This month’s theme:
Cold

We had a cold snap here in Maine recently. It was bad enough that, with the wind chill, it hit 24 below zero where I am, but a few days later it was 13 below and the wind chill made it feel like 33 below. I’ve gone through colder, but it wasn’t pleasant. As such, my mind has been on cold lately, so this entry is the opposite of my July 2012 entry, “Hot,” which you can read HERE if this cold stuff gets you grumpy.

“Poor Jonathan...”
Fantasy humor
By David M. Fitzpatrick

Poor Jonathan, Jeremy thought, even in his current situation.

“Well, what do you think now, boy?” she asked, her scratchy voice a high-pitched hiss.

Outside, the wind blew with a near-constant, light whistle. From his angle, his head immobilized, Jeremy could see the snow blowing almost sideways. He tried to nod, but the magic held him fast, and the attempt made his neck muscles scream in searing pain.

“I said tell me, boy!” she cried out. Cold spittle from above hit his forehead and cheek.

Jeremy could feel the nub, like an icicle jabbing at him, digging almost painfully into his cheek. It was damn cold. He’d learned his lesson. Oh, how he’d learned it. But poor Jonathan...

“TELL ME!” she snarled.

“I was wrong,” he said, meek and afraid. He couldn’t move until she released him. And he dearly wanted to be released.

“Say it, then,” she commanded.

“All right!” he cried out. “It’s colder outside! MUCH colder!”

And with that, she released her spell. He staggered back, disoriented, and tried not to look at the ancient, sagging breast as the witch tucked it back inside her ragged gray robe. The breast was as wrinkled and hairy as her grizzled face. It had not been a pleasant experience. But poor Jonathan...

“Didja learn something today, sonny?” the old hag said with a cackle, with a broad smile baring crooked teeth, green teeth, missing teeth. “The next time you want to say something so rude as ‘A witch’s tit is colder than this,’ best be sure there aren’t any witches listening!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jeremy said, his voice quivering.

“Not as bad as your friend, though,” said the witch, slurping her white-scummed tongue over her thin, cracked lips. “Now, tell us again, sonny, what YOU said.”

Jeremy looked in fear at his friend. Jonathan was on his knees, trembling in place, trying to fight against the witch’s spell. Poor Jonathan...

“Say it, boy!” the witch shrieked, even as she pulled up her ragged robe to expose her ugly genitalia. Jeremy could smell the disgusting discharge that he could see; it turned his stomach. “Or it will be far worse than you even now imagine!”

“Okay!’ Jonathan cried out. “I said... I said a witch’s twat was so cold... your tongue would freeze to it!”

She cackled in delight. “Well, let’s see if we can prove or disprove that theory, boy...!”

Jeremy tried to close his eyes as proof against the scene, as Jonathan, unable to stop himself, clambered under her spell between her veiny thighs. But the witch’s spell had made sure Jeremy would have to watch...

“Poor Jonathan,” he whispered to himself.

“It’s Relatively Cold”
Science fiction
By David M. Fitzpatrick

It was 120 below zero Fahrenheit. Trina Meserve was freezing. She was appropriately bundled up for the trip outside the habitat, but she could still feel the biting chill right through the layers. A lot of it was probably psychological, because the fabrics that kept her warm weren’t actually letting much body heat escape.

“God damn, it’s cold out here,” she said. If it weren’t for the facemask, she knew the bitter air would have frozen her lungs in a single breath.

Jim Halloway, the expedition leader, nodded; his helmet bobbed, and Trina couldn’t see his face. “Just what we signed up for here on Icewind,” he replied over the communicator.

They paused to survey the sky above. It was always awesome to Trina, every time she saw it. Galahad, the blue-green-yellow gas giant, loomed in the sky, always looking as if it were about to crash into them. Or perhaps they into it. At the far fringes of the horizon-spanning sight were the blue skies of the moon of Icewind. Otherwise, it was ice and snow everywhere—a flat, boring landscape that stretched into the distance in every direction. Behind them was the series of interconnected domes that was the living habitat for the twelve-person crew. It was a series of geothermal shafts that they’d cut seven miles down that found enough heat from Icewind’s tiny molten core that ensured that they’d have enough heat to survive living there even if all the equipment failed and the supply ships forgot about them.

