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The Monster at Crook Pond
The campus legend had been around for some time, though everyone who knew about it told the story a little differently, whispering their sincere warnings alongside more obvious embellishment. But they all had the same core: stay away from Crook Pond in the winter, the one tucked away behind the Sciences building that hardly anyone passed by and which was the first thing to freeze over any time the weather got cold. There was something dangerous there, though no one seemed to have a clear idea of exactly what.
Of course, Audrey had never heard of any of it, at least the first time that she saw the girl.
It was a Monday in late November, and the long indian summer had finally broken with a vengeance. Over the weekend, a cold front had come through, bringing with it several inches of snow, only for it to partially melt and then refreeze all over again the next day.
In essence, it was the kind of weather Audrey hated the most. But she was determined to make the best of it and had bundled up in full. After piling on layers of clothes, donning her black coat and boots, pulling her stocking cap down tight around her ears, and winding a long scarf around her whole head, she felt like a particularly cold-averse mummy.
It had worked too well, and after sweating through her morning Stats course, she decided to take the longer, scenic walk to Organic Chem, the path that passed by the idyllic pond in the back, where much of the snow was still untouched and nice-looking. That’s where she saw the girl.
The girl was sitting by herself on a bench overlooking the pond, elbows on her knees, head resting in the palm of her hands as she stared blankly forward. A silver charm bracelet gleamed on one of her skinny arms, and an unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. But most strikingly of all, she was dressed as if it was the height of summer. Her t-shirt was a faded yellow, and the girl’s denim shorts were distractingly short, leaving a long expanse of leg so pale that it almost blended into the white of the snow.
Audrey couldn’t help but stare, her pace slowing to a halt. And the more she stared, the less sense it made. The girl’s dark hair hung in thin, wet curls, looking for all the world like she had stepped out of the shower. And her bare feet gently rested on the snow, toenails painted orange in chipped polish. Audrey waited, watching the girl as she didn’t move an inch, only gazing forward with the same vacant expression.
When Audrey started walking again, the crunch of frozen snow beneath her boots sounded suddenly loud. For some reason she felt as if she was approaching a rare bird of some kind, that if she so much as blinked, the girl would suddenly startle and take to the air, or maybe just vanish entirely.
Neither of those happened. The girl didn’t react at all. Audrey swallowed, then awkwardly sat down on the bench next to her. She stared forward too, trying to see if there was something in particular the girl was interested in off in the distance. When she gave up, she realized the girl had turned to look straight at her, and Audrey’s breath sucked in in surprise.
A long uncomfortable moment passed, with the girl still completely silent. “Aren’t you cold?” Audrey finally asked.
“Dreadfully,” the girl responded immediately. Audrey didn’t know what she expected, but the voice caught her off guard, too--deeper than she expected, equal parts bored and languid.
“Can-- Can I do anything?”
The girl raised her arms above her head, arching her back to stretch and in the process emphasizing the way the thin t-shirt hugged her figure. Audrey’s eyes flicked away as her felt warmth in her cheeks. “You want to help warm me up?” the girl asked, amusement creeping into her tone.
“I mean, I… Do you want my scarf? Or coat?”
The girl raised an eyebrow, her lips curling upwards, and Audrey fumbled, trying to unwrap the scarf from her head but getting it tangled up in the process. She finally got it off, and was working at the top button of her coat when she glanced back at the girl to see her crossing her arms and frowning.
“You’re a girl,” the girl said flatly.
Audrey looked down at her bulky coat, suddenly realizing that with her hat and scarf on, it had been far from obvious. “Yeah,” she said.
The girl pursed her lips as she stared at the pond, exhaling slowly. Audrey found herself momentarily struck by the realization that even in the chill of the air, the girl’s breath didn’t fog at all. “Look, you look like a good person. It’s really sweet of you to offer to help. But you should go away.”
“What? No really, I-- I don’t understand, but I can help,” Audrey said, the words coming out fast. “If you explain, maybe I can-- I’m great at solving problems, and I’m sure there’s something that I can do--”
The girl met Audrey’s eyes again, and she stood from the bench, leaning down so that her face was inches from Audrey’s own as Audrey found her words trailing off into silence. The girl’s lips pulled back into a grin that showed more teeth than it did amusement. “You want to know my story? I’m a monster. And today I’m feeling particularly gracious, so consider yourself a very lucky lady.”
With that, she reached down to tap Audrey on the tip of her nose with one finger, and Audrey let out a gasp at the sharp cold, so frigid as to be painful. Her hands flew up, covering her nose with her mittens as the girl spun on her heels and gracefully strode over the snow and out onto the frozen surface of the pond.
After the moment of shock, Audrey jumped up, stumbling to follow. “Wait!” she called out, but the girl didn’t respond. Audrey clumsily followed, feet slipping on slick ice, barely heeding the fleeting worry about whether it was thick enough to support her weight. Ahead, she saw the girl take another step and then drop down out of sight. Audrey fell, then, her feet going out from under her, and she kept going forward on hands and knees, trying to be as careful as she could while still hurrying.
At the center of the pond, where the girl had disappeared, lay a jagged hole in the ice. The water below was an inky black, surface still rippling slightly. Audrey stopped, her lungs aching from the icy air as she panted heavily. As she watched, the edges of the hole crept forward, the water disappearing from view, leaving only unblemished ice behind.
It warmed up again the next day, not getting anywhere close to summer again, but at least enough that the snow melted away and students began voicing complaints about winter not being able to make up its mind. Audrey walked past Crook Pond every day for the next week, even on the days she didn’t have Organic Chem. But she didn’t see the girl again, and the pond looked perfectly unassuming and peaceful, albeit a little muddy.
She was about to give up entirely and write it off as a hallucination when she woke up shivering on Saturday. The weather had taken another cold turn, and the old radiator in her room had never been the best about keeping up. But rather than annoyance, she felt something else: a kind of anxious certainty that led her to get up, bundle into her coat, and head to campus.
The sidewalks were empty, with few students interested in leaving a warm bed on a day like today unless absolutely necessary. Audrey hurried as she traveled through campus to the pond, worrying if she was too early, if it was only a certain time, if there was something about the kind of snow in particular…
But sure enough, as the pond came into view, a slim figure was lying across the bench in front of it, one bare foot dangling down to almost touch the ground below. The girl had another cigarette between two fingers of the hand across her stomach, and Audrey paused some distance away to go through her coat pockets for the zippo lighter she had picked up from a convenience store several days ago.
She took a deep breath and walked up. “Need a light?”
The girl’s eyes flicked over to her, narrowing as they looked Audrey up and down. After a long consideration, the girl extended a hand with the cigarette. “Yeah.”
Audrey grinned, and pulled off one mitten, fumbling with the lighter. With increasing panic, she flicked at the wheel, trying to get it to light without any success.
“Give it here,” the girl said, sitting up and reaching out expectantly. Audrey dropped the lighter into her hand. In one smooth motion, the girl flicked it open, producing a flame to ignite the end of the cigarette. She flicked it closed again, tossing it back to Audrey.
