Ice Maiden

The man was an artist, but his studio was far from usual. From his
warm and well-appointed living room led an ante-room which gave way in
turn to a glacial chamber containing several large industrial freezers
in which lay his works of art; the energy to maintain this divergence
of temperature did not come cheap, but nor did his masterpieces, for
the man was the top ice sculptor in London, and his work was
commissioned by top hotels and the very finest of dinner parties. Few
of his customers ever saw him at work, and may have been surprised by
the gusto with which he initially set about the huge blocks of ice with
great hammers and chisels, but it was not long before the edifice was
tamed and shaped. Then he was down to the tiny tools, almost surgical
in character, with which he picked out the fine feathers on the wing of
a wintering swan, or the pennant atop the main mast of a seafaring
schooner captured in the swell of a frozen ocean.

He had few friends, but his wealth and artistry brought him to the
attention of many gifted women. Some of them sought to thaw his cold
heart, but none of them succeeded. They found him morbid, for his
frostbitten finger unerringly touched and made solid the hidden folly
inherent in their busy and superficially fulfilled lives; the magazine
columnist whose crafted prose would adorn sleeping tramps on park
benches before being buried under tons of similar wasted words in
landfill sites, the designer whose headline-catching creations would be
laughed to scorn and sold at a discount next year, the computer
supremess whose state-of-the art software would be decompiled into
nothingness come the next upgrade, even the worthy doctor who was
working round the clock only to somewhat delay the inevitable decease.
So he remained a bachelor as he entered into his mid-life.

In his cynicism and loneliness he decided to carve a work of art purely
for himself; an ice maiden, a beauty of his own specification and
design who, unlike all his previous works, would not dissolve into
rivulets at the end of some dreary party, trickling through myriad
gratings to join the foetid flow of the capital's waste products. He
started slowly, using his spare time between commissions but soon found
that he was turning away work in order to be with her and shape her
fine crystalline features. Finally, months later, he etched the last
needle-fine hair and stood back to appreciate his completed handiwork,
only to find himself immediately reaching out to her.

"Do not touch me!" she warned, with a mocking sparkle in her shiny
eyes, a sparkle he himself had inscribed there. And he knew that he
would not, could not, sully her glacial splendour just to satisfy his
curiosity, but the fire still burned within him. He drew back, but
continued to admire her until drowsiness dulled his attention and he
staggered off to find his bed.

So he spent more and more time with her, gazing wretchedly on her
inaccessible beauty whilst she laughed at his impotence. On occasion,
when she drove him to fury, he would contemplate teaching her a lesson
and taking her through into the warm sitting room, only for a minute,
but enough to make her cry. But he was not at heart a cruel man, and he
knew he could not bear to see her fine features irretrievably smudged
and melted into remorseful pools.

A cold snap set in, and Londoners slithered and cursed their way to and
from work along glossy pavements, but away from the glare of the street
lights the winter sky turned through varying rainbow shades before
settling to inky black, pierced by starlight, and the night air was
sharp.
"Other girls get to go out," she wheedled during this brief icy reign,
"turn your heating off and you can take me out with you!" But he would
not, perhaps for fear of damaging her extremities against walls and
lampposts. The opportunity was lost and she grew petulant and sullen;
her eyes now sparkled with anger and she spoke rarely, and only with
contempt.

Soon he had stopped taking commissions altogether, and had dropped out
of society completely, for he had never been a wild spender and could
live frugally on his investments. But his clothes became frayed and
faded, and his beard grew whiter and more unkempt; when, on occasions,
he had to venture out to do his shopping he was greeted with glances of
pity. And what of his ice maiden? She could not, of course, grow
wrinkle-faced, droopy-breasted or dumpy-hipped like her flesh-and-blood
sisters, but eventually her smooth beauty began to be marred with a
patina of hoarfrost, and her eyes began to lose their sparkle and grow
milky, no longer seeing.

And, for all I know, they are together still.