the day when the ice would inspire confidence and he could join her. It made him realize how badly he wanted something that he had missed in the years since his wife’s death. It was so lonely in that frozen part of the world, and they had so little, this father and daughter. One afternoon, on the walk home from the country schoolhouse, the little girl slipped near the high gorge and fell among the rocks. They didn’t find her body until that evening. The father’s grief was unimaginable. He locked himself behind the door of the only home his daughter had ever known. No one could understand his terrible loneliness, but the villagers agreed it wasn’t healthy for him to stay shut inside there with all those memories. What the villagers didn’t know was that the father wasn’t alone inside that dark house. The shadow was with him. It hadn’t been long after he had closed himself off that he had noticed it. He had been sitting in his old chair one night when, from out of the corner of his eye, he saw the shadow of his daughter moving along the back wall in the main room. He called to it. It had stopped at the sound of his voice. He talked to it, and it seemed to listen intently. The first evening it had appeared, he tried to tell it all the things he would have told his daughter if there had been more time. After several days, the father began to take comfort in the shadow's presence. He tried to please it by making use of other shadows in the house. Years ago, after the death of his wife, he had learned to sew. He stitched together a dress of shadows which he gave as a present to the shadow of his little girl. But he never could tell if the shadow ever wore it. Another night, he prepared a shadow meal and invited the shadow to supper. His guest didn’t eat anything, but he remembered his manners and chewed with his mouth closed. Later, the father slept under a blanket of shadows and dreamed about his little girl skating in competitions and winning gold medals to thunderous applause. The next week, a fierce winter storm descended upon the village late in the day, knocking out the electricity. Inside the father’s home, flames from the fireplace provided the only heat and light. Just as he was about to put another log on the fire, the shadow appeared on the back wall. But this time it wasn’t the shadow of his little girl. It was the shadow of a woman he didn’t know. He dropped the log on the hearth and stood to face the strange presence. Then the shadow began twirling and the father couldn’t understand it. He moved closer to the wall, expecting his own shadow to appear, but instead, he saw the shadow of a thin young man that moved as if someone had been skating along the floorboards and the two shadows joined hands and embraced there on the undecorated wall. Then the shadows of the couple reached for the edges of other shadows on the wall, which they pulled over themselves like covers. The father didn’t understand why the shadows were behaving like that, so he turned and went into the bedroom and felt his way through the darkness to the old wooden chest where he had stored away his daughter’s things. He rifled through the little-girl dresses and schoolbooks until his hands found the old pair of ice skates, which he carried back into the flickering light of the main room. He refused to look at the shadow-covered wall as he hurried over to the door and opened it to face the storm. He clutched the skates to his chest and walked outside. He fought the gusting wind and wild flurries down to the snowy bank of the river that was lined with huge gray boulders. He stepped up on one, reared back his arm, and threw the skates out into the cold water. They landed with a loud splash and sank from view. But before the ripples died, the current turned back upon itself to form a huge whirlpool. It grew larger and larger until its perimeter touched the banks and the father recognized in that swirling water the grace of his daughter spinning on the ice in an unbroken dream without a beginning or an end, and he wanted to join her finally, to hold her hands and twirl with her until they vanished into that roaring vortex. The villagers who were bundled up in their heaviest winter coats shouted down to him from the open doors of their houses, but he had lost all interest in them as he balanced on the slippery boulder which had been worn smooth over the years by the relentless current, and he never even looked back before leaping out of their lives forever, into the raging waters that everyone knew were cold enough to stop a healthy man’s heart.
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