“You know those are bad for you, right?” Audrey said.
“Don’t think I’ve got much to worry about,” the girl said. She took a long drag of the cigarette, but then was overcome with coughing as she tried to exhale. Audrey leaned forward and then back, eventually just taking a seat on the bench.
“You smoke often?” she asked, when the girl had stopped coughing and was preoccupied with glaring at the cigarette.
“No. But I… was close with someone who did.” She fiddled with the bracelet on her wrist. “It’s a good excuse to ditch a party and talk.”
“Hm,” Audrey said. “Monsters have parties?”
The girl glanced over, the corners of her mouth tugging up into a faint smile. “Killer parties, you might say. You don’t wanna know what they spike the punch with.”
“I see.” Audrey took a deep breath. “I’m Audrey, by the way. Do monsters have names, too?”
The girl let one finger brush the tip of the cigarette, and the ember immediately went out. “Mina,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Mina.”
Amusement danced in Mina’s eyes as she looked at Audrey. “You’re really dumb, Miss Audrey. By all rights, I should kill you, you know. Monster code.”
“But you’re not,” Audrey said calmly. The anxiety already dissipating had never been about her safety.
“Nah,” Mina admitted. “Not today, anyways.”
“Why do monsters need to kill people, anyways?”
“It’s just the way of the world,” Mina said, one hand raised theatrically. “The circle of life, such as it is. You humans with your delicious warmth, all rushing around in your tasty bodies. It’s only fair to share with the rest of us, we poor monsters who are so very cold.”
“You take the warmth from people?”
Mina’s eyes cut over to Audrey, narrowing slightly. “More or less.”
“I see.” Audrey raised a mitten to her chin. “But what if you could get warm some other way? Then you wouldn’t need to kill people. Me included.”
Mina didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose.”
“Then how about we make a deal? I’ll do some research--I’m pretty good at that, by the way--and figure out a way to warm you up.”
“And what, precisely, do you get out of this deal?”
Audrey smiled. “Something to do? Seems like a fun project.”
Mina rolled her eyes. “So now I’m a project.”
“Would you rather, uh, keep sucking the heat out of people?”
“Maybe!” Mina said brightly. “You don’t have to make it sound like such a bad thing. Or maybe I just think your little project is a lost cause.”
“It’s at least worth a try. And less boring than sitting around out here all day. I mean, I think the gym has a sauna, and--”
“I can’t leave,” Mina said distractedly, staring at the pond again. She shook her head, and playfulness crept back into her voice. “Um, monster code again. And I don’t want anyone to steal my place on the bench, duh.”
“Oh.” Audrey pondered for a moment. “But I could bring something to you?”
“Hey, yeah.” Mina smiled, this time in full. “Actually, I could think of a few things.”
It turned out that Mina was less invested in Audrey’s plan to find a way to warm her up, and more interested in the possibility of someone to run errands for her. That’s how Audrey found herself back at the pond a couple of days later, her backpack stuffed full with library books.
“No, no, maybe, no,” Mina said, sitting crosslegged on the snow as she used the bench to sort them out into stacks. “Are you serious?”
“If you had been more specific than ‘good books,’ maybe I could have better matched your tastes,” Audrey said.
“What the hell is this?” Mina waved a book in accusation.
“Um, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone?”
Mina cocked her head to the side.
“It’s the first in a series about this boy who goes to a school for wizards, and--”
“Do I look like I’m twelve?” Mina said.
“It’s for adults, too! Some of the later books in particular get really good.”
“Oh my god, Audrey,” Mina said, eyes wide and mouth open. “I didn’t realize you were a nerd.”
“Shut up.”
Mina snickered, tossing the book into the no pile and reaching for another.
Audrey winced. “You’re probably not going to like that one either,” she said. “I just included it because, I don’t know, I figured a wide range was best?”
Mina’s eyes were glued to the synopsis on the back. “Mmm,” she murmured. She finally looked up, the book in her hand momentarily wavering the no and maybe piles until landing on no. “I think maybe vampires hit a little too close to home for me.”
Audrey blinked. “Do… Do you suck the blood out of people? Is that how you keep warm?”
“Eeeugh, seriously? That’s disgusting.”
“Okay, good.” Audrey watched Mina sort through another couple of books, before she quietly said, “How do you do it, then?”
Mina looked up, face blank. “How do you think?”
“Um.” Audrey swallowed, looking away. “Is it… is it like… an intimate thing?”
“Audrey!” Mina said sharply. A grin blossomed on her face. “Are you asking what I think you are?”
“What? I don’t know. I’m just… When we first met, you were surprised that I was a girl, right? So…”
Mina leaned forward. “So you’re asking, when I find a nice, warm, dumb boy who wants to help poor, little, cold me, how do we do it? You’re asking…” her voice dropped to a breathy whisper, “do we fuck?”
“Oh my god,” Audrey said, her mittens covering her face.
“Oh, you’re soooo sweet to help me out,” Mina play-acted, her voice syrupy sweet. “I know it’s so cold out here, but why don’t we get out of these silly clothes and lie down on this bench together and just… see what happens? Oh my! And you’re such a big boy, too. I don’t know it that would even fit in--”
“Okay!” Audrey shouted. “I get it!” She heard Mina burst into laughter and peeked out over the top of her mittens to glare at her.
Mina waved a hand dismissively. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Audrey. I never do anything more than kiss. I’ve got rules about that sort of thing.” She smiled beatifically. “Would you believe that I’m still as pure as the driven snow?”
Audrey considered it. “No,” she said.
Mina grinned again. “You’re learning!” She turned back towards the books. “Oh! Hey, I remember this.” She tapped the cover of Pride and Prejudice.
“How old are you?” Audrey asked drily.
Mina snorted. “A lady never tells.” She glanced down at the book and then back up at Audrey. “Nowhere near that old though.”
Audrey let her sort through a few more, picking out another book to add to the yes pile. “So what are your rules, then?”
“Hm?”
“Monster code, I guess? About the people you kiss. Or kill. Or both. You said you have rules?”
“Ah, yes.” Mina raised a finger. “One: No dogs.”
Audrey’s eyes grew round. “What?”
“No! Not like… I mean, no guys with dogs. I wouldn’t--” Mina saw the grin on Audrey’s face, and stuck out her tongue. “No guys with dogs,” she repeated. “Pet owners are nice. They deserve better.”
“I had a hamster growing up,” Audrey said.
“Ew, rodents. Two,” Mina continued, raising a second finger, “Nobody who’s already taken. If they’ve got a wedding ring, or even worse, if they’re with their girlfriend--”
“Someone hit on you while they were with their girlfriend?”
“You would be amazed. I’d probably be doing the girl a favor, but still, too messy. I don’t like it. Three...”
“No girls?” Audrey said, after Mina had trailed off into a frown.
Mina met her eyes, her face unreadable. After an uncomfortably long moment, she turned back to the books. “I think I just want these two.”
“Okay,” Audrey said, a little too quickly. “Once you finish them, I could always-- Hey?”
