The Melting Queen

by Bruce Cinnamon

  The crowed watches me with awe, and I know they can feel my words echoing through their flesh and bones as much as I can. Birch’s mad shrieks are overcome, drowned out by the voices of all the women he sought to silence and control. The Melting Queens stare at me with pride, lending me their voices, feeling the same euphoria that I feel.

  “I am the Melting Queen,” I say. “The last Melting Queen. I burn down this tradition to build a new one in its place. We won’t have a throne, or a crown, or a mother goddess. We won’t have parades and pageants and projects. We won’t have me, or Shishira Sarasvati, or Albert Herring, or anyone else trying and failing to be May Winter. We’ll just have a fountain.”

  I reach out and put my hand on the burning throne. I give it a shove, and it collapses in on itself. The flames continue to consume the wreckage as I walk down the hill, through the line of Melting Queens, to the birthing dome’s entrance. The old man stands there, shaking, silenced. I stand before him, above him, my Melting Queens all around him.

  “I say again, Kastevoros Birch. Step aside.”

  The old man chews wordlessly on the air for a moment, then steps aside. I walk past him, into the birthing dome, into the greatest performance of Odessa Steps.

  Under the oculus, in a perfect circle of sunlight, my former friend lies on the grass. She’s naked, puffing and panting, red-faced, clutching at her swollen belly. Her muscles are all clenched tight. Her whole body is contorted. The day has come. Her child is ready to be born.

  Aside from Odessa, there are only a few people—doctors, nurses, midwives—in the birthing dome. They’ve been watching me as much as they could through the distorting glass, and as I approach Odessa they gape at me. I kneel down on the grass next to her, take her hand in mine. She looks up at me, squeezes my hand with all her strength.

  “That was… a performance,” she says, struggling to squeeze out the words as well.

  “So is this,” I say. “But now you need to go to a hospital.”

  “No... I want to... Here.”

  “It’s over.”

  “Still. Please.”

  I look into her pale grey eyes and see her stubbornness, undimmed.

  “Fine. But I’m not leaving until you’re okay.”

  She studies my face, and I don’t have a clue what she’s thinking, but eventually she nods.

  “Good,” I say. “Now take a deep breath. And push.”

  {20}

  A city unlike any other

  Edmonton is not as I dreamed it.

  Standing at the Top of the Stalk, looking down on my city, I don’t see a chaotic nightmare dreamscape tearing itself apart or a perfectly organized circle of canals. It’s just a city, sprawling out over the prairies, growing in all directions.

  People are like cities. You might have a perfect plan for them, a grand vision, an exact idea of how they should develop. But really they just get slowly built up day by day, week by week, month by month. A thousand small decisions accumulate, and before you know it you’ve got a big scattered mess, with beautiful things and ugly things and strange things all crowded together, side by side.

  I am not the River Runson I imagined I would be. I’m not happy all the time and full of boundless energy. I’m not a brand new person, completely free of the past. But I am still magnificent.

  I’m dressed in a copper-scale gown, gleaming like the rising sun. I asked Magpie to make me one final Melting Queen dress, and she didn’t disappoint. We melted down May Winter’s statue—tore down the lie of the First Melting Queen and turned her image into the final extravagance of the Last. I feel the weight of the thousand copper leaves and think about the cost of these traditions.

  After Kaseema reclaimed the Office of the Melting Queen, I asked for the green leaf dress in the lobby to be taken down and burned. I don’t know who made it or when, but the lies are over now, as is the pageantry. Today will be the last grand celebration, and I mean to go out in style.

  I reach up and run my fingers through my long red hair. The magic of the Melting Queens has granted me this one final indulgence, to regrow my pride and joy in six short weeks. I unravel my fiery crown and the wind catches my hair, unfurling it like a victory banner over a conquered city.

  When I exit the Stalk and walk through the busy streets, hundreds of costumed revellers approach me. I stop to share a photo or a hug, to answer questions or to listen to a few final confessions. The streets are full of celebrants, but it’s not Melting Day. It’s Hallowe’en, and the First Snow is falling over Edmonton.