“Well, I’ll still be glad when we’re done with this assignment,” Trina said. “I hope our next job is on a hot ball of rock somewhere too close to its sun.”

Jim laughed. “It’s all relative. If they send us to somewhere hovering around freezing, it’ll feel like a tropical vacation.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. It might seem relative, but I want real heat next time. Now THAT’S relative!”

A sudden booming sound broke the silence, and the two humans spun about. It didn’t take them long to locate the source. It was a spaceship, cruising from the eastern horizon through the thin atmosphere, moving quickly, and descending toward them. It was angular and jagged, like a haphazard flying crystal, and it glowed in golden light with glowing areas of blue and white.

“Not one of ours,” Jim said. “Alien guests. Not a ship configuration I’ve ever seen. I always love first contacts.”

They watched as the ship of a hundred edges circled gracefully around the habitat and slowly lowered on antigravs until it gently set down a hundred feet from them. Trina and Jim hurried across the frozen landscape even as the spaceship lowered a ramp and opened its door. Two crewmembers, wearing protective suits of their own, clambered down the ramps and met them with bows and raised hands.

And they had hands. The aliens were a bit shorter than the humans but a good deal wider, and they had two sets of arms: one much larger above, and two smaller and longer ones that, even in their suits, seemed more like tentacles. Through the aliens’ glass helmets, Trina could see that they had mostly familiar facial structure, albeit with albino-white skin and four oversized, deep-blue eyes.

“Greetings,” Jim said. “Welcome to the coldest outpost this side of the Galaxy!”

“Are you kidding?” one of the aliens said through the translator. “This place is HOT! DAMN hot!”

Jim looked over to Trina, who chuckled.

“Okay, you win,” she said. “It’s all relative.”

“Frozen Dilemma”
Superhero
By David M. Fitzpatrick

He stood naked on the glacier. It was like something out of a comic book, given his name.

Kind of like Doctor Octopus in the Spider-Man comics. What was it J. Jonah Jameson had said in the second Spidey movie? Something about the odds of a guy named Otto Octavius having an accident that fused four artificial limbs to his body to give him a total of eight? But those sorts of silly things only happened in comic books.

Or... maybe not. There he stood in the arctic snowscape: Stan Snowman, afflicted with a bizarre condition. And it was pronounced SNOW-min, really, not SNOW-MAN. But still...

The sun was barely a sliver on the horizon of what seemed like an endless ice field. Soon, it would be eternally night this close to the North Pole. And here Stan Snowman was, stuck out in the dark, frozen wasteland above the Arctic Circle. Wind blew blisteringly cold air against him; he hated every moment of it, but at least it didn’t hurt.

Off the glacial shore, he could see the cruise ship nearly completely sunk beneath the sea. It was his own fault for taking an arctic vacation at all—and so absolutely not his thing. Of all the stupid things to give in to his stupid wife over. But now she was dead, trapped and drowned and frozen like the other hundreds of people on the ship.

Stan Snowman stood on the ice, naked and surveying his body, his skin now an icy, pale blue from head to toe. The bizarre electrical storm was like nothing he’d ever seen. Something about the aurora borealis, he thought, and plasma in the air, or who knew what else. Magic or something, maybe. And it had hit him on the deck before it had lashed out at the ship and sunk it. And in the subzero waters, Stan Snowman had been the only survivor, immune to the terribly cold waters that had killed so many so quickly.

But it was more than just a resistance to cold for Stan Snowman. He held out his hands and mentally commanded his newfound powers to manifest. Blasts of freezing energy erupted from his palms and hit the icy ground. He turned them toward the water and ramped up his power to incredible levels; in seconds, he’d even frozen a big iceberg out of the salt water where he’d trained his beams.

He willed his feet to produce the same blasts, and he rose into the air like a rocket off a launchpad. He took cues from Iron Man and angled his hands down, countering the blast pressure with enough to level him off. He flew around, up and down and sideways and vertical and horizontal, with total control.