Mina had stood up, and started walking out to the pond, the two books cradled in her arms. Audrey followed behind, slowed by the difficulty of walking on the ice.
“What are you-- Whoa!”
Mina tossed one book right into the hole at the center of the pond. The second followed right behind. As they hit the water, they plunged straight down without even a splash, only a circle of ripples extending out to trouble the black surface of the water.
“Those are library books!” Audrey said.
Mina raised both hands, palms up. “Oops?”
“How are you even going to read them if they’re all wet?”
“It’s… complicated,” Mina said. “That’s just how things work. I think. That’s how I got the cigarettes--some guy trying to quit threw a pack in the pond. And the old ‘you need a light?’ trick works pretty well, am I right?”
“Well-- Wait, you think?”
“I’m totally pretty sure that’s how things work.”
Audrey’s eyes lit up. “Wait. So, if I brought you some sweaters or a coat, and tossed those in here…”
“Not a chance,” Mina said. She twirled on the ice, and Audrey’s eyes stayed locked onto her. “And deprive the world of this view?”
Audrey didn’t argue.
Giving Mina the books ended up working just fine, though Audrey also found returning them to the library to be an impossible task. As soon as she got a certain distance away from the pond and got the least bit distracted, the books would vanish right out of her backpack. One time, she tried carrying them in her arms, focusing on them the entire time, only to bump into someone at the door to the library and suddenly realize her hands were empty. So she gave up, and paid the library fines. From that point on, she made sure not to give any book that to Mina that she hadn’t already bought.
After some trial and error, she figured out what Mina liked, too: romances, even the really sappy awful ones, but not anything with supernatural elements. She had less luck learning more about Mina herself. The girl always managed to deflect questions that were too pointed, leaving Audrey to be creative in deducing things. A long discussion on music one December day had proven to be fruitful--it turned out Mina had lots of opinions, but a particularly limited frame of reference. She had heard of Nirvana, but not Weezer, and seemed completely baffled by the term ‘boy band.’
Mina liked apple cider too, though it never stayed warm for more than a few seconds when she held the cup. But she hadn’t ever tried Indian food. Audrey brought a bowl of curry one day that she had specifically requested to be as spicy as physically possible. Mina said it didn’t help her feel any warmer, but she ate the entire bowl, too, and asked for more next time.
Audrey ended up spending so much time on cold days out talking with Mina that she failed Organic Chem, her final grade dropping barely too low after she completely bombing the final. When she reluctantly left to go home for the winter break, her parents were furious. She had heard the lectures before; she had heard them all her life--how it was her responsibility to make the family proud, how she had to be twice as good as everyone else, how they had invested a lot of money in her and her education, how her behavior was ‘simply unacceptable.’
It was weirdly freeing. For the first time in her life she had legitimately screwed up in a serious way, and yet how the punishments weren’t all that different than when she hadn’t placed at that swim meet in junior high or when she had tried to say she didn’t want to learn piano in fifth grade. It was a strange to realize that disappointing your parents in something reasonably big still wasn’t the end of the world.
After the shouting and the yelling, they confined her to her room for the entire break. She didn’t mind that either, spending time scouring the darker corners of the web, approaching the many questions of Mina with intense concentration. To take breaks, she watched YouTube videos on knitting, and after being a model daughter for a week or so, convinced her father to get her some yarn.
She dreamed of Mina every night.
It seemed like the winter break lasted an eternity, and Audrey was thrilled that the morning she returned also happened to be bitterly cold. As soon as she could get away, she threw on her coat, collected her things, and hurried out to the pond.
Audrey saw Mina from afar, pacing back and forth in front of the bench, a book in her hands. When Audrey started walking faster and Mina heard the crunch of her footsteps, her head jerked up and her face lit up in a smile. Audrey barely managed to refrain from hugging her.
“You took long enough,” Mina announced. “I’ve finished all the books. In fact, I’ve read some twice.”
“The bad ones?”
“The super shitty ones.” Mina grinned, waving a book with its cover of a girl in a bursting bodice, clutched to the sculpted bare chest of a man whose long hair drifted in the wind.
“I don’t see what you get out of those.”
Mina bounced over to the bench, sitting down and patting the seat next to her. “It’s all the awful people! There’s something wonderful about seeing somebody make terrifically bad decisions for love.”
Audrey sat down. “Boy, you would like reality television.” Mina gave her a blank look, and Audrey smiled, filing it away. “Anyways, It’s supposed to be romantic, I think.”
“I know, I know. Romeo and Juliet. But that’s stupid! If they had actually thought things through, neither one of them would be dead.”
“I missed you,” Audrey said quietly. “I missed this,” she followed up quickly, a little louder.
Mina curled her toes in the snow, toying with the bracelet on her wrist. “I was worried you wouldn’t come back.”
“What? Why?”
Mina shrugged, smiling faintly. “But you did, right? You still haven’t figured out an answer for your project.”
“Yes,” Audrey said, biting her lip. “I-- I made you something.” She fished through her backpack, pulling out the scarf she had knitted over the break. “It’s not very good. I screwed up a few times and had to redo it, and it’s really simple and probably not your style.”
Mina pulled it out of her hands. She wound it loosely around her neck, and looked up at Audrey, her mouth wavering. “Thank you.”
“If the color isn’t right, or… I mean, I don’t think that’s going to really keep you warm, but I just thought…”
Mina closed her eyes. “It’s perfect,” she said firmly. “I--”
“Hey ladies,” a voice said, jarring Audrey out of the moment. She looked up in shock to see a man standing in front of them, sporting mirrored shades and a cocky grin. He flipped his sunglasses up and sized up Audrey, eyes moving up and down her body. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“You totally are,” Mina said icily.
“My bad.” He directed his attention back at Mina. “But since I already cut in, maybe you should introduce me to your new friend, babe?” Audrey glanced over at Mina, eyes widening.
“I’m not your babe,” she snapped. “Get lost.”
“Aw, Mina. That’s not what you said last time.”
“Mina?” Audrey said hoarsely.
“It’s not…” She grimaced. “It’s not going to happen, Steve. Go away. Go away and never come back here again.”
“Whoa, sorry, I don’t know what I did that--”
“I said go away!” she said, her voice raising to a shout.
He stopped short. His eyes flicked between Mina and Audrey. “Fine,” he said, turning to go. “Fucking dykes,” he muttered, plenty loud enough to hear.
In an instant, Mina was on her feet and in his face. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“What?” he said, hunching his shoulders.
“Say it again to my face. Say it to my fucking face so I can end you.”
“I don’t have to deal with this.” He roughly shoved her aside and Mina tripped, landing in the snow. The man winced in pain as he looked between his hands that had touched her and Mina and back again. “Freaks!” he barked out as he backed away, turning to hurriedly jog off after seeing Mina not move.
After a long moment, Mina stood up again and walked over to sit on the bench, pulling her knees up to her chest.
“He showed up while you were gone,” she said quietly. “I thought-- I worried you might not come back. I thought maybe if I strung him along, just in case. If I needed to…”
“Okay,” Audrey said. “Okay.”
