“What do you hope is beyond the ice?” asked Victoria, knowing as she said it that the question was pointless.
Livia sighed. “Well, I imagine I’m a great warrior, and I have long golden hair, and servants to bring me pomegranates in silver bowls. I wield a sword—no, a rifle—while I lead my brigade of elephants into battle, through a field of poppies. But when I come home, it’s children, all my children, and I read to them and I know I’ve kept them safe, by fighting.”
“For me,” said Victoria, “it’s me, Creator-Mum and Simon, and I paint murals. My mind, legs and hands all work, and they will work, forever.”
“Is that what you think is beyond the ice?” said Livia.
“No,” said Victoria. “I think it’s nothing.”
* * *
That night, she dreamed of the morning she’d lost her hand.
She had been losing fingernails for months, dropping them with a metallic cling in the sink-drain. When she woke up that morning, she sat up, reached for her bathrobe—and her right hand wouldn’t move. It was frozen at the end of her wrist, folded up neatly where she had tucked it under her head before sleep. She frantically shook her arm; the hand flopped, a useless five-legged insect at the end of her appendage. She stared at the worn spots on the tips of her bronze fingers.
Maybe it could be fixed, she thought wildly, glancing around at the unfinished canvases leaning against the walls. She stumbled to her desk and tried picking up a paintbrush left-handed. It dangled awkwardly between her fingers.
Downstairs, Creator-Mum was shuffling around the kitchen on cellulite and varicose-marred legs, shaking a rasher of bacon in a pan. Victoria stuck the hand into Creator-Mum’s face.
“And good morning to you too, dear,” said Creator-Mum.
“It’s broken,” said Victoria.
Creator-Mum set down the pan and swiveled to look at her. “Well,” she said calmly, “we’ll go to the repair shop and see what they say.”
They couldn’t repair her. Over the coming weeks, more and more of Victoria began to die. It was a strange thing, to feel that a part of you that you’d known your whole life, say your buttocks, or your left shoulder, was no longer yours, had become something you didn’t recognize and couldn’t control, as though someone had grafted a foreign object onto your skin.
One day, in autumn, three weeks after her hand had gone dead, Victoria limped to the subway station and rode the Underground to the Third Ring, to see her mural.
Victoria had painted murals all over the city, but no mural had ever been so dear to her as her first one, her Third Ring mural, which satirically yet lovingly depicted the ostrich feathers and tailcoats of the First Ring upper crust.
I met Simon there, thought Victoria, and her mind raced through the story of their courtship like a sped-up film strip, set to the warble of a melancholy viola: their flirtation, their dates and the short summer nights they spent together, covers thrown back in the oppressive August heat. Then the night of bombings, of hiding in the basement as the city shook, and then the newspaper that arrived on her doorstep the next morning, blaring the headlines: BOMBINGS IN THE FOURTH RING. FIFTY KILLED IN UNDERGROUND COLLAPSE.
These thoughts crowded Victoria’s mind as fifteen years later, she walked, her body failing beneath her, around the corner to the tenement-side where her mural, her first crowning glory, blazoned the wall.
A hive of workers swarmed the mural, bearing rollers and trays of paint and slapping ladders against the wall. Half the mural had already been rolled away into white oblivion. As she watched, one of the overalled men squelched a roller against the wall and obliterated an ostrich feather.
Victoria leaned against a lamppost and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, something had tweaked in her metal brain and instead of a bustling city around her, she saw Queen Anne’s lace, a wall of murals. Her dream, or the past’s dream, or the future’s.
She shook her head, and the scene of the workers destroying her mural swarmed back into view, and it was in that moment that she knew, fiercely and coldly, that she belonged here no more. The moment she decided to buy her one-way ticket. It was a simple decision. Victoria had nothing left in the city. So she would move on.
* * *
Someone was shaking her awake. Victoria blinked and Livia’s face swam into view, streaked with tears.
Victoria didn’t have to look to the window to know why Livia was crying, or why Victoria’s nose was cold.
“It’s snowing,” said Livia.
“I know,” said Victoria.
Livia’s hair hung lank on her shoulders. “I can’t,” said Livia. “I can’t do it. Maybe next spring. I’m going back. Are you coming?”
Victoria looked at her right hand flopped uselessly on the bedclothes.
“Are you coming?”
When Victoria didn’t answer, Livia said, “I’ll wait for you at the boat, if you’re coming. I’m sorry,” and then she was gone, her wheelchair leaving tread-marks in the carpet.
Victoria pushed herself up with her left hand and pressed her nose to the glass. Beneath the drifting flakes, she saw Livia wheeling down the gravel path to the catamaran hulking on the knife-sharp sea. Around her, attendants lifted bags, shepherded other machines who had decided to go back on this last ship home.
Victoria slid out of bed. She put on her slippers and robe. She gathered her crutches and limped downstairs.
The bathhouse was deserted and the thunk of her footstep echoed in its marble halls. The little tables that had once been covered with food were picked over, practically empty. Deep inside her, where Simon’s death lived, she felt it: I am alone, at the end of the world. And she thought she heard a viola, crashing into a minor-key crescendo, playing somewhere, far off, in the bathhouse.
She slid open the doors of the ice room. The ice glowed like the full moon over the city, or, from a certain angle, like the gaslight lampposts of her youth.
Why am I here, about to step into the abyss, at the end of the world? Better, perhaps, to haunt the couch cushions, thought Victoria.
But she thought of Creator-Mum’s desiccated legs and her test results, of the white paint slopping over the mural, of the thin viola piping through the halls of the bathhouse, or perhaps just through the halls of Victoria’s memory.
So she dropped her robe, and slid beneath the ice. It was only cold for a second.
Emily B. Cataneo is a writer and journalist. Originally from New Hampshire, she attended college in Boston, Massachusetts, and worked there as a reporter for three years before moving to Berlin, Germany. Now back in Boston, she currently works at a non-profit online feminist historical archive, as well as continuing her career as a freelance journalist and fiction writer.
Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Nightmare, Interzone, Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts, Lackington’s, The Dark, and SmokeLong Quarterly, and has been long-listed for Best Horror of the Year in 2013, 2014, and 2015, and Best Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2016. As a journalist, she has written for newspapers such as the Financial Times, the Boston Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor.
She lives with her partner, Nate, in an apartment with too much antique furniture. In her spare time, she reads history books, generally about the Romanov dynasty or the social history of late 19th and early 20th century Europe; runs along the Charles River; and embarks on too-ambitious craft projects.
Speaking to Skull Kings Page 17