Free The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman Page A

Lawrence. People in the Orlon Home for the Aged most often requested travel books for places they would surely never see: Egypt, Paris, Venice, Mexico. My mailman was reading poetry; no wonder what little mail I received was crumpled and stained. The griddle cook at the diner, who made a terrible omelet and even worse blueberry pancakes, read Kafka, in German.
    If Frances York had known what I was doing, I would have been fired on the spot. What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul. I knew Frances’s philosophy. It was not our job to monitor the books our patrons withdrew any more than it was our duty to alter their reading habits. I liked Frances and respected her, but I wondered if she would have hired me in the first place had she known who I really was. I was poison long before I’d started snooping around. Would she have felt safe with a person who knew more about the effects of arsenic than she did about the Dewey decimal system? A death addict and a thief who didn’t know wrong from right, white from red? At least now I’d had Peggy come by to help color-code my clothes; I knew enough to wear white blouses and black skirts to work and to leave my red clothes at home. But I was still me, hidden by sensible shoes, by skirts past my knee and button-down blouses.
    Thankfully, Frances had no reason to suspect any of this. I was a model employee: polite to our patrons, cheerfully running books out to those who were housebound or in the hospital. I even made a weekly trip to the home for the aged with a box of travel books. Could anyone have discerned I was not to be trusted? Not for a second. Well, maybe those mothers from the nursery group, they seemed to know, but I wasn’t counting them. I avoided the children’s section as a matter of fact. The bright illustrations, the rhymes, the high hopes, all made me nervous. Child patrons always wanted something: directions to the bathroom, a drink of water, a sequel to a book that doesn’t have one.
    The children’s section was where the tall windows were, and the sunlight filtering through in pale streams revealed how filthy the shelves were. There were dust motes everywhere. I ventured into that section one morning with a mop and a sponge. At least it was a school day, and there were no children around. Only me.
    By accident, I found the book my brother had taken out.
    Or perhaps there were no accidents; perhaps I saw the book out of the corner of my eye, and my brain processed the discovery in some deep place I couldn’t reach. However it happened, I turned and there it was, not put back properly, askew on the shelf. It was an old edition of Grimm’s, black with silver lettering. The pages smelled watery; when I held the book up to my nose I sneezed. Tears in my eyes. So what? I just happened to pick it up. I just happened to sit on the floor cross-legged and thumb through the pages.
    One story in particular had clearly been a favorite, perhaps of my brother, with dog-eared pages and a coffee stain or two. It was “Godfather Death,” one of the stories I’d hated and had always passed by. In this tale, whenever Death stands at the feet of an ill person, that person belongs to him. To trick Death, a good doctor, the kind hero, turns the ill person around so that Death is at the head and therefore cannot take him. Fairy-tale logic can be intractable or fluid, and the hero never knows which it is. Especially if the hero is a rational man. This one is.
    One more time and I’ll take you instead, Death says, but the doctor is a scientist through to his soul, a believer in order and in the rightness of things; he cannot accept this is the way the game of life and death is played. There have to be rules, and he is convinced that all he needs is to reverse Death’s direction. But when the doctor saves the girl he loves by turning her around