Audrey had spent a lot of time with Mina in the worst of the winter, during days that at one time she never would have imagined willingly going outside. Now, for the first time in a long time, she realized how cold she felt.
Audrey was only really truly certain in March. She watched the weather forecast like a hawk, biting her nails when Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow on Groundhog Day. In the meantime, her grades continued to decline, a concern she shoved to the back of her mind. She met with Mina every day that she could. They never saw the guy--Steve?--again, and neither one of them brought up what had happened.
Soon the first week arrived with a warmer day, and when Audrey wound up sitting on the bench by herself, she really began to worry. She double-checked her investigations, torn between indecision and necessity, and then turned to other projects.
When they had another cold snap, she was ready. Mina looked surprised to see her that morning, dragging the bulky device, a coil of cords around one shoulder. That had been the one of her other ideas that had turned out to be most feasible, though Audrey herself was pretty surprised that her collection of extension cords managed to reach all the way to the Sciences building and didn’t short out somewhere or catch on fire.
When she had plugged in the space heater and set it on high, Mina draped herself over the entire thing, cradling it beneath her.
“Oh my god,” she moaned. “So, this isn’t working at all, but it also does feel amazing.”
Audrey smirked, sitting on the bench. She pulled out a folder from her backpack while Mina was distracted, going on and on about the space heater.
“Winter’s almost over,” she said finally.
Mina propped up her head, face momentarily blanking. Her lips curved up into a big smile that nonetheless didn’t touch her eyes. “There’s usually a few cold days in April, right?”
“Mmm.” Audrey bit her lip. “You also haven’t killed anyone, as far as I know.”
“Any good monster can still have an off-year,” Mina said breezily. “I’ll just have to make up for it next winter.”
“I don’t think so,” Audrey said. “In fact, I don’t think you’ve killed anyone. Ever.”
Mina was silent for a moment. “Why do you say that?”
“People dying get noticed.” Mina opened her mouth, but Audrey shook her head. “Even fratty douchebros. I checked the police reports, and no patterns of murder, deaths by exposure, or even mysterious disappearances during the winters.”
Mina wiggled her fingers. “What if magic’s involved?”
“I found a reddit post and tracked down a guy named Doug,” Audrey said. “2013? He was a football player? Ring any bells?”
Mina looked down, hugging the space heater close.
“Sounded like you drained him a lot, but left enough for him to stumble over to a nearby building. He was okay, but of course no one believed his story. They thought he had gotten drunk and wandered out to pass out in the snow.”
“I never know for sure,” Mina mumbled over the low hum of the space heater. “It’s not a science. Every time it feels so warm and so good that I want to just take and take and take. Somehow I stop, and hope that they’re okay. That they’ll get up again and get to somewhere okay, or that someone will find them. I’m never sure. That’s why… at some point I just started saying that I killed them. It’s easier that way, right? That’s what monsters do.”
“But you’re not a monster, either. I found this.” She pulled out a printed sheet of paper, labeled ‘MISSING: Alexis Philomena Poe,’ and dated February of 1992. Above a small paragraph, in a dated black and white but still entirely recognizable, was a picture of Mina.
Mina sat up, still perched on the space heater. She smiled, the expression fragile. “Wow. You are good.”
“I told you from the beginning that I was,” Audrey said. “So I guess I just wanted to know… why? Why the secrecy?”
“I never liked Alexis,” Mina said. She gripped one wrist tightly with the other hand. “I... was close with another Alex. That was too cute by half, you know?”
Audrey shook her head. “But what happened? You went missing in January, and you’re connected with the Crook Pond, so part of this is obvious. But you’re not wearing winter clothes. Which means… you didn’t just fall in the pond, right? Something happened. It was on purpose. Did someone do this to you? Or did…”
“It doesn’t matter, okay?” Mina burst out. “I was-- Something happened but that was a long time ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore. This is how things are. I’m a monster now.”
“No, you’re not.”
Mina jerked her head from side to side. “I’d rather be a monster than cursed, or stuck, or… pitied.”
“I don’t pity you,” Audrey said, after a moment. “You know that, right?
Mina let out a sigh. “I know. And that’s the worst.”
“You just drain people a little. Is that so bad?”
“Yes.” Mina wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “I hate it. I tell myself it’s okay, convince myself first that the kind of people I trick deserve it, and then that no one deserves it. Every year I feel like I’m getting closer to either taking from someone until there’s nothing left or else giving up entirely and fading away. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“Fading away? Wait, if you don’t--”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. I know I’m always getting colder and colder, somewhere deep inside, and only taking someone else’s warmth really fixes that. None of this--” she bounced one of her heels off the space heater, “--really does the trick.”
“But this year, you haven’t…”
Mina’s mouth formed a thin line.
Audrey stood up, abruptly. She pulled off her mittens.
“Look, that’s not going to work either,” Mina said in frustration. “I told you--”
Audrey grabbed Mina’s hands in her own. “Take me,” she said, not even flinching at the pain, the contact so bitingly cold that where her hands rested against Mina’s bracelet felt burning in comparison.
Mina jerked back, falling off the space heater. She stood up again, eyes wild. “No! What? No. It’s against the rules.”
“Screw the rules. What, rule three? Just because I’m a girl--”
“No,” Mina said, her voice wavering, but still enough force behind the word to cut Audrey off. “That was never rule three. Rule three is never to take someone who-- Who I might be--” She took a shallow breath, the next words coming out fast. “Who I’m in love with.”
Audrey’s eyes grew wide. She didn’t--couldn’t--say anything.
“I came up with that in the second year. When I saw Alex--Alexandria--again. I wanted to. It hurt so much, but I told myself I couldn’t. I made rule three. I knew it would go away in time, it would get cold, just like everything else. Just like this. I--”
“I don’t care,” Audrey said, and she pushed forward to kiss Mina.
It was incredibly, brain-meltingly cold, but Audrey hardly noticed. She could feel the heat being dragged out of her, her senses dulling, until Mina shoved back hard, pushing Audrey away to tumble into the snow.
“No!” Mina shouted.
Audrey looked up, her teeth chattering. “It’s okay,” she said. Her eyes refused to focus, and she kept blinking, seeing only flashes--Mina’s face crumpled in anguish, the silver bracelet on her arm seeming to glow blue, the vivid red of the scarf as Mina ripped it from around her neck to throw to the snow.
“You’re not thinking straight," Mina said, her voice choking. “It's just-- What if it’s some kind of magic? I must be messing with your head, without meaning to. This isn’t right.”
“I don’t care,” Audrey said with complete lucidity. “I want to do this.”
“I won’t let you,” Mina whispered as she turned to run across the ice.
Audrey could hardly stand, she was so cold. Her hands and feet were completely numb. But she scrambled after Mina anyways, screaming out as she watched Mina dive into the hole in the pond. By the time she had made it out to the center of the pond, the ice had already closed shut.
The next week, Mina wasn’t there, even on one day when the temperature was well below freezing. Audrey spent all morning walking out across the ice of the pond, carefully checking it out. In the center she found something--a place where the ice seemed thinner, and the water underneath was particularly dark.
