Keep Art Alive :: “Mrs. Frost” :: Art by Menton3
“I’m fooling somebody.
A faithless path to roam,
deceiving to breathe this secretly.
This silence,
a silence I can’t bear.”
Laney used to make up fairy tales about their Mother. The stories, they always included evil curses conjured up by some unknown force of nature who whisked her away, their Mother, into some frozen land. She was beautiful, our Mother, Laney would say. She was brighter than the sun and warmer than the middle of July. That’s why they took her, Laney explained, because the witches of the Frost Netherlands wanted her heat for themselves.
These fables, well, Jack knew they were made up. They were the stuff of children’s books, and Jack was not a child anymore, not after their Mother left them. He was 9 and Laney had been only 3 years older, yet she spoke to him as if she were decades above him, as if she was now the second in command, come to take over for their missing Mother. Jack thinks back and has to concede that she was that to him, his new Mother, and in some way she still was.
For the most part it was just the two of them now. Sure, their Father still resided in their rotting from the outside mobile home, but mostly it was just a his hard shell that was in their, sitting in front of the television eighteen hours out of each day, blurry eyed, mesmerized by nothing, drunk to near oblivion from the moment he re-opened his eyes, day after day. Once upon a time their Father was the guitarist in a one-hit-wonder band. He was even on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Now though, he was more frozen than the “Evil Mother Stealing Queen” was.
“Laney, do you think we can find the Frost Queen?” Jack asked on the seventeenth day after their Mother disappeared.
“I don’t know, Jackie. She might just steal us away and freeze us, too.” Laney explained, pausing at all the right moments, running her pale hand through his dirty blonde hair.
“You mean like in Carbonite? Like Han Solo?” Jack lived for Star Wars back then, loved everything about it. Well, admittedly he still does.
“I doubt it. I mean, the Queen isn’t from space or anything.” Laney smirked, giving him a wink and a nod.
Jack knew she wasn’t in Carbonite. He knew she wasn’t in some Frost Queen’s clutches either, but it was easier to breathe when he pretended to believe. It made him feel less lonely. Believing made him feel numb.
