Ice Country(5)

“You’ll bounce back. We both will,” Buff says, scraping a boot in the snow. We’re sitting in a snowdrift, having never made it home. Neither of us has much to go home to anyway, and there’s plenny of snow and ice to treat our throbbing heads.

“How?” I say, adding another clump of snow to the snow helmet I’m wearing. “How in the chill are we supposed to get enough silver to pay for everything we broke?”

“There’s always boulders-’n-avalanches,” Buff says, referring to our favorite card game of the gambling variety, another vice we picked up the moment we turned sixteen and were permitted into the Chance Holes.

I feel a zing of energy through my bruised body. It’s a longshot, but…

“How much silver do you have to put on the line?” I ask.

Buff shrugs, removes the snowball he’s holding against his skull, chucks it at a tree, missing badly. “Twenny sickles,” he says.

I frown, scrape the snow away from my own head, doing the math. Combined we have maybe fitty, give or take a sickle. Probably a quarter of what we need to pay Yo back. We’d have to get awfully lucky at b-’n-a to win that kind of silver. I pack the snow into a tight ball, launch it at the same tree Buff aimed for, missing by twice as much.

I look up at the gray-blanketed sky, striped with streaks of red, like bloody claw marks, where the crimson sky manages to peek through the dense cloud cover. When I look down again, I know:

We have no other choice—we’ve gotta try.

Luckily, cards have nothing to do with throwing snowballs.





~~~





The bland gray of the daytime is long past, giving way to a heavy night. I end up stopping at home to get my last bundle of silver coins. When I pry it from behind the bearskin insulation we’ve got pressed against the stacked-tree-trunk walls, it feels lighter than it should. Turns out I’ve got even less than I thought, only twenny sickles. The missing sickles are probably because Mother found my stash and stole what she needed to buy enough ice powder to keep her in a sufficient stupor to forget about me and my older brother, who she says, “Reminds me of your father more than anything.”

Wouldn’t want to do that.

Not that it matters. If she didn’t find some of my silver, she’d have found another way. She always does. That’s one thing I’ve learned about addicts: they’ll get what they need one way or another. Sell a piece of furniture, steal it, trade something. Whatever it takes.

I don’t confront her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good anyway. She barely knows I’m there, sitting blank-eyed and cross-legged in front of the dry, charred fireplace logs, holding her hands out as if to warm them on the invisible flames. “Oooh,” she murmurs softly to herself.

I sigh. If we do win anything tonight, I’ll have to find a better place to hide whatever’s left over after paying Yo back. Like somewhere in another country, fire country perhaps.

Shaking my head, I light a small fire so my mother doesn’t freeze to death.

My brother, Wes, isn’t around, because unlike me, he has a job doing the nightshift in the mines. Ain’t much of a job if you ask me, but without his dirt-blackened face we’d have died of starvation months ago. He’s only two years older than me, but if you asked him, he’d tell you he’s ten years my senior in maturity. Not that I’m arguing.

Given our situation, I should’ve gotten a job a long time ago, when I turned fourteen and school ended. Or at least at age sixteen, when most guys do, after they’ve had their two years of fun. So why am I seventeen and wasting my life away? I wish I knew.

My little sister, Jolie, is staying with a neighbor down the street until my mother can pull it together. The way things are going, she might be there forever. Although I’ve had a pretty shivvy day, not seeing Jolie’s smiling face at home is the worst part. She’s only twelve, and yet, I swear she’s one of the only people who really gets me. Her and Buff, that is.

I leave my mother babbling to herself about how the Cold is growing wings and flying above the clouds, or some rubbish like that. The warmth of the fire I made chases me out the door.

It’s colder than my ex-girlfriend’s personality outside. Even with my slightly-too-small double-layered bearskin coat that I won playing boulders when I was fifteen, and the three thick shirts underneath it, I’m instantly frozen from head to toe. When the wind blows it goes right through me, like I’m naked and made of brittle parchment, and I find myself running just to keep warm. My bruised skull aches with each step.

Before heading to meet Buff, I stop at our neighbor’s place to see Jolie. Although not rich by any stretch of the imagination, Clint and his wife, Looza, are better off than us, which I’m glad for. It means Jolie gets a decent place to stay, three warm meals a day, and a taste for what it’s like to be part of a real family. Selfishly, I want my mother to get cleaned up so my sister can come home, but I know that might not be the best thing for her. Either way, I’m glad she’s close by.