She was ready the next day, but it had already warmed up again. She had to wait even longer, anxiously making plans and scrapping them and then making them all over again, before the weather got cold again. It was April, maybe the last day of the year the pond would freeze over, when Audrey showed up at the center of the ice.
She didn’t need the saw, after all. The hammer and chisel worked fine. The rest of the ice was several inches thick, but the center broke easily, revealing a familiar pool of eerie dark water. She looked at it for a long time, wondering if it was worth talking to the pond or if that would be stupid.
“I sure hope this works,” she said, finally. “If you can hear me, Mina, don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”
And then she took off her scarf. And her hat, and her coat. And her sweater, and her pants, and her boots, and more and more layers until she was standing there, shivering in an old t-shirt and some pyjama shorts. After a moment of thinking, she pulled her socks off as well, clutching her arms around herself for the marginal warmth they provided.
She looked up to see a passing student who had stopped in the path to stare at her, practically standing in her underwear next to a heap of clothing in the middle of a frozen pond. Audrey waved.
And then she dived into the pond, the waters closing over her.
The ripples in the pond lasted for a good thirty seconds. The student who had seen the whole thing screamed, and ran out onto the ice. By the time he reached the center, the ripples had stopped, and the pond was still once again.
Mina almost knocked over the student when she burst up from the water, dragging the limp body of Audrey behind her.
“What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck,” she repeated as a mantra. “Help me,” she barked at the student, struggling to heave Audrey out of the water. He grabbed Audrey by her stomach, pulling her body out to lay on the ice.
In the distance, an ambulance siren wailed.
“No, no, no,” Mina said, looking down at where Audrey’s body laid. Audrey’s face stared upwards with a glassy smile. “We have to get her to somewhere safe.” She grabbed both arms and began dragging Audrey backwards across the ice. The student’s feet skidded as he tried to lift her legs to help, and he fell flat on his face.
“Fuck!” Mina yelled out, dropping Audrey suddenly. She looked down at where her hands had gripped Audrey’s wrists, where ice had started to form over her skin. She looked down, and then over towards the path. The ambulance sounded like it was getting closer.
She grabbed Audrey’s wrists again and pulled with all her might, dragging her off the lake and over to the path, where she could rest Audrey’s body against the bench. She couldn’t tell if Audrey was breathing or not. She couldn’t risk touching her further to check her pulse.
Mina just knelt, staring at the body as she heard shouts approaching. She felt unimaginably cold, colder than she ever had in her life and death both, a cold that burned in her chest and throbbed in her veins and stabbed in her eyes. When she reached up to brush at her face, she realized the tears had crystallized into ice.
When Audrey woke up, she had no idea exactly where she was. At first, with all the white and with her mind still not entirely lucid, she was afraid she had wound up in heaven somehow. But then she realized that literally every part of her body hurt, and that didn’t seem to fit.
She groaned a little, squeezing her eyes open and shut, and a nurse swept into the room.
“I see you’re awake,” the nurse said. “That’s good.”
Audrey tried to say something, but wound up coughing instead. Her hands opened and closed, and she looked up with alarm, trying again. “I--”
“Shh,” the nurse said. “Don’t strain yourself.”
Audrey tried to sit up, her first clenching. She coughed again.
“Shh, shh.” The nurse pushed her back down, and Audrey was too weak to resist. “What do you need? Do you-- Oh.” She disappeared from view, and came back with something silvery glittering in her hand. “Did you want this?”
Audrey snatched it away, clutching the metal in her hands.
The nurse sighed. “We had to pry that out of your hands to begin with. You know, you were clinically dead for almost twenty minutes. It’s a miracle you made it at all. If it hadn’t been so cold…”
Audrey had stopped listening to her. She was staring at her wrists in wonder, where the caramel color of her skin was abruptly broken by a pair of pale bands. She turned her arms over, and could see how the shape looked just like a handprints, wrapped around each of her wrists.
Her parents were terrified and apologetic when she saw them shortly afterwards. It was only when she heard about the psych evaluation to come that she realized why. With her grades dropping and her behavior changing, everyone had assumed she was suffering from such acute depression that she had attempted suicide.
She didn’t feel it necessary to correct them. In fact, she didn’t say anything one way or the other at all, refusing to talk about the pond or what had happened that day. The psychiatrist eventually cleared her, but insisted that she begin seeing a therapist regularly. At first, Audrey only enjoyed it as a change of pace from the rest of recovering in the hospital, but eventually she began to appreciate having someone to talk to, particularly as her parents more or less came unglued in not knowing how to deal with her.
But when she politely but firmly insisted that she was okay, and that she wanted to go back to school, they listened. She was already planning on staying through the summer, after all, and had signed the lease. Even though it was late May before she was out of the hospital and had her strength back, with the help of her therapist, she quickly convinced her parents to let her get back to living on her own.
What came as a surprise was when she went outside for the first time. While she was confined to her bed, spring had come in full force. The trees and flowers had bloomed, the birds were back, and the weather was already warm once more.
On June 1st, she moved back into her apartment.
Everything was just how she left it, which mostly meant in a state of complete disarray. She started cleaning in the morning, before pausing to run to the store, where she pointedly ignored any strange looks at everything she had bought.
After she came back and finished filling up the freezer, she started tidying up again. It took a little longer than expected, particularly cleaning out the old fireplace that she had never used before. She smiled when she found the zippo lighter she had gotten months ago, and ended up using that to kindle the fire in the fireplace. By the time things were presentable and she had changed into her fuzziest purple sweater, the ice was all ready.
She ran the cold water from the tap in the bathtub until it was close to overflowing, and only then began bringing in the dozens of trays of ice cubes she had crammed into her freezer, dumping them out one by one into the tub. Once satisfied, and only making a little bit of a mess, she fished out the silver bracelet from her pocket and dropped it into the ice-filled water. She paused only briefly at the doorway, before walking out and closing the door behind her.
Audrey was microwaving two mugs of apple cider when she heard a muffled “What the hell?” from the bathroom. She couldn’t help but smile, and carried the cider around to set on the coffee table, in front of all the blankets on the couch.
It wasn’t very long before she heard the soft sound of the door opening behind her.
“What-- How did you know that would work?” Mina said in a hushed tone.
“Oh, I totally didn’t,” Audrey admitted. “But I googled some stuff and figured it was worth a try. I’m good at solving problems.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous. You could have died. All for something that might not have worked.”
“Maybe. But in all those crappy romances, it works out somehow in the end, right? Deus ex machina to save the happy ending.”
A multitude of expressions flashed across Mina’s face, before she finally relaxed into exasperated relief. She crossed her arms. “I’m still cold, you know.”
“Yup.” Audrey took a sip of her cider and looked up with a sly grin. “But don't worry. I’ve got a few ideas for us to try together.”
Of course, Audrey had never heard of any of it, at least the first time that she saw the girl.
It was a Monday in late November, and the long indian summer had finally broken with a vengeance. Over the weekend, a cold front had come through, bringing with it several inches of snow, only for it to partially melt and then refreeze all over again the next day.
