Date of creation: 08/13/2024

Word count: 1496

Author’s note: This was my entry for round one, part one. The prompt was to write a story featuring a newly written book and a character named Pipaluk, and the maximum word count was 1500 words.

*****

The cheery knock at the door couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. I sighed and set the book on my lap so I could pull my right glove off. The few droplets of moisture left in the cold, dry air around me crystallized when they touched my fingers and fell tinkling to the sofa and the floor. I conjured a thin slab of ice as a makeshift bookmark and inserted it carefully between the pages without touching my bare skin to the paper, and then I pulled my glove back on my hand.

Another knock, followed by a “Hello?”

Pipaluk.

I sighed again and shouted, “I’m coming!” Then, lowering my voice to a mutter as I closed the book and set it on the sofa, “Not all of us can drop everything at a moment’s notice. You try being a snow witch one day. See how you like it.”

I padded to the door in my slippers to wrench it open, and there was Pipaluk. Neon green hair spiking out from his head in all directions, as if he just stepped out of an explosion (possible), wearing thick plastic lab goggles (fogged up), a wide smile (annoying), a long white lab coat (buttons mismatched), and heavy work boots (covered in a purple gooey substance). Nothing new. That, combined with his short stature of barely four feet tall, made it easy to look past him to my yard.

“What in the name of Jack Frost?” I exclaimed.

“Language,” Pipaluk scolded me, wincing.

“Your—things—have ruined my yard! What do you expect me to say?”

The heat cubes were bouncing happily all over the exposed brickwork and patches of mud, shades of brown, red, and orange all over what should have been white. My boundary line of ice was long gone, as were the snow banks and ice sculptures I’d cultivated so carefully. A small, solitary patch huddled in one corner, trembling as its glassy surface weakened, drip by painful drip.

“I’ll get them out of here, I promise!” Pipaluk said hastily. “But it’s not so bad. You can fix it, right?”

I yanked his cloudy goggles off his face and threw them on the ground. If I was going to glare at him, I wanted to see those overly large eyes, but his thick glasses were fogged up, too. And he’d worked hard to perfect those glasses. Unlike some people, I valued hard work, so I didn’t wrench them from his face and throw them on the bricks to grind them under my feet. I just thought about it.

“Take off your glasses,” I demanded.

He reached up to press a button on the glasses’ right leg, and tiny windshield wipers set to work, clearing the lenses so I could see his hot pink irises.

“I can fix it,” I said through clenched teeth, clenching my fists at my sides, “but it will take time. That was precision work. That willow tree took years for me to make. Years! And it’s gone in a matter of hours!”

“I can help! I can—”

“You can get your new pets out of my yard,” I said, dropping my voice into a low, dangerous tone. A freezing wind picked up and slapped my face. Pipaluk shivered. His windshield wipers froze in place with a whine of tiny gears. “Now.”

He hung his head in shame and turned around. The oblivious orange cubes had stacked themselves into a pyramid next to the sidewalk. He bent over and picked up his glasses just as the jiggly structure fell, molten cubes bouncing over his head and missing him by a narrow margin.

“Thank you for looking after them,” Pipaluk muttered, standing up, shoulders drooping. “Let’s go.”

All the cubes dimmed. They followed his messy purple tracks with slow, sad hops, and I felt a pang of guilt. Again. For the second time today. But I’d done nothing wrong, I reminded myself. If he couldn’t restrain his creations appropriately, he needed to accept the consequences when they ran amok.

And I had a lot of repair work to do, so there was no time for useless emotions like guilt or regret.

I ripped my gloves off and threw them on the porch as the last cube exited the stone wall enclosing my yard. The icy wind became a gale, swirling with ice and snow streaming from my fingertips into a blizzard. Reclaiming the wet bricks and ugly mud with layers of white wasn’t the problem. I could do that without lifting a finger. It was the designs, the delicate tendrils of ice snaking across the stones in intricate patterns, the garden of frozen flowers, the willow. I made that willow in remembrance of my mother’s favorite willow tree, the one that died as soon as she did. When I lost control.

Wind screamed in my ears, whipping my hair around my face. I could do that again. I could bury this house, this neighborhood, this town in ice and snow, trapping Pipaluk and every other person who didn’t understand me inside while I enjoyed peace and quiet and the atmosphere where I felt most comfortable.

The phone’s shrill ring interrupted my tantrum.

I let the wind stop, and the swirl of ice and snow dropped to the ground. White. White snow blanketing the bricks and frozen dirt, bluish ice hanging from the eaves and the branches of that one stubborn dead bush that wouldn’t disintegrate, and the still and silence of a winter wonderland.

Except for Winter Wonderland trilling from the kitchen.

But I liked that song.

I picked up my gloves and pulled them back on. The song had reached the chorus by the time I got back inside and picked up the phone, crystals forming in the air from my exhaled “Hello?”

“I think I can help you!” Pipaluk squeaked excitedly.

I sighed and massaged my temple. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ve been working on this new—”

“Pipaluk. I don’t want a potion, or a pill, or an animated, sentient object. I needed a new project, anyway, so—”

“—and they melted their crates, but I’m sure their new enclosure will hold—”

“I really don’t—”

“—if I use a little less fairy dust—”

“You’re not listening to me, are you?”

“That’s it!” he shrieked. I could picture his index finger pointing straight up into the air as his face split nearly in two with his smile. “Gotta go. You’ll thank me later!”

Click.

I sighed again and replaced the phone on its hook. That snow witch commune sounded really good right about now. But knowing my luck, if I moved there, my new neighbor would be another mad scientist, or worse, someone who wanted to come over and talk. Like my cousin Crystal. I couldn’t stand her for more than a few minutes at a time, and I wasn’t about to join the book club she kept gushing about where everybody gossiped and nobody read. Warlocks weren’t that interesting.

Pipaluk kept his intrusions to a minimum, all things considered. The cubes were the first real problem I’d had with him. His kids didn’t even bother me, and his wife made a great milkshake. For someone without ice elemental power.

A milkshake sounded good right about now. I’d forgotten about lunch since I was too immersed in that book.

I opened the pantry to a cloud of frost and ran my gloved finger along my options. Chocolate, of course, and…mint. Mint sounded good. Cool and refreshing. I threw it all in a blender with milk, waited a minute for it to mix, stopped the blender, poured it into a glass, and removed a glove. The ice spread through my fingers when I picked the glass up again, and by the time I’d reached the living room and my waiting book, the mixture had crystallized nicely.

Crystallized. Crystal. And the newly written book she sent me for my birthday, an advance copy from an obnoxiously famous snow warlock she met at a party at the North Pole. A book I swore I’d hate because he was so overrated, and she was so dead-set on finding the perfect match for me, and it was a romance, for goodness’ sake. A romance. I didn’t read romance novels. Romance novels were for lonely people, and I wasn’t lonely. I liked to be alone.

I pulled my glove back on and sipped the minty, chocolatey shake as I picked up the book, flipping it over to the author’s picture and the blurb on the back cover.

Okay, I had to admit he was handsome, with that heart-freezing smile and those glacially gorgeous blue eyes.

And he was a pretty good writer.

I opened the book to my ice bookmark, right where Pipaluk’s knock interrupted me, right at the climax, when the main character confessed his love to the woman he’d admired from afar since that fateful night their paths crossed in a snow globe shop on Christmas Eve.

Winter Wonderland

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