December's Child

She lived in the Gulf of Finland, in a house with a garden of ice sculptures. From there, through the winter nights, she could see the lights of St Petersburg.

She’d lived all round the Baltic, on the island of Gotland, in the city of Copenhagen, in the Polish town of Sopot, on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago, in Riga, and Kipsala, but it was St Petersburg she recalled most fondly – the pastel neoclassical facades of Finnish granite rising above the bridges and canals, her beautiful art nouveau house in the Colonna quarter, the icebound city in winter.

For it was there that she’d created her first snow garden, and discovered her true art.

During the darker months she’d lie on snow as others lie on summer sands. She remembered years when the Baltic froze over and a vast silence descended, interrupted only by the ice breakers.

She wanted others to love the snow and ice as she did, for there was purity in the fresh clean breath of winter.

She wanted to love, for she’d been human once, or part human. She hardly knew.

She’d been left at her father’s door on the day of the winter solstice. The snow baby they’d called her. For she was white as snow and cold to the touch. The woman her father hired to nurse her was found dead, her skin blue-white and cracked. Her father never hired another and soon, when she was six or seven, he set her down in the icy wilderness, and left her to live or die, as winter decreed. For he’d not kill her himself, though she’d killed – adults and children – and all for want of a friend or a simple caress.

She’d survived that winter and others, for winter loved her well enough.

Wherever she lived she kept her guard, staying only a few years. But she always returned to her favourite places. She’d lived in St Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad many times. Occasionally someone recognised her in the street, at the theatre or ballet, but it couldn’t be true that she looked as she did twenty or thirty years before. Perhaps she was the daughter, the granddaughter, they enquired, and she laughed and said yes.

If anyone suspected, if anyone tried to harm her, a frost crept over their skin as their blood turned to ice. Some were frozen upright. A battalion of Bolshevik soldiers once met this fate. They were perhaps her finest work.

Whenever summer came, she bathed in tubs of ice, remembering past lovers who’d wanted to be loved to death and beyond. And so she touched them, breathed on them, arranged them in her garden. Many people travelled to look at her snow sculptures. In St Petersburg they arrived on horses, troikas, automobiles.

And when the thaw came, and she’d fallen out of love, she dug a pit and buried them, and no one was any the wiser.

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Image by Aleksandra at Fusion Dream. An alternative version of this story was published around 20 years ago at a writing forum as part of their advent project and was slightly shorter than the present version.