Then he shut it all off as he blasted below him to create an ice ramp from the ground up. He bare feet hit the ramp and he felt the frigid cold as he slid like a snowboarding mogul all the way to the bottom.

Stan Snowman took a deep breath, willed all of his power, and spun, throwing his hands out. A FWOOM! like a sonic boom erupted, rippling outward in waves of force, and all around him the glacial landscape shattered into a zillion icy shards and collapsed into the ocean. He took to the sky and flew to solid ground elsewhere.

He had super powers. There was no denying it. But, really? Of all things, he got... cold-based powers? Sure, he was Stan Snowman, but somehow it just wasn’t fair.

He hated the cold, the snow, the ice. He’d hated coming on the stupid arctic cruise in the first place, but he’d always given in to his wife. She’d grown up in northern Quebec, so it was all fun and games for her. It was bad enough that he’d moved to Maine, which at least had nice summers to go along with its brutal winners. But Stan Snowman was from southern California, born and raised. He was accustomed to warm weather, or at least not-Ice-Age weather. He loved sun and heat, beaches and bikinis, year-round cookouts and riding his motorcycle every day. Not this crap.

So a guy who preferred something closer to tropical... got cold-based super powers. He knew he had two choices.

The first was that he’d become The Snow Man, the superhero savior who rescued kittens and saved children and stopped bank robbers.

The second was the obvious choice. Fate or karma or whatever had played this cruel joke on him, and he’d show the universe and all the people on Earth just how funny he didn’t think it was. The firemen could get the cats. The children could get better parents.  And he’d do the bank robbing.

“I will be The Snow Man,” he said aloud, “a supervillain!”

“Frosty”
Fantasy/horror
By David M. Fitzpatrick

It was just a snowman. Billy had worked all afternoon on him in the frigid cold, and he never thought it was anything more than a snowman of his creation.

Well, mostly his creation. It was tough to get that big midsection up on the bigger bottom section, so he needed his dad to come out and help. His dad hadn’t been happy to help.

“Jesus, Billy,” the bearded logger said, his frozen breath puffing out like a cloud of smoke with every exhaled syllable, “don’t build such a damn big bottom if you can’t get the next one up on it. You got to plan this shit out, boy. You have to learn to do on your own. You always need to get help. You won’t never get nowhere on your own...”

It was usual for Billy’s dad. Billy just gave plenty of “Yes, sir” replies as the man helped hoist up the midsection.

So when he had the head ready, Billy had another problem. It was much smaller than the midsection, but he had to lift it so high that he couldn’t do it. Plus, the head was still pretty big, and it was heavy. He didn’t dare to ask his father again, so he found his sister. Stepping into the warm house was like landing in a hot tub; the heat hit his nearly frozen ears and warmed them up to the point where he could feel the cold, and they hurt.

Suzie had inherited their father’s meanness and their mother’s bitchiness, and she berated him the entire time. “You’re such a weakling,” she said, still gloating over her growth spurt putting her a head taller than him over the previous year. “Lift weights or something. God, you’ll never amount to anything.”

That last line was one of his mom’s favorites. Billy kept his mouth shut until she threw on a coat and hat and gloves and followed him outside. Going back out into the cold was almost like system shock; Billy’s ears hurt, and he realized just how dreadfully cold it was.  He had to wrap this up before sundown, so he could get inside and warm up properly.

After Suzie had helped him place the head, with her bitching at him nonstop, he thanked her politely. She was already stalking back to the house complaining about what a little toad Billy was.

Then he needed a face and accessories. A soft and wilting carrot he found forgotten in the fridge’s crisper drawer would serve as the nose. In his mother’s bag of a zillion odd buttons, he found two oversized buttons that mostly matched for the eyes, and a line of smaller ones for a mouth. He even found an old fake corncob pipe in his toybox, designed for blowing bubbles. But he needed a hat and scarf. He didn’t dare guess, so he had to go to his mother.

“You think we work so you can take clothes out for a stupid snowman?” she snapped. “You’ll use rags and nothing more, you got that?”