In essence, it was the kind of weather Audrey hated the most. But she was determined to make the best of it and had bundled up in full. After piling on layers of clothes, donning her black coat and boots, pulling her stocking cap down tight around her ears, and winding a long scarf around her whole head, she felt like a particularly cold-averse mummy.
It had worked too well, and after sweating through her morning Stats course, she decided to take the longer, scenic walk to Organic Chem, the path that passed by the idyllic pond in the back, where much of the snow was still untouched and nice-looking. That’s where she saw the girl.
The girl was sitting by herself on a bench overlooking the pond, elbows on her knees, head resting in the palm of her hands as she stared blankly forward. A silver charm bracelet gleamed on one of her skinny arms, and an unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. But most strikingly of all, she was dressed as if it was the height of summer. Her t-shirt was a faded yellow, and the girl’s denim shorts were distractingly short, leaving a long expanse of leg so pale that it almost blended into the white of the snow.
Audrey couldn’t help but stare, her pace slowing to a halt. And the more she stared, the less sense it made. The girl’s dark hair hung in thin, wet curls, looking for all the world like she had stepped out of the shower. And her bare feet gently rested on the snow, toenails painted orange in chipped polish. Audrey waited, watching the girl as she didn’t move an inch, only gazing forward with the same vacant expression.
When Audrey started walking again, the crunch of frozen snow beneath her boots sounded suddenly loud. For some reason she felt as if she was approaching a rare bird of some kind, that if she so much as blinked, the girl would suddenly startle and take to the air, or maybe just vanish entirely.
Neither of those happened. The girl didn’t react at all. Audrey swallowed, then awkwardly sat down on the bench next to her. She stared forward too, trying to see if there was something in particular the girl was interested in off in the distance. When she gave up, she realized the girl had turned to look straight at her, and Audrey’s breath sucked in in surprise.
A long uncomfortable moment passed, with the girl still completely silent. “Aren’t you cold?” Audrey finally asked.
“Dreadfully,” the girl responded immediately. Audrey didn’t know what she expected, but the voice caught her off guard, too--deeper than she expected, equal parts bored and languid.
“Can-- Can I do anything?”
The girl raised her arms above her head, arching her back to stretch and in the process emphasizing the way the thin t-shirt hugged her figure. Audrey’s eyes flicked away as her felt warmth in her cheeks. “You want to help warm me up?” the girl asked, amusement creeping into her tone.
“I mean, I… Do you want my scarf? Or coat?”
The girl raised an eyebrow, her lips curling upwards, and Audrey fumbled, trying to unwrap the scarf from her head but getting it tangled up in the process. She finally got it off, and was working at the top button of her coat when she glanced back at the girl to see her crossing her arms and frowning.
“You’re a girl,” the girl said flatly.
Audrey looked down at her bulky coat, suddenly realizing that with her hat and scarf on, it had been far from obvious. “Yeah,” she said.
The girl pursed her lips as she stared at the pond, exhaling slowly. Audrey found herself momentarily struck by the realization that even in the chill of the air, the girl’s breath didn’t fog at all. “Look, you look like a good person. It’s really sweet of you to offer to help. But you should go away.”
“What? No really, I-- I don’t understand, but I can help,” Audrey said, the words coming out fast. “If you explain, maybe I can-- I’m great at solving problems, and I’m sure there’s something that I can do--”
The girl met Audrey’s eyes again, and she stood from the bench, leaning down so that her face was inches from Audrey’s own as Audrey found her words trailing off into silence. The girl’s lips pulled back into a grin that showed more teeth than it did amusement. “You want to know my story? I’m a monster. And today I’m feeling particularly gracious, so consider yourself a very lucky lady.”
With that, she reached down to tap Audrey on the tip of her nose with one finger, and Audrey let out a gasp at the sharp cold, so frigid as to be painful. Her hands flew up, covering her nose with her mittens as the girl spun on her heels and gracefully strode over the snow and out onto the frozen surface of the pond.
After the moment of shock, Audrey jumped up, stumbling to follow. “Wait!” she called out, but the girl didn’t respond. Audrey clumsily followed, feet slipping on slick ice, barely heeding the fleeting worry about whether it was thick enough to support her weight. Ahead, she saw the girl take another step and then drop down out of sight. Audrey fell, then, her feet going out from under her, and she kept going forward on hands and knees, trying to be as careful as she could while still hurrying.
At the center of the pond, where the girl had disappeared, lay a jagged hole in the ice. The water below was an inky black, surface still rippling slightly. Audrey stopped, her lungs aching from the icy air as she panted heavily. As she watched, the edges of the hole crept forward, the water disappearing from view, leaving only unblemished ice behind.
It warmed up again the next day, not getting anywhere close to summer again, but at least enough that the snow melted away and students began voicing complaints about winter not being able to make up its mind. Audrey walked past Crook Pond every day for the next week, even on the days she didn’t have Organic Chem. But she didn’t see the girl again, and the pond looked perfectly unassuming and peaceful, albeit a little muddy.
She was about to give up entirely and write it off as a hallucination when she woke up shivering on Saturday. The weather had taken another cold turn, and the old radiator in her room had never been the best about keeping up. But rather than annoyance, she felt something else: a kind of anxious certainty that led her to get up, bundle into her coat, and head to campus.
The sidewalks were empty, with few students interested in leaving a warm bed on a day like today unless absolutely necessary. Audrey hurried as she traveled through campus to the pond, worrying if she was too early, if it was only a certain time, if there was something about the kind of snow in particular…
But sure enough, as the pond came into view, a slim figure was lying across the bench in front of it, one bare foot dangling down to almost touch the ground below. The girl had another cigarette between two fingers of the hand across her stomach, and Audrey paused some distance away to go through her coat pockets for the zippo lighter she had picked up from a convenience store several days ago.
She took a deep breath and walked up. “Need a light?”
The girl’s eyes flicked over to her, narrowing as they looked Audrey up and down. After a long consideration, the girl extended a hand with the cigarette. “Yeah.”
Audrey grinned, and pulled off one mitten, fumbling with the lighter. With increasing panic, she flicked at the wheel, trying to get it to light without any success.
“Give it here,” the girl said, sitting up and reaching out expectantly. Audrey dropped the lighter into her hand. In one smooth motion, the girl flicked it open, producing a flame to ignite the end of the cigarette. She flicked it closed again, tossing it back to Audrey.
“You know those are bad for you, right?” Audrey said.
“Don’t think I’ve got much to worry about,” the girl said. She took a long drag of the cigarette, but then was overcome with coughing as she tried to exhale. Audrey leaned forward and then back, eventually just taking a seat on the bench.
“You smoke often?” she asked, when the girl had stopped coughing and was preoccupied with glaring at the cigarette.
“No. But I… was close with someone who did.” She fiddled with the bracelet on her wrist. “It’s a good excuse to ditch a party and talk.”
“Hm,” Audrey said. “Monsters have parties?”
The girl glanced over, the corners of her mouth tugging up into a faint smile. “Killer parties, you might say. You don’t wanna know what they spike the punch with.”
