Two Idioms and A Winter Afternoon.

Why does she do it? She's been warned. She's been fined. She's even been banned. But she doesn't stop.

The water underneath is cold. The air above is just damp enough. She thinks that it will be okay this time, once again, as she views the distant and grey horizon.

It's not as though she began by intending to go out as far as...beyond. It's just that over time her desire and imagination grew to overtake her caution and reason.

She places her weight upon the freeze, and glides. The blades are sharp, and together with the wind make the only sound. She goes far far away from where she started, far beyond the normal boundaries. The vertical wooden slats delineating the edge of safety whiz by in a brown blur. She reads the sign but it doesn't register. She is driving herself beyond the marks of any others...to where it is blank.

He is watching. His rail of a frame is camouflaged in tattered corduroy as he sits by the side of the tree dotted boundary. His hollow chest and bony spine form a question mark as he squats and leans back against the wood.

He should stop her, he knows, but he can't. She is pushing further and farther out, and he is frightened for her. Yet he knows she can only have something so special planned. She is too far to touch now, too far to reach. But still, if he could break from his trance he could call to her, coax her back. Could he make her change her mind? Should he, when he knows what is worst and likely to happen? Ah, but if the worst does not happen, how can he destroy her chance? Who is he to even consider it?

Even before she reaches the part of the ice where the white fades into turquoise and sapphire, it begins to unfold. She is all momentum and grace in these moments. She starts to trace the peels and fractal curls from her mind onto the untouched plane she has at last reached. Her pace brings the indigo marks to the surface in woven spirals and dashes from her jumps.

He sees a handmaid's henna forming on the fingers of this lake. It is spectacular but he looks away, bothered.

With her speed and slickness she has become indistinguishable from her canvas, and only the brief and trailing splashes give away her location. They can be heard until the crackling sounds like distant fireworks under water begin to drown them all out. But the cracklings are not distant. They surround her.

Her blades circle the center of her kaleidoscope wheel vision where a sharp nose of granite juts out above the glistening plane...she pushes, leaps, twirls, lands, and her blades dig in and stick into the grey stone. Her hair settles around her neck but her eyes are still on the horizon. She stretches her head impossibly around to see the finish. Broad and fine arabesque shapes of thin crisp sheets are appearing and rising three hundred and sixty degrees around her and then sliding and vanishing into the deep. Ice lace. Seconds pass, and then it is over. She peers beyond her own cheekbones and out into the distance again.



He whistles long and low under his breath, and taps out applause no one can hear. He looks at his watch and contemplates what to feel. His fists fall open.

She is planted still onto the rock. Dark blue tongues of water lick the edges of the stone.

Which will end first? Her balance, or the winter?

He doesn't know.