Heart of Ice

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He was staring at the frozen lake and thinking about his mother lying on a table somewhere, screaming in pain.

He was remembering what she had told him, how they had kept her in that little room and held her down, how it felt like her insides were being torn in half, and how it went on and on and on for two days until she begged to die.

He was thinking about her and how much he had loved her. But he was also thinking that if she had been able to stand the pain for two more minutes-two damn minutes-his life would have been so very different.

But she couldn’t. So he was pulled from her womb at two minutes before midnight on September 14, and because of that everything now had changed.

The ferry was coming in. He heard its horn before he saw it, a white smudge emerging slowly from the gray afternoon fog. It was running late. The straits had frozen over early this year because of the long, bitter cold snap. He pulled up the hood of his parka and looked down at the duffel at his feet. Had he remembered his gloves? Everything had happened so fast he hadn’t given much thought to packing. Now he was so cold he didn’t even want to open the duffel to look, so he stuffed his red hands into his armpits and watched the ferry.

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