Montz

Glacial Cosmology

By Sophia Montz

You’re probably wondering why you haven’t been able to reach me, Rebecca. I promise that I’m well enough. To explain why I left, I must first present what may sound like a strange, esoteric little tale.

When I was six, I dreamed the world was made of ice. Not just the world, but the planets, the stars, and the space between the stars, down to the swirling atoms of our skin—from the discus of Andromeda to the beads of electrons. The whole universe unfolded across my closed eyes like a tessellation of snowflakes. This miracle of ice rocked me awake with feverish revelation. Not feverish in the traditional way, you understand. Feverish in that it filled me with a longing so deliciously frigid that all I could do was sit, shaking, under the guttering curtain of my midsummer window.

You may be curious what this has to do with you. I’m sure you’ll understand if you only keep reading.

20°C (68°F): Hospital Temperature

I’ve always struggled to articulate what this vision meant, to evangelize ice as my creator. It may help you to understand that the average temperature of a hospital room is sixty-eight degrees, and an infusion of cisplatin is stored at twenty-seven degrees. A cold cap is filled with a coolant chilled at precisely twenty-five degrees. And as a child still half-sitting on my father’s lap, I could reach out and touch the strange silver helmet and laugh as he tells me that it’s nothing, he’s just becoming a snowman—watch out, the carrot for a nose is next.

−5°C (23°F): Below Freezing

Later, my father and I spread a blanket in the backyard, my breath vapor against the moon. I could still smell the antiseptic under the tar of cigarettes, charred citrus and flared pine. He passed me a telescope and told me to look up.

“They call it the Milky Way,” he said.

But have you ever packed snow between your gloved hands, tighter and tighter and tighter, only to see a loose stream of all your efforts fall back to the ground like a comet’s tail? What else could the Milky Way be but that stream, diamond-tossed and stalactite against the sky? He pointed to the stars.

“That’s you, that’s Mom, that’s me,” he said.

I smiled. It was the three of us intrepid across a dark river of space, marching towards a polar night.

0°C (32°F): Melting Point

When I think of memory, I think of the spinning sides of a thaumatrope. At once clear and at once far away, but blended. I remember the feeling of my father’s telescope with an uncomfortable sharpness. The metal is still cool in my hands, the raised engraving of the name pebbled like crushed ice. But my father stands distant. More than anything, I remember what could have been him. I live with his void, the outline of the shape he should have filled. He thaws away and becomes steam, like a spirit rising from a medium after a séance.

2°C (34°F): Drinking Temperature of Vodka

Memory blurs for us, too, Rebecca. Our first meeting at the fraternity party remains an aerosol of cloying smoke. Our first kiss, just the gloss of old sodium streetlights. But I can feel the plastic booth of the chain restaurant where we met your parents, your finger tapping against my palm under the table in morse code between limerence and love. And that Saturday passed between bands of rain, between prismatic neon puddles shaking with the bass of passing cars? Technicolor crisp. I’ll never smell the burning lemon electricity of a summer storm without thinking of you.

“One more drink,” you begged. I don’t remember my answer. But I know your hair was slick against your head and that I touched its taffy softness. You always had that wildness to you, the nerve to plunge into a city half-asleep.

Try to remember for yourself. Can you picture us in bed together after that night? Tell me if it’s clear or far away. You smelled of cigarettes, of hydrogen—is it possible to smell of hydrogen? —like the collapse of something elemental. Your body curled away from mine just enough to imply guilt, your touch just bare enough to tamp down suspicion. Twin judgments rattled back and forth as I chewed on the inside of my cheek, my hand resting in the dead space between us. Guilty, not guilty.

4°C (39.2°F): Morgue Temperature

It reminded me of lying in bed next to my father. My mother pushed me up and over the plastic hospital railings to confront the pieces that were left of him. His body was already a comma, a pause, oriented towards another world. Here, not here.

37°C (100°F): Temperature of Cool Ash

When I think of grief I think of cigarettes, the ashes of them pendent at the tips. When my father pulled me into the cotton of his shirt it was like standing in the glade of a forest fire. My ashes build and build and build but never fall, just curve away. Maybe this is the tragedy of ice, in the end. The only change possible is to evaporate and disappear.

−270.45°C (−454.81°F): Average Temperature of the Universe

I hope you understand now, Rebecca. The childhood revelation after my strange, consumptive dream—a dream in the dim morning hours before my father’s funeral—was simple. In the white smoke of a frozen universe, nothing ever really dies. Isn’t it better to leave us this way, preserved in a cool elegance of patient waiting?

I take my father’s telescope and point it towards the moon. You’re there now in the stars, next to three resolute figures holding hands in a zodiacal light, just at the tilt of horizon.

Sophia Montz writes legal memoranda by day and literary fiction by night. She lives in Miami, FL with her husband and two cats. Her work is forthcoming in Does It Have Pockets.