“I see.” Audrey took a deep breath. “I’m Audrey, by the way. Do monsters have names, too?”
The girl let one finger brush the tip of the cigarette, and the ember immediately went out. “Mina,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Mina.”
Amusement danced in Mina’s eyes as she looked at Audrey. “You’re really dumb, Miss Audrey. By all rights, I should kill you, you know. Monster code.”
“But you’re not,” Audrey said calmly. The anxiety already dissipating had never been about her safety.
“Nah,” Mina admitted. “Not today, anyways.”
“Why do monsters need to kill people, anyways?”
“It’s just the way of the world,” Mina said, one hand raised theatrically. “The circle of life, such as it is. You humans with your delicious warmth, all rushing around in your tasty bodies. It’s only fair to share with the rest of us, we poor monsters who are so very cold.”
“You take the warmth from people?”
Mina’s eyes cut over to Audrey, narrowing slightly. “More or less.”
“I see.” Audrey raised a mitten to her chin. “But what if you could get warm some other way? Then you wouldn’t need to kill people. Me included.”
Mina didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose.”
“Then how about we make a deal? I’ll do some research--I’m pretty good at that, by the way--and figure out a way to warm you up.”
“And what, precisely, do you get out of this deal?”
Audrey smiled. “Something to do? Seems like a fun project.”
Mina rolled her eyes. “So now I’m a project.”
“Would you rather, uh, keep sucking the heat out of people?”
“Maybe!” Mina said brightly. “You don’t have to make it sound like such a bad thing. Or maybe I just think your little project is a lost cause.”
“It’s at least worth a try. And less boring than sitting around out here all day. I mean, I think the gym has a sauna, and--”
“I can’t leave,” Mina said distractedly, staring at the pond again. She shook her head, and playfulness crept back into her voice. “Um, monster code again. And I don’t want anyone to steal my place on the bench, duh.”
“Oh.” Audrey pondered for a moment. “But I could bring something to you?”
“Hey, yeah.” Mina smiled, this time in full. “Actually, I could think of a few things.”
It turned out that Mina was less invested in Audrey’s plan to find a way to warm her up, and more interested in the possibility of someone to run errands for her. That’s how Audrey found herself back at the pond a couple of days later, her backpack stuffed full with library books.
“No, no, maybe, no,” Mina said, sitting crosslegged on the snow as she used the bench to sort them out into stacks. “Are you serious?”
“If you had been more specific than ‘good books,’ maybe I could have better matched your tastes,” Audrey said.
“What the hell is this?” Mina waved a book in accusation.
“Um, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone?”
Mina cocked her head to the side.
“It’s the first in a series about this boy who goes to a school for wizards, and--”
“Do I look like I’m twelve?” Mina said.
“It’s for adults, too! Some of the later books in particular get really good.”
“Oh my god, Audrey,” Mina said, eyes wide and mouth open. “I didn’t realize you were a nerd.”
“Shut up.”
Mina snickered, tossing the book into the no pile and reaching for another.
Audrey winced. “You’re probably not going to like that one either,” she said. “I just included it because, I don’t know, I figured a wide range was best?”
Mina’s eyes were glued to the synopsis on the back. “Mmm,” she murmured. She finally looked up, the book in her hand momentarily wavering the no and maybe piles until landing on no. “I think maybe vampires hit a little too close to home for me.”
Audrey blinked. “Do… Do you suck the blood out of people? Is that how you keep warm?”
“Eeeugh, seriously? That’s disgusting.”
“Okay, good.” Audrey watched Mina sort through another couple of books, before she quietly said, “How do you do it, then?”
Mina looked up, face blank. “How do you think?”
“Um.” Audrey swallowed, looking away. “Is it… is it like… an intimate thing?”
“Audrey!” Mina said sharply. A grin blossomed on her face. “Are you asking what I think you are?”
“What? I don’t know. I’m just… When we first met, you were surprised that I was a girl, right? So…”
Mina leaned forward. “So you’re asking, when I find a nice, warm, dumb boy who wants to help poor, little, cold me, how do we do it? You’re asking…” her voice dropped to a breathy whisper, “do we fuck?”
“Oh my god,” Audrey said, her mittens covering her face.
“Oh, you’re soooo sweet to help me out,” Mina play-acted, her voice syrupy sweet. “I know it’s so cold out here, but why don’t we get out of these silly clothes and lie down on this bench together and just… see what happens? Oh my! And you’re such a big boy, too. I don’t know it that would even fit in--”
“Okay!” Audrey shouted. “I get it!” She heard Mina burst into laughter and peeked out over the top of her mittens to glare at her.
Mina waved a hand dismissively. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Audrey. I never do anything more than kiss. I’ve got rules about that sort of thing.” She smiled beatifically. “Would you believe that I’m still as pure as the driven snow?”
Audrey considered it. “No,” she said.
Mina grinned again. “You’re learning!” She turned back towards the books. “Oh! Hey, I remember this.” She tapped the cover of Pride and Prejudice.
“How old are you?” Audrey asked drily.
Mina snorted. “A lady never tells.” She glanced down at the book and then back up at Audrey. “Nowhere near that old though.”
Audrey let her sort through a few more, picking out another book to add to the yes pile. “So what are your rules, then?”
“Hm?”
“Monster code, I guess? About the people you kiss. Or kill. Or both. You said you have rules?”
“Ah, yes.” Mina raised a finger. “One: No dogs.”
Audrey’s eyes grew round. “What?”
“No! Not like… I mean, no guys with dogs. I wouldn’t--” Mina saw the grin on Audrey’s face, and stuck out her tongue. “No guys with dogs,” she repeated. “Pet owners are nice. They deserve better.”
“I had a hamster growing up,” Audrey said.
“Ew, rodents. Two,” Mina continued, raising a second finger, “Nobody who’s already taken. If they’ve got a wedding ring, or even worse, if they’re with their girlfriend--”
“Someone hit on you while they were with their girlfriend?”
“You would be amazed. I’d probably be doing the girl a favor, but still, too messy. I don’t like it. Three...”
“No girls?” Audrey said, after Mina had trailed off into a frown.
Mina met her eyes, her face unreadable. After an uncomfortably long moment, she turned back to the books. “I think I just want these two.”
“Okay,” Audrey said, a little too quickly. “Once you finish them, I could always-- Hey?”
Mina had stood up, and started walking out to the pond, the two books cradled in her arms. Audrey followed behind, slowed by the difficulty of walking on the ice.
“What are you-- Whoa!”
Mina tossed one book right into the hole at the center of the pond. The second followed right behind. As they hit the water, they plunged straight down without even a splash, only a circle of ripples extending out to trouble the black surface of the water.
“Those are library books!” Audrey said.
Mina raised both hands, palms up. “Oops?”
“How are you even going to read them if they’re all wet?”
“It’s… complicated,” Mina said. “That’s just how things work. I think. That’s how I got the cigarettes--some guy trying to quit threw a pack in the pond. And the old ‘you need a light?’ trick works pretty well, am I right?”
“Well-- Wait, you think?”
