By Beth Konkoski

Moon on glassy ice, cold booms and echoes along fault lines.  Twelve skate blades clack upriver.  Fish these girls cannot see hang suspended in January cold.  Wind across cheeks like sharp razors, wind through parkas like bullets, wind caught in sheets held by daring fingers, almost tamed with its ballooning.  They turn, ready for the ride of knees rattling, bumps and ridges the moonlight almost hides.  Their speed both joyous and on the edge where each set of two might crash the whole hard thing down or billow, billow, nearly a mile, fly, fly and believe ice holds girls and girls hold back the cold as their cheeks and smiles numb in the dark. 

Afterward in a basement, in the night where a wood stove pulses with its collapsing logs and feet take turns nearly burning through socks to warm up their toes, coals fall and the metal gleams its pumpkin heat, as they fill themselves back to life with pizza and grape soda.  The black face of ice sits alone while girls giggle and séance, push deep in sleeping bags with popcorn crumbs, their hands full of gossip they whisper but do not fully understand.  A night so cold and so hot, so quiet and so common.

Late when sleep finally descends, leaving only one, alive to her tears, the outcast this time. 

Slumber party. Skating party. 

And while the others sleep, she sneaks out the door, welcomes the cold, although it violates and nearly turns her around.  Without skates or friends, at least tonight, she stomps her way to the river’s quiet center and stares at the mirror of solid ice, how it reflects moonlight but not her face, how gold can waver there in the cold while she gives her voice a chance to scream, gives her fear of who she might be, a chance to rise, gives her knowledge of who the other girls will force her to become, a chance to bloom and grow like the sheets they held as sails.

Over pancakes in the morning, she will swallow this same voice, will let the thick chunk of syrup-coated breakfast move down her throat without gagging.  And she will wait for a ride home without telling any of them what the ice promised her, what she will do to save herself.     

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Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia with her husband and two mostly grown kids.  Her work has been published in journals such as: Smokelong Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Story, and Split Lip Magazine.  Her collection of short fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for Short Fiction and was published in June 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press.