The Snow Queen

Story One

He was a very wicked man, a short, rough hard-wire of a man with cragged skin and long, shrunken teeth and eyes which flashed with nothing but the next beat of his heart, and the next tide of liquor on his lips. You might say he was a bad seed, a bad seed among a bed of rotting debris but bad seeds may germinate and thrive in close, fetid conditions. It is true that he was quite gregarious and left an impression, one way or another, on each who met him.  Constantly courting his own death made him very fecund, rather like a plant which flowers quickly in the hottest part of the garden, although remarkably, as far as he leant towards it, death would not let him in.

In short he was an 'arse'. Some folk loved him though; indeed they loved him when he was bad, they laughed about his deeds and said, 'There he goes again, good old...for he will never be tame and it was always thus'. A few women lived only to see a fleeting flash of his golden side and dwell on it for many months thereafter but he was cloaked in such a marinade of darkness that he could only fake good. Within their hopeful minds dwelt only the fantasy of family life while they busied themselves with the chores of what and where he spawned; small helpless fruits which they pickled in hot, damp rooms or left out in the cold to shrivel and become invisible.    

A local drinking den was his court, a street corner was his business. All he touched and infiltrated gradually lost its beauty and verve instead becoming pale, retracted and needy. They looked for him, called his name night and day, painted it upon walls of grey concrete, for what? To have the very life sucked from them, why? Perhaps because they themselves felt so lowly that their lives were simply an ill-fitting garment, primed to be thrown away to anyone willing to take it. And this little man took it willingly and then laughed when he forgot where he buried it. Of course he derived some amusement from his undertakings but no joy, never joy for everything he saw was hideous and distorted and he had the power to make others see the world through his own eyes. There was no dreams to chase, no castles to build, only sickly confinement and despair.

Many of his associates vanished or were filed away into nothing but a heap of cold bones with cups for coins and sores upon their weary hides. A few of his trusted counterparts stuck with him for years but their faces became hard and distorted and their hearts as cold a black ice. And just like him they cursed the earth and spat tiny fragments of this ice at unsuspecting folk and out into the atmosphere where they floated on idle winds and stuck in people's throats and the corners of their eyes. It stoked the evil little man to think of all the ill he caused and some of these fragments of dark ice float still among us and now you shall here what happened with one of them.