The Day the Ice Cracked

So throughout my life I've had several dreams that were 'important' and stuck in my mind more than regular dreams. Here's one I had when I was 12, in as much detail as I can remember it.

I was twelve years old, my mind balanced on the edge of insanity and my body at the precipice of becoming a woman. I didn’t remember how I had gotten here but somehow I just walking barefoot though the snow. It was the end of March in Minnesota, and though a think coat of snow still covered everything and the lake was still iced over, flowers were beginning to poke though the snow and the temperature was edging towards something nearly bearable.

           

The snow receded at the edge of what I realized was Lake Nokomis. Towards the middle of the northerly section of the lake there was a light, much like the overhead lights in the fenced off ice-skating rink where pond hockey tournaments were played during these Minnesota winters. I knew that the light didn’t belong there, just out in the middle of the lake like that. It unnerved me but that shadows behind me seemed unpleasant so I stepped onto the slick ice and headed towards that light.

           

I was wearing nothing but a strange filmy garment of white silk that reminded me a bit too much of cobwebs and provided no protection from the cold. My feet, though bare against the ice, didn’t seem to be falling victim to frostbite and I understood that this was a type of cold less malevolent and more of a challenge to me. I pulled off my flimsy clothes (they made a sound like cotton balls being pulled apart) and let the air attack my naked body. I seemed to harden, as if condensing in the cold to become almost superhuman. I touched my arm, and the skin did not yield.

           

I knew that behind me someone was watching me undress, but I was not concerned because I instinctively knew that I was the only one who could walk on this ice. I wanted them to watch me; I wanted to be desired, but only from a distance. I felt I was here to do something important and the shadows around the lake were inconsequential.

           

When I reached the light I examined myself and saw that I was white and shimmering on the surface and seeming to emanate a deep murky green light from inside my body. Behind the light post I could see the dark outline of a willow tree. It was bare of its leaves and its trunk was decorated with graffiti etched crudely into the bark. I recognized this tree. During previous summers I had spent a lot of time under that tree, sipping cokes and observing the waters and daydreaming about my first boyfriend, who had given me a hand folded paper lotus flower. He was the one who watched me from the shadows now, though perhaps not with desire but judgment.

           

The tree seemed to give me a nod of encouragement, and all at once I felt the cold surface beneath my feet vibrate with a strange noise. A humming, low pitched, almost but not-quite human. I heard this and I looked down to see light beneath the surface. Even through the 13-inch thick ice I could see a dim glow, a green glow, not unlike that I observed coming from my own chest.

           

I crouched and lay the side of my head against the ice, listening. All I heard was humming, sometime higher pitched but mostly the constant base, but in my mind I heard “FREEDOM…SOON…. FREEDOM…LIGHT….” It was not a voice that spoke in my head, it was energy. There was no language used I just understood. And I felt excited by this, I felt compelled to change, I felt… that I needed to break the ice.

           

I pounded with my fists, but they merely slid against the surface instead of breaking through.  Breathing heavily, I looked around for something heavy. Noticing a dark stone at the base of the lamppost, I grasped it eagerly.  The stone was smooth onyx carved into the shaped of a dragon’s head. One side was rough as if it had been broken off.

           

I found the place where the ice seemed thinnest and knelt before it. Though it was heavier than expected, I raised my new weapon above my head. Bringing it down with every ounce of energy in my body, I screamed as it made contact. The ice spider-webbed, but did not break. Below me the humming stopped. The icy wind stopped blowing for a second. The entities I sensed in the shadows beyond the lake stilled. I brought it down again, and this time my left hand slipped in the process, crushing my fingers between shards of ice and rock. But this time water flowed. My hand was useless, though the coldness of the water numbed the pain. I seized up in one last, painful swell of energy, and I reached into the crack I had made and ripped the lake open. I forced a ray of heated energy though the hand I shoved into the crack and a sound like thunder boomed as the ice parted for me. 

           

I slid into the exposed water immediately, sinking faster than normal.

           

At first the cold was excruciating, like an unrelenting demon that wrapped itself around every inch of me; a second skin. I tried to breathe, and water forced itself down my throat and into my lungs and for a moment it was over. 