  I spend my day walking through the city—from the Sky Harbour Gardens to Sundial Park to Churchill Square to Whyte Avenue. As the sun begins to set, I walk down into the valley, out across the Walterdale Bridge. I glance into Café Fiume as I tread the boardwalk, and our eyes meet. She stares at me for a moment, then lifts her hand in a tiny wave. Her baby is in a carrier on the chair next to her, sound asleep. I hesitate only a moment before continuing down the boardwalk to the café’s door.

  “Hi,” says Odessa as I sit down.

  “Hi.”

  “Nice costume.”

  “Thanks. I’m being May Winter for Hallowe’en. Where’s yours?”

  She nods at the baby.

  “I’m being a mother this year.”

  “How’s that treating you?”

  “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to make interesting for myself. I’m tired, and cranky, and sore everywhere, and my breasts are aching all the time, you’ve no idea.”

  “Actually, I do.”

  She smiles tightly.

  “Yeah, I guess you do, don’t you?”

  We sit in silence for a bit. The baby gurgles and twists in the carrier, but keeps sleeping. I look up and see little rivers flowing off the glass bridge, snowflakes melting as they hit the glass roof.

  “So I guess you’re headed off then. Baby in tow. Unless this means you’re going to stay.”

  Odessa shakes her head immediately, reaches out to slip the pacifier back into the baby’s mouth.

  “No, we’re gonna go.”

  “Where?”

  She looks up at me.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere warm. Somewhere far away.”

  She leans back in her chair and finishes her coffee. I look over her shoulder, up the riverbank at the familiar skyline. My feet start itching to move again.

  “Well, I suppose I should be on my way,” I say, pushing my chair back and standing. “Goodbye, Odessa.”

  She grabs my wrist.

  “I don’t want to be Odessa Steps anymore,” she says quietly. “Or Olechka Stepanchuk. They’re both done now, I think. I’m entering an abyss of identity for a while. Like you described, the last time we were here. I’m on the ocean floor.”

  She looks at her child with a mixture of hope and terror in her eyes. Then she squares her jaw and turns back to me.

  “I’m scared to do this alone,” she says. “Even though I know that I can.”

  “I know you’ll do fine,” I say. “Your kid will be amazing and brilliant and so weird.”

  She laughs, then her face becomes set and serious.

  “I’m sorry for the things I said about you. I’m so sorry, for everything.”

  I sigh. Once I imagined that hearing that would make me feel so much better. I shrug.

  “It’s water under the bridge,” I say quietly.

  We both look down at the dark grey waters sliding by beneath us. My attention is drawn into their mesmerizing current for a while.

  “Will you come back in the spring?” I ask casually.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I used to come back every year because of my grandfather. But he died during the summer.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It’s okay. This baby is alive. Ludlow Spetnik is dead. This isn’t home anymore.”

  “You still have friends here,” I say. She seems about to respond when the server comes up with h
er bill. The baby stirs and squawks at the noise.

  “Ooh,” says the server, “hello little baby. You’re adorable! Is it a boy or a girl?”

  The woman who is no longer Odessa Steps looks up at me.

  “I don’t know,” she tells the waiter. “They haven’t told me who they are yet.”

  I leave the café with a smile on my face.

  The snow is neither crescendoing nor fading in fervour. But the sky is darkening. It’s getting dark so early lately.

  As I go up the other side of the riverbank, I hear music blaring through the city. The party must be well underway. When I reach Jasper Avenue at the top of the hill, I find a dizzying array of people dancing, drinking, and making merry. The snow doesn’t stop, but evaporates before it reaches us. Here we are, the people of Edmonton, burning bright in the night.

  There are familiar faces in the crowd. Sander’s wearing a Mountie uniform that I’m sure he’ll be spending the next six months in, yawning constantly as the snow swirls down around his felt hat. He’s surrounded by Melting Queens, celebrating the completion of his book. The Melting Queens of Edmonton: A True History comes out next spring. Thousands of people have already pre-ordered a copy.

