Short Prose

Out a Maid
Alyssa Pelish

February's snow was thick and deep. It coated cars and rooftops like heavy white icing, butter cream frosting. On Valentine's Day, some of us gathered at Kramden Park. We pelted pastel colored hearts at each other and onto the depths of the lake snow, leaving faint traces of Pepto-Bismal pink and pale pistachio green: BE MINE, CRAZY 4U, BABY.
          We noticed two figures on the lake, identified Sarah Rosen's baby blue coat. We paused in the midst of our candy litter to watch them face off, hearing no words, just squinting to make out the silent movie of their gestures: Sarah, venturing a hand toward Royal's shoulder; Royal brushing it off; both motionless for a moment; Sarah, leaning toward him, to be heard above the wind; Royal, backing away, turning his face to the colorless sky, beginning to spin, arms outstretched like a child; Sarah, starting toward him again, fists clenched; Royal, shouting something we could not discern, shoving Sarah not ungently, waltzing away; the small figure in blue, on her knees, watching him leave.
          The night she died was in late March. Water was just beginning to trickle through the creek beds; the last layer of snow over the lake had turned soggy, showing patches of ice translucently dark. The sky that day was a blue that stings the eyes. The moon in its round entirety shone in the night sky, softening the black ceiling to nearly blue.
          Accounts vary. There are those who say she drifted, barefoot, in a nightgown of deep blues and purples, down Columbine Street, following the flow of the creek to the north side of the lake. Others recall her wearing only the sheerest of slips, one strap straying over a pale shoulder, running dream-eyed down Low Street, through the marshy southern end of the lake, onto the ice. She ended up somewhere in the middle. They all remember how her dark hair wisped round her shoulders, matted with cockleburs and adorned with withered tansy. As she walked, she must have picked the dried grasses, their dormant husks rooted along the snowy creek beds and marshes. In her arms she carried great stalks of cattail, tall fescue, wild millet, horsetail, lovegrass, royal fern, all of them dead, the color of cobwebs and wheat, the dry brown spikes of the cattails smudging her face, poking obscenely at her neck and chin.
          People debate how long she slid and pirouetted across the ice. A quarter hour? Five minutes? At each footstep the ice sang with echoed creaks and groans. It was a windless night. And the few people on the banks—loitering teenagers, cops on a smoke break, insomniacs—could only watch, transfixed with wonder and cold horror as a growing fault line spidered insidiously beneath her bare white feet.
          The ice gave one final shudder as it shattered, splintered like a hole punched through a window. As she fell, she said nothing. No one heard her make a sound.
          She sank, of course. Her body was found a quarter-mile from the gash in the ice; she may have swum below the ice for a good hundred meters before her lungs gave out and her heart stopped. They dredged the lake that morning, punching through blackened lake ice, finally dragging her pale blue corpse to the surface. A great crowd gathered to watch, to see the blood frozen purple in her veins, all along her limbs; to see her parted blue lips and frost-kissed lashes. In her hands, she still clutched the dead, dried grasses, her knuckles white.

(Originally from Northern Wisconsin, Alyssa Pelish is a 1999 graduate of Carleton College. Her work has been published in The Harvard Summer Review and in Manuscript. She is a first-year student in the MFA fiction program at Sarah Lawrence.)