He mumbled that he did, and that that was his intention. She bitched some more until she stomped into the laundry room and dug out a winter cap with a big pompon. The mice had chewed holes in it, but that was okay. The scarf she threw at him looked about a hundred years old, full of holes and unraveling on one end. It would do.

He hurried outside, but after being inside for so long, it was really unbearably cold. The wind had picked up, and he shivered against it as he stumbled through the snow to the back yard. The sun was gone, behind the trees, and it would be getting dark very quickly. He was tired of the snowman at this point and just wanted to finish it and get back inside so he could thaw.

He finished decorating the snowman and, as a last touch, jammed sticks into either side for arms. He stood knee-deep in the snow, in the cold early evening with the gray and darkening sky, and surveyed his work.

“I name you Frosty,” he announced to the silent snowman in the cold evening.

He had accomplished something. He’d had help, but he’d created something. He tried to feel proud, but he couldn’t. It was pointless. It was just a stupid snowman. He sighed, trying not to cry, and wasn’t sure why he should cry over a snowman. His tears would only freeze anyway. It was bad enough his eyeballs felt cold. Every breath made his lungs ache. But he just felt like crying. Over a snowman? Sure, they’d all holler at him for being a baby, and over something as silly as a snowman.

Maybe it was something else that made him sad. Maybe he couldn’t handle being a nothing kid with a sister and parents who didn’t even like him.

He sighed, looking up at the sky. It was partly overcast, but there were stars twinkling through. He found one that seemed bright, and he pretended that it was the kind of star you wished upon. He focused on it and he thought real hard. He called out mentally to any gods who might be listening—or fairies or spacemen or anyone who could grant him a wish.

“I just want to be someone special,” he whispered to the universe. “I just want to do something that matters.”

The universe said nothing, and instead Billy watched as clouds slid over the star and snuffed out its twinkle.

He sighed. It figured.

It was cold, damn cold. The thermometer was just about zero Fahrenheit, and the weatherman said the wind was making it feel like fifteen below. After it got dark, it was supposed to get far colder. Nearly forty below with the wind chill overnight, they said. A record for that day.

The sky kept darkening, and the wind kept howling. Billy was shivering a lot now, and he knew he couldn’t stay outside any longer. He’d learned about frostbite on exposed skin. He turned to head back inside.

“Stop, boy,” came a voice behind him.

He spun about to see who was there. The back yard was empty except for his snowman. But now he realized the snowman was looking at him... with real eyes, and a non-button smile with real, icy lips, one that angled up maliciously at him.

“You have given me life, boy,” Frosty said in an icy voice. “You have spawned me from the depths of Hell to bring sweet relief from the heat and the agony. And you’ve unleashed a grand demon on this Earth! I will plunge this world into a new Ice Age, one wrought with evil! By morning, through a frigid and terrible night, I shall complete my transformation from this snowy vessel to my true form, and the world will bow to me. And you, he who made my return possible, shall be my minion, a prince to rule over humanity!”

Billy was frozen—bordering on literally, but also from fear. Frosty seemed to sense this, and he leaned forward, gesturing with branch arms that were beginning to seem thicker, more distinct, more humanoid. “Don’t fear me, boy,” the snowman said. “Consider those who hurt you, and terrorize you, and rule over you, and know that tomorrow you will have all the power to have your vengeance upon them!”

Billy hurried back to the house. The snowman’s words were tempting. There was only one thing to do.

*   *   *

The next morning, his mother was furious. His father was furious. His sister was furious. Everyone screamed at him and belittled him. He took it as he sat at the kitchen table, all three voices berating him, next to the window that was open a crack. He turned his head as they hollered, and he surveyed his work.

The fat orange extension cord fed out the window and snaked across the snow-covered yard, where it joined a blue extension cord that completed the run far out in the back yard to where he’d made Frosty. Even from the kitchen, he could see the hat, the scarf, the buttons, the pipe, and the arms, all of them stuck to the small, frozen pond created by the melting snowman.

Mostly, they were mad that he’d left the hair dryer out there, and it had frozen into the ice.

They kept screaming, but Billy smiled. He’d brought a conquering evil into the world, and then he’d destroyed it.

Yeah... he was special.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.