Reflections on Ice

By Lucas Moody. This story was collected as part of a 2023 open call for submissions. It is one of 17 stories that were selected to be published.

In the ancient, long ago before times... in the days when Picard was still captain of the Starship Enterprise... before Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant, before a MisCon had ever been held in Missoula... in the days when I was still a child, I remember thinking to myself that "April showers, bring May flowers" was a very silly turn of phrase.

After all, it didn't rain in April... that was a month of ice and snow. The rains did not come until May.  For certain, there were flowers in May as well, during two weeks that find the lilacs in bloom caught between the seasons of Still-Winter and Construction.

But that was when the rains were, when the ice on the Rattlesnake Creek would break and there was a sound like thunder or cannons as the torrent of released water and ice rolled boulders down stream towards the river that runs through Missoula, Montana.

The creeks and rivers would be utterly reshaped at the end of Still-Winter when the fragrance of the lilacs would waft on the breeze.  New pathways would open up, even as old ones were closed... a boulder where one could sit dry in the middle of the creek and think, would have been washed away.

Blue herons would rest upon the ice of the sleeping waters before taking flight.  The ice sheets were so thick that it could bear a person's weight, though attempting a crossing was perilous.  Every year brought tales of poor souls who fell through into the icy torrents beneath the placid surface.

But now the rains come as if to herald in the New Year.  Caring nothing for insistence of a child now grown that the showers shouldn't arrive until after April.  What ice exists is thin and fleeting, washed away before it bridges the waterways.  When the lilacs bloom, there are no rolling boulders that rubble like cannons, no breaking ice sheets that roar like thunder.

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Lucas Moody grew up next to the Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana. No matter how many times he moves away, the mountains keep drawing him back. He dreams of a world where we are no longer alienated from the environment.