Spirits of the Freeze-Sea is the story of the dreadful consequences for Izzy and her sister Shalla when Izzy forgets she mustn’t close her eyes to the ice spirits. Told in three parts, Spirits of the Freeze-Sea brings together All the Birthdays*, Dancing to the Wild Ice**, and the new Shalla’s First Ice Shatter.  Available for eReader download from Cut A Long Story, price 99p.

Full story below.

Spirits of the Freeze-Sea

 *All the Birthdays

When it’s our birthday, when the ice breaks and the spirits burst through, you have to dodge out of the way and cover your head so they don’t hiss sharp into your ears or quick-grab your tongue. If they get your tongue, you end up babbling like a prattaloon for days and people laugh and throw things at you to shut you up. Dilip got a broken nose that way last year, when a shelly-pot hit him. If they get in your ears, you’re stuck listening to the flap-mouthing the babblers made all the years before, and that’s worse because you can’t shut them up and the spirits can be a bit choosy about how long they leave you with the racket. But you have to keep your eyes wide open because they want you to watch them while they dance and dive and scorch the air and cut sizzling streaks into the ice. You can blink, just so long as you don’t linger. Blinking is okay.

Izzy got caught last year, twirling on the edge of the freeze-sea like a dizzy firefly with her head back and her arms wide, all shut-eyed and giddy. Burned her eyelids right off her face, they did. She’ll be watching the rest of her life now, which won’t be too much longer because Izzy has to share everyone’s birthday so she gets everyone’s years too, and there are near a hundred of us and nobody lives that long.

 

**Dancing to the Wild Ice

After Izzy’s eyelids got burned off, she had to watch all the time without blinking – apart from the frog-lick that slides across side-to-side, but you can see through that so there’s no escape and she’s been watching since Jinty started making the dance.

 

Izzy and Jinty and me are on the same birth ring – at least for now. When the ice breaks on your birthdays, you don’t want to get distracted by the noises and the flap-yappering of the spirits getting into people’s mouths and ears. If you do, you might forget to keep looking, like Izzy did. She won’t be on our birth ring after the dance.

 

Making a dance is tricky; you can’t just put it together from nothing with your own leggy-hops and chinbobs and such, there’s a right way to do it. For a start, you have to make sure there’s the same number of steps as celebrators. You can have multiples or squares or roots, but you can’t have primes, they’re sneaky and unfriendly, so you put harmonics on primes to layer them up, like chords for feet.

 

Jinty got permission to open the Book of Dances and stuffed leaves in his ears so the whistling wouldn’t get into his head while he traced over the old patterns with blackwood chalk. Jinty plays cat-string harp and he knows harmonies but he’s not good at numbers, so we blew the good ones into his left ear and the bad ones into his right ear and made marks on the backs of his hands so he’d remember.

 

He was gone half the year doing that dance with only the tapping and thumping to say he was still in the Book House. We pushed bits of bovey meat and pea parkies under the door to keep him going, and we tried not to sing in case we put him off his rhythm and he got something wrong. The problem with being the dance-maker is that, if you got it wrong, you have to join the dancer and do the dance together, hopping over the ice from beat to beat and picking up more and more birthdays on the way. Of course it means you share them with the dancer so you only pick up half each which can be a blessing, as long as it doesn’t leave you with the head-dallies and not being able to think straight because then you’ll straightaway make a mistake and end up stiff as a snowfish with your eyeballs pointing at the sky and the deep at the same time.

 

Jinty’s doing it because he got the green twig and there’s a lot of us on our ring so not much chance of coming back if he fouls up. Not like when there’s only, say, ten or twenty of you. You can add ten or twenty birthdays no problem as long as you don’t already have a whole lot stacked up. There’s over two hundred of us, and we have twenty five rings, and nobody lives that long.

 

We knew he was done when the spirits started chasing about above the Book House, whipping the roofing up at the corners and screeching through the windows like banshi-ghosts riding on lightning. It was going to be our birthdays tomorrow so there wasn’t any more time. Anyway, he came out, pulling the dance along behind him on wax-leaf runners and it twitched and throbbed like it was ready to go all on its own. We all helped to pin it down – spitting on its edges and freezing it to the ice. The last step had to be in the right place for Izzy, in the middle where the wild ice shifted and sucked like a whirlpool full of skinning knives. We could see the spirits under the surface, charging about with trails of fire behind them, and we made sure to keep looking. Izzy was looking too, of course, but even with the doze-weed it was like she knew this was for her. She’d be stepping and hopping and gathering years to her back until she was stooped, but if Jinty had got it right and we’d done the freezing out right, Izzy would drop into the wild ice just before her skin fell off and her arms and cheeks and bones came apart, and her blood and water and gristle spread over the lake to feed the shinny beetles. It wouldn’t be so bad if she couldn’t feel any of it. It wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of us couldn’t hear any of it either, but we only had the doze-weed. Jinty’d had no doze-weed and he was scrabbit-scared. We’d know tomorrow if he had good reason.

 

Shalla’s First Ice Shatter

There was a whole lot of whooping and clapping and shrieking coming from the Meeting House yesterday. Bunches of ten year olds skipping up the steps in their fancy drapes, and bunches of little ones prancing about outside like dolly-mops on strings, pretending to be grown-ups with flaps on their ears and their mouths lip-tight shut.

 

When each batch got inside the house, with the big doors closed and their child years shut off for good, the instructing began for their first Ring Birthdays. You have to know how to stop the yollerers getting into your head, and how to always watch the ice spirits, to keep looking and never to close your eyes except to blink.

 

It’s Shalla’s year this time and she’s all excited and looking forward to her first ice shatter, seeing the spirits shooting like hiss-rockets out of the freeze-sea to rip up the sky and make witchcats out of the clouds. She’s never seen a witchcat – well, you don’t until your first birthday because of the risk you might forget to look where you should look, and you end up having your own dance made for you. When that happens, they give you doze-weed to get you through it, but you still collect everyone else’s birthdays and get older and older as you go. You might be lucky and draw a good dance maker; get to the end before the end gets to you.

                       

After the hi-jinks and sweetpops and little pieces of stripey rock-gum, it all went quiet and the humming began. You hum because it helps the words settle in, like humming makes a soft place in your head for them to sink into and stick. But with over a hundred first timers, there’s bound to be a few accidents. You just hope you’ve done enough and there weren’t any nippers in the air, stealing the words out of the little ones’ ears and leaving scrabflannels in their place.

 

There’s shrieking in the Meeting House again today because they’re strapping Shalla into the gripframe. After her sister forgot to keep looking at the spirits and ended up dancing over the sea-ice with her bones on fire, Shalla’s parents aren’t taking any chances. Stretching her eyelids over the frame and finishing them off there and then, she won’t have to be stitched wide open every year. There won’t be the holes and the darn-beds; the bits of gut weft, greased out stiff like they’re pretending to be eyelashes. And with a good sharp slick-knife, those eyelids will come off easy as a lizard skin.

 

 

 

 

*First seen on Readwave

**First seen in Lancaster university DLMA 2013 showcase as Dance to the Wild Ice.