long thaw

Long Thaw

Once a year, on the eve of Grace’s birthday, the anniversary of the day she’d fallen off the face of the earth six years ago, you and your friends awaken to find a cardboard box in each of your mailboxes, containing a sheaf of construction-paper posters and a printed map of the city with your routes highlighted in purple. Her frozen face smiles up at you from inside the package, with the yearly chorus of “DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?” in big block letters above a detailed description of what she looked like the last time she’d been seen alive, from the same three sets of clothes she’d always wear to the ever-present orange tilley hat she’d don in rain or shine or hail or snow.

You all convene at the crack of dawn, at the same spot on the shores of Margog Pond where you would gather after school to plot your evening adventures so many years ago. At the innermost end of the little parkette the greenery gives way to a rocky beach, and the pond spreads out toward the line of tall fences that mark the borders of the tiny conservation area, where three of the city’s many paved-over rivers empty out into the little reservoir before funneling into the rainwater sewers for this patch of suburbia. A thick mist has set in over the frozen pond, a second layer of whitewashing over colours so vibrant underneath. Bryce has brought you all coffee, and you stand huddled in your long coats and thick gloves, stamping your heavy-booted feet in a circle near the barren pear tree by the shore at the back of the parkette. The boardwalk hasn’t been shovelled yet, and you prepare yourselves to wade through the heavy powdering. The sun is just beginning to creep up above the treeline and the gothic structures of the city on the hill in the far distance, setting diamonds in the snowbank and making the pond’s icy capstone sparkle.

“Sixth time’s a charm, right?” Bryce muses. “This time these posters are really gonna jog the memory of the one random person who knows where Grace is. I believe it.” The rest of you shrug off his facetiousness as Bryce’s way of avoiding his actual feelings, while Sarah plays her part and smacks his arm with a handful of posters.

“Can’t we at least wait until the snow’s gone in like two weeks?” He asks.

Sarah hits him again. “This is Grace’s birthday vigil. Even if she’s not alive out there somewhere, this ritual is keeping her memory alive, which is all the ancient Egyptians believed you’d need to have eternal life.”

“You woke-and-boke, didn’t you?”

“How else am I supposed to get through this?”

At this point, you’re not doing this for Grace, you’re doing it for her parents. It’s an awful place for them to be stuck in, with their daughter having vanished so suddenly without a trace, and all they can do is hope that she’s still alive somewhere and might miraculously reappear some day. It’s easier to accept than the reality of the situation. It’s not too much to ask that you help them deal with the helplessness they must feel.

“Every time these posters show up on my doorstep I want to ask her parents if they’ve finally got it into their heads that they’re the reason she ran away in the first place. Do they really think this will get her to change her mind and come back to an abusive home?”

“She didn’t run away and you know that. We all know that. She’s at the bottom of this accursed pond. They found her tacklebox on the shore the day she went missing, on the same day the ice sheet finally broke from the long thaw.”

“So she went to the pond to ice-fish, and then left her tacklebox on the shore when she went out there? Get your head on straight. Besides, she’d know better than to go out on the ice when it was this close to melting.”

“The ice looks pretty solid now, and it always does until you get out into the middle of it and it starts to crack underneath your feet.”

Bryce huffs, and offers no further response, and you all finish your coffees in silence.

The first leg of your route is the boardwalk around the pond, which you follow with a box under one arm and a stapler in the other, attaching a sheet to every second pole along the hand-rail. Every early morning jogger you pass looks at you with the same look of quiet sadness at the sight of the posters that are by now so instantly recognisable. None of them have anything to share, of course- not that you expect them to have any new information, as in all likelihood the only person who does is Grace herself, and she’s taken that knowledge with her to wherever it is she’s gone off to.

She’d always talked about how she would one day pack up everything she owned and disappear into the night to start a new life somewhere else, so when one day in early spring you’d all gathered at the bus stop and Grace was nowhere to be seen- neither that morning or later on when you’d gone round to check up on her- you’d all somewhat expected her to have finally made good on her word. If this were the case, why would a set of posters set up in the area of where she’d disappeared have any kind of hope of reaching their intended demographic of one?

The boardwalk has three exits which lead off into the other neighbourhoods which share a border along Margog Pond. As your group of friends arrive at each exit, one of you splits off with their box of posters to staple them to telephone poles and bulletin boards along their designated routes in one of these areas. Your little group thins out until you are the last one on the boardwalk, and when you return to the spot where you started, the posters greet you at the finish line. Before continuing, you sit for a moment on one of the park benches and stare out at the pond.

Back when Grace was still among the living, the five of you had gone ice fishing every winter on Margog Pond; right up until the early spring when the ice began to melt and crack, you’d be out there at least once a week. The one river which has not been turned into a sewer passes through the pond on its way to the Lake, carrying several kinds of tasty fish not yet tainted by the abundance of pollutants the city has dumped into the lake over the years, and Grace knew all the best ways to extract these fish from the depths even after the pond had frozen over them.

As you sit recollecting, there appears before you Grace’s tacklebox sitting on the shore the way she’d always set it up when she arrived early at the pond. It’s the same deep green metallic box and the same hand drill sitting atop the snowbank, and when you blink it’s still there. You gather up your box of posters and apprehensively approach the kit. When you sink into a crouch to examine it from up close, a few of the posters slip out from the box and fall face-down onto the sheet of ice covering the water. You snatch them back up, and when you stand up the tacklebox is nowhere to be seen, leaving not even an impression upon the snow. You turn around in a circle, searching for anything that could confirm what you’ve just seen to be true, and when you return to face the frozen pond you see off in the distance the unmistakable silhouette of your friend, wearing her orange tilley hat.

She is not alone out there. Two other figures walk with her, their forms tense and anticipatory. Something about their demeanour strikes you as sinister, and though it has been so many years since you last saw Grace, your protective instincts kick in immediately and you step out onto the frozen pond. One tentative foot in front of the other as you test the integrity of the ice sheet, and you close the distance slowly. Grace seems to be speaking with the two of them and their mannerisms grow aggravated, their movements jerky and hostile. At this, your sense of self-preservation splinters away and you break into a run across the water, calling out to Grace as there echoes out from under you the deep rumbling crackling of the thawing ice. The early morning fog thickens around your distant friend and her aggressors, and then in an instant your foot falls through, and you are consumed by a deep and complete darkness that wrings the breath from your lungs and pulls you down, gasping and grasping for anything that can keep you afloat, sinking ever further into oblivion. Far below you in the utter dark there gleams a hazy form, vaguely humanoid and horribly contorted, and atop it rests an object made of orange fabric, the last thing you see before all that remains is the all-encompassing chill of the deep.