  Kaseema is holding court with the Melting Queens, dressed as Lady Olenna Tyrell from Game of Thrones. Alice Songhua is doing her best Anne of Green Gables, and Isobel Fraser has covered up her scooter with cardboard and become Thomas the Tank Engine. Victoria Goulburn is rather unimaginatively dressed as a ghost, but Iris Zambezi makes up for it with her incredible confection of a costume, a mounded rainbow kaleidoscope that cascades off her in all directions.

  “What’re you looking for?” says René, slipping through a grove of people and appearing in front of me. He’s dressed as a kangaroo, his hand in his pouch, no doubt turning his sootstone over and over.

  “Where’s Clodagh?”

  René smiles.

  “Come on.”

  He grabs me with his non-preoccupied hand and tugs me through the crowds, which extend down several side streets, through several alleyways. The festivities are almost on the scale of Melting Day. My troublemaker friend leads me down some grubby alleyways and through some microparks and parking lots.

  “I know where you’re taking me.”

  “No you don’t. Shut up, it’s a surprise. Close your eyes.”

  I do as I’m told until René positions my body and tells me to open my eyes.

  The Winter Fountain sits in the heart of a hole that used to be a hill. We tore out the roots of the Spring Throne and built this giant sootstone out of a hundred different types of stone: marble and granite and sandstone, basalt and limestone and slate, everything. People will come here, summer or winter, to soak their feet and their bodies, to relax, and to let go of the darkness inside themselves.

  The fountain is really a hundred and fifteen fountains, all woven into each other. The walls of the fountain, sunk into the earth, will flow with water from the base of a hundred and fifteen columns, each one holding a statue that represents some aspect of a Melting Queen’s reign. None of them have been installed yet, but we have plans for many of them already, dragons and elm trees and bridges.

  Steps and ramps lead down from ground level into the fountain’s heart, where a huge circular reflecting pool sits empty. Beside it stands Clodagh, dressed as Audrey Hepburn from Roman Holiday, a little Vespa parked beside her.

  René starts down into the lower fountain, and after a moment I follow. Clodagh turns and greets us.

  “Can you believe all this?” she asks giddily. “In what, six weeks!?”

  “It was the last command of the Melting Queen,” I say. “Kaseema has been working day and night.”

  Clodagh beams.

  “Hold out your hand,” says René. I obey, and he pulls his hand out of his kangaroo pouch and holds it over mine. I can’t help but tense up, waiting for the sootstone even though I’ve already drained it dry. He opens his fingers and a shiny penny falls onto my palm. René grins.

  “See, it is a surprise.”

  I inspect the coin. Maple leaf. 2018. The profile of the Queen. But I see that René has scratched out “Elizabeth II” and written “River Runson” in tiny letters.

  “Throw it in,” says René. “Make a wish.”

  “It’s bad luck to throw a coin in a dry fountain. Everyone knows that.”

  “Of course they do,” says Clodagh. “Which is why we’d never ask you to.”

  “You mean…?”

  I look between them, and Clodagh grins. She lifts her phone to her mouth.

  “Turn it on.”

  Water begins to leap forth from the base of each of the pillars. We stand there, watching, mesmerized as the water fills the reflecting pool and starts to cascade over the sides. Hot water, water that steams in the cold autumn air. The Winter Fountain. Edmonton’s first hot spring, where people can come to thaw out their cold bones in the long dark season. I listen to the rush of the cascade, smell the fragrant steam of hot water waking up cold stone, feel the heat emanating from the pool.

  “River.”

  René looks at me, gestures impatiently at the coin in my hands.

  I look into his dark magpie eyes, which always seem to mock me but also let me in on the joke. I look over his shoulder at the glowing lights of downtown Edmonton, snow falling softly from high above. I look at Clodagh, whose joy lights up her face like a blazing sunrise.

  I smile, close my eyes, and make a wish.