           

It is hard to describe what happened next. When the freezing water flowed into my lungs it was paramount to the phenomenon know to meditation gurus and drug-enthusiasts as ‘ego death’. I was no longer a twelve-year-old girl named Rachel or any other name I’d tried to invent for myself. I was the lake in its entirety; I was each molecule of the water that rushed towards the crack I’d created in the ice. The fish that had hibernated in the depths of the water were another part of me; they were the lesser beings of my entity. The Nixies, or the holder’s of the lake’s consciousness, were opening their eyes for the first time in months. They were filled with an endless hunger, a hunger that was not just in their bellies but in their souls as well.

           

I’d feared these creatures in a superstitious way since I’d first begun swimming in the lake. My child self had adhered to a strict set of rules to pacify and repel the strange and exotic Nixies. My best friend in grammar school had taught me ways to communicate with the Nixies and determine if I was in danger from them: a child could make a handprint in the beach, and if it filled with water in a certain amount of time the Nixies were hungry for your flesh. A drop of a girl’s blood on a willow leaf could be cast into the lake as an offering. The three old willow trees we knew as ‘The Sisters’ could offer protection, but then one was obligated to do them favors.

           

As I floated in the Lake, feeling everything in my surroundings and forgetting everything about myself, I understood the nature of the Nixies. They were not as simplistically evil as we had always assumed. They were powerful, and sometimes malicious, and yes they were a source of lust for everything living. But they also had knowledge to offer and they were a part of the delicate system that was the water in Minneapolis. They were one of the societies that found balances between the old world and the new.

           

The moment of clarity did not last forever; it may have lasted less than half a second for all I knew. But when I returned to my body, I felt the most beautiful sensation of awakening I’d ever experienced. I felt I had been reborn.

            My body had been transformed by the water- my skin was slick and incandescent, my legs and arms ended in translucent webbed fins. My eyes could now see clearly underwater, and it seemed the need to blink had vanished. 

           

But I no longer felt the shame and self-loathing that had taken me over in the last few months. My futile attempts to take care of my brother, my odd hallucinations and my obsessive devotion to a boy who was either unwilling or incapable of caring about me in the way I so desperately wanted- those things were from another life. I remembered them, but I accepted them without emotion.

           

The oldest of the Nixies, who would not have her name spoken aloud, presented herself before me.  She was so ancient that she had become not one singular being, but a temple for the memories of thousands of generations of life forms that had ended at this lake. “Grandmother” was too confining a word to describe her. She was the silent watcher. She found those with power, or the potential to power, and she pushed them. She watched over everything that had happened since her birth.

           

The other Nixies were all the daughters of her and the Dark One, she explained to me. They were spirits less tied to their homeland. They could die, if they so choose, and often did to escape the hunger.

 

“Dark One?”

 

It was impossible to speak underwater, but the old Nixie understood my question.

 

“ He is the shadow-spirit of this lake. Not quite like us, but not quite like you. I have a feeling you’ll be meeting him though… Don’t let him control you, and you may learn quite a bit from the Dark One.”

 

The Nixie looked at me critically. “You have potential to see things as they have never been seen before, and open up new connections that no one else could open.”

 

“What do you mean?”  I asked, but she ignored my pointless question.

“ You also have the potential for great waste. Waste and ruin and destruction, not just of your own life but also of others. Nobody here has the power to decide which way you are going to go. But I felt it best we acknowledge each other and work together.”

 

Several large fish swarmed in front of her, and when they had cleared out. The lake was empty again.

 

“You are coming into a new phase of life now.” A different voice spoke from behind me. It was a low, gentle male voice that reminded me somehow of shame and euphoria all at once.

 

“But you must watch carefully for this,” The Dark One said, and a hand lightly caressed my right hip. There was a birthmark there, shaped like a heart that I had always wondered about.

 

I looked down and saw the birthmark nestled at the center of a dark bruise. The skin felt hard beneath my fingertips, as if a piece of metal or stone was somehow implanted underneath my skin.

 

I sank to the bottom of the lake, away from the Dark One, and settled into the murky sands there. I seemed to drift into unconsciousness, and the last thing I noticed was a glimmer of something metallic, sinking into the lakebed with me.

 

 

I awoke immediately after the end of this dream. I got out of bed clumsily, feeling my un-athletic humanity contrast with the dream. I immediately went to the living room.            

 

My dad was sipping coffee in his armchair. “Look Rachel, the ice has cracked. Soon it’ll melt completely and then we’ll have spring.”

 

“No, this is Minnesota. We’ve got plenty more winter to come, wouldn’t you say so, Rach?” My mom shakes her head at Dad’s optimistic declaration. “Lots of shoveling to look forward to before we get to swim.”

 

I stood before the window. I stared at the crack in the lake. I felt awake.