ICE

A van full of stoners doing bong hits and driving out onto Walloon Lake in late November, after the first freeze-up, when it is just too fun and unavoidably pleasurable not to enjoy the hardness of the ice—newly frozen, translucent, and prone to gun-shot adjustments—too tempting to drive the van out onto a location that, just a few short weeks ago, seemed burdened with liquidity, waves slapping the boat hulls. All the kids had been out there, dangling lines, the lake silty and murky, lily pads encroaching on the south end. These kids were acquainted with the depths as they unfolded beneath the boat. Each knew the oil barrel raft under which, listening to the soft patter of afternoon water, one could gaze into the yellow depths the way God might stare between the clouds. So it was natural to drive the van out into the center, where soon—in a week or so—ice fishing shacks would appear. Most natural to test the ice in the largest way possible, stoned and happy. Most natural until—near the center—a crack opened, engulfed the machine, and returned the upper world to silence.

UNDERDRESSED

A kid out cross-country skiing, humping the poles, digging in, throwing back a good kick—the hard blue wax tossing the powder, and the bone-bent curve tense and tight against the snow—then up a hillock, leaving the herringbone marks across a landscape bisected by the Penn Central tracks to Chicago but otherwise natural and scrubby and, in the summers, a favorite of local dirt bikers who weave their ruts into the hills. So he is very wet and tired when he slows and rests for a moment, his breath puffing out in the subzero air, feeling the chill resting against the sweat of his spine, entering his hips. When he moves on to keep warm, coming up over another hill and into a glen, he catches his ski on a stump, falls, twists his ankle, and feels a tight snap. He dies silently, falling into the impenetrable darkness and then the unwillful sleep, head down in the soft snow.