  APPENDIX {1}

  List of Melting Queens

  The Melting Queen is a work of fiction, but many real women have made important contributions to Edmonton. A number of them are included in this list of former Melting Queens, to honour their legacies and to thank them for the vital role they’ve played in building our city. Their names are italicized in the list below.

  1 | MAY WINTER

  The First Melting Queen brought Edmonton together to celebrate the end of winter and inaugurate the Melting Day tradition.

  2 | LOUISA CAROLINE LORNE

  Louisa Lorne organized festivities to mark the creation of the Province of Alberta—and the selection of Edmonton as the new province’s capital city—on 1 September 1905.

  3 | ORGANZA GRANT

  Organza Grant was the first Melting Queen who truly had a signature initiative rather than just presiding over festivals and ceremonies. Many Edmontonians lived in tents in the river valley in this era (including the Grant family) and Organza worked with the City to create a sanitation initiative to protect these citizens from typhoid and other diseases.

  4 | ROSETTA GRAYDON

  During her tenure, Rosetta Graydon founded the Edmonton SPCA and Humane Society, advocating especially for the ethical treatment of horses, which were a key component of local life in 1907 Edmonton.

  5 | AURELIA GREEN

  Aurelia Green pushed for the University of Alberta to be built in Edmonton—and not in Calgary, as had previously been suggested. Ultimately, a compromise was achieved by locating the university in Strathcona, directly across the river from Edmonton.

  Aurelia formally opened the university for its first forty-five students in the fall of 1908.

  6 | PEARL FLINDERS

  Pearl Flinders was hit by scandal when, two months after her coronation, she was found to have been having an affair with a married man. She was not able to recover from the social fallout and spent the rest of her term in isolation.

  7 | ADA MAGRATH

  One of Edmonton’s most prominent socialites, Ada Magrath helped organize and develop the YWCA in Edmonton, assisting single women who arrived by train in the booming city and who had no permanent place to live.

  8 | ISOBEL FRASER

  Only four years old and from the city of Strathcona, Isobel Fraser was an incredibly controversial choice when she was Named. Her term saw a referendum to unite the two cities, with majorities on both sides of the river voting to merge—largely because the unity committee used the adorable and p
recocious four-year-old as its figurehead.

  9 | ANNIE MAY JACKSON

  The first female police officer in the British Empire, Annie May Jackson was deputized as a Special Constable with the Edmonton Police Force shortly before her tenure. She used her position to help newly arrived immigrant women avoid the men who tried to recruit them into prostitution.

  10 | BRIDGET BOWER

  Partnering with the still hugely popular Isobel Fraser, Bridget Bower organized a gigantic summer festival to celebrate the completion of the High Level Bridge, Edmonton’s most iconic landmark, which joined the two cities together.

  11 | ERNESTINA LAKE

  A poet and member of the wealthy Lake Family, Ernestina Lake helped promote recruitment for the 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces.

  12 | ALOISE PENNANT

  Aloise Pennant was the first Melting Queen to outright refuse the call to serve her city. She faced such intense criticism for this choice that her family was forced to leave Edmonton. Massive floods during the summer of 1915 were subsequently blamed on her absence.

  13 | DR. GENEVA MISENER

  The U of A’s first female professor, Dr. Geneva Misener led the Edmonton Equal Suffrage League, pushing the provincial government to give women the vote (although the Voting Rights Act only extended the franchise to white women; Indigenous women did not get the vote until 1965).

  14 | MARIGOLD HUMBER

  Marigold Humber’s brother, husband, and two sons were all killed in the Great War. She organized convalescent homes for wounded and traumatized soldiers, and is regarded as one of the most admired Melting Queens in Edmonton history.

  15 | MIRANDA MEDWAY

  Miranda Medway carried on the work of her predecessor and had a close relationship with her. Her term saw the end of the Great War and the Armistice ceremonies. She was instrumental in maintaining calm and educating the public on quarantine practices during the 1918-19 flu outbreak, which killed over 600 Edmontonians.