“I’m totally pretty sure that’s how things work.”
Audrey’s eyes lit up. “Wait. So, if I brought you some sweaters or a coat, and tossed those in here…”
“Not a chance,” Mina said. She twirled on the ice, and Audrey’s eyes stayed locked onto her. “And deprive the world of this view?”
Audrey didn’t argue.
Giving Mina the books ended up working just fine, though Audrey also found returning them to the library to be an impossible task. As soon as she got a certain distance away from the pond and got the least bit distracted, the books would vanish right out of her backpack. One time, she tried carrying them in her arms, focusing on them the entire time, only to bump into someone at the door to the library and suddenly realize her hands were empty. So she gave up, and paid the library fines. From that point on, she made sure not to give any book that to Mina that she hadn’t already bought.
After some trial and error, she figured out what Mina liked, too: romances, even the really sappy awful ones, but not anything with supernatural elements. She had less luck learning more about Mina herself. The girl always managed to deflect questions that were too pointed, leaving Audrey to be creative in deducing things. A long discussion on music one December day had proven to be fruitful--it turned out Mina had lots of opinions, but a particularly limited frame of reference. She had heard of Nirvana, but not Weezer, and seemed completely baffled by the term ‘boy band.’
Mina liked apple cider too, though it never stayed warm for more than a few seconds when she held the cup. But she hadn’t ever tried Indian food. Audrey brought a bowl of curry one day that she had specifically requested to be as spicy as physically possible. Mina said it didn’t help her feel any warmer, but she ate the entire bowl, too, and asked for more next time.
Audrey ended up spending so much time on cold days out talking with Mina that she failed Organic Chem, her final grade dropping barely too low after she completely bombing the final. When she reluctantly left to go home for the winter break, her parents were furious. She had heard the lectures before; she had heard them all her life--how it was her responsibility to make the family proud, how she had to be twice as good as everyone else, how they had invested a lot of money in her and her education, how her behavior was ‘simply unacceptable.’
It was weirdly freeing. For the first time in her life she had legitimately screwed up in a serious way, and yet how the punishments weren’t all that different than when she hadn’t placed at that swim meet in junior high or when she had tried to say she didn’t want to learn piano in fifth grade. It was a strange to realize that disappointing your parents in something reasonably big still wasn’t the end of the world.
After the shouting and the yelling, they confined her to her room for the entire break. She didn’t mind that either, spending time scouring the darker corners of the web, approaching the many questions of Mina with intense concentration. To take breaks, she watched YouTube videos on knitting, and after being a model daughter for a week or so, convinced her father to get her some yarn.
She dreamed of Mina every night.
It seemed like the winter break lasted an eternity, and Audrey was thrilled that the morning she returned also happened to be bitterly cold. As soon as she could get away, she threw on her coat, collected her things, and hurried out to the pond.
Audrey saw Mina from afar, pacing back and forth in front of the bench, a book in her hands. When Audrey started walking faster and Mina heard the crunch of her footsteps, her head jerked up and her face lit up in a smile. Audrey barely managed to refrain from hugging her.
“You took long enough,” Mina announced. “I’ve finished all the books. In fact, I’ve read some twice.”
“The bad ones?”
“The super shitty ones.” Mina grinned, waving a book with its cover of a girl in a bursting bodice, clutched to the sculpted bare chest of a man whose long hair drifted in the wind.
“I don’t see what you get out of those.”
Mina bounced over to the bench, sitting down and patting the seat next to her. “It’s all the awful people! There’s something wonderful about seeing somebody make terrifically bad decisions for love.”
Audrey sat down. “Boy, you would like reality television.” Mina gave her a blank look, and Audrey smiled, filing it away. “Anyways, It’s supposed to be romantic, I think.”
“I know, I know. Romeo and Juliet. But that’s stupid! If they had actually thought things through, neither one of them would be dead.”
“I missed you,” Audrey said quietly. “I missed this,” she followed up quickly, a little louder.
Mina curled her toes in the snow, toying with the bracelet on her wrist. “I was worried you wouldn’t come back.”
“What? Why?”
Mina shrugged, smiling faintly. “But you did, right? You still haven’t figured out an answer for your project.”
“Yes,” Audrey said, biting her lip. “I-- I made you something.” She fished through her backpack, pulling out the scarf she had knitted over the break. “It’s not very good. I screwed up a few times and had to redo it, and it’s really simple and probably not your style.”
Mina pulled it out of her hands. She wound it loosely around her neck, and looked up at Audrey, her mouth wavering. “Thank you.”
“If the color isn’t right, or… I mean, I don’t think that’s going to really keep you warm, but I just thought…”
Mina closed her eyes. “It’s perfect,” she said firmly. “I--”
“Hey ladies,” a voice said, jarring Audrey out of the moment. She looked up in shock to see a man standing in front of them, sporting mirrored shades and a cocky grin. He flipped his sunglasses up and sized up Audrey, eyes moving up and down her body. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“You totally are,” Mina said icily.
“My bad.” He directed his attention back at Mina. “But since I already cut in, maybe you should introduce me to your new friend, babe?” Audrey glanced over at Mina, eyes widening.
“I’m not your babe,” she snapped. “Get lost.”
“Aw, Mina. That’s not what you said last time.”
“Mina?” Audrey said hoarsely.
“It’s not…” She grimaced. “It’s not going to happen, Steve. Go away. Go away and never come back here again.”
“Whoa, sorry, I don’t know what I did that--”
“I said go away!” she said, her voice raising to a shout.
He stopped short. His eyes flicked between Mina and Audrey. “Fine,” he said, turning to go. “Fucking dykes,” he muttered, plenty loud enough to hear.
In an instant, Mina was on her feet and in his face. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“What?” he said, hunching his shoulders.
“Say it again to my face. Say it to my fucking face so I can end you.”
“I don’t have to deal with this.” He roughly shoved her aside and Mina tripped, landing in the snow. The man winced in pain as he looked between his hands that had touched her and Mina and back again. “Freaks!” he barked out as he backed away, turning to hurriedly jog off after seeing Mina not move.
After a long moment, Mina stood up again and walked over to sit on the bench, pulling her knees up to her chest.
“He showed up while you were gone,” she said quietly. “I thought-- I worried you might not come back. I thought maybe if I strung him along, just in case. If I needed to…”
“Okay,” Audrey said. “Okay.”
Audrey had spent a lot of time with Mina in the worst of the winter, during days that at one time she never would have imagined willingly going outside. Now, for the first time in a long time, she realized how cold she felt.
Audrey was only really truly certain in March. She watched the weather forecast like a hawk, biting her nails when Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow on Groundhog Day. In the meantime, her grades continued to decline, a concern she shoved to the back of her mind. She met with Mina every day that she could. They never saw the guy--Steve?--again, and neither one of them brought up what had happened.
Soon the first week arrived with a warmer day, and when Audrey wound up sitting on the bench by herself, she really began to worry. She double-checked her investigations, torn between indecision and necessity, and then turned to other projects.
When they had another cold snap, she was ready. Mina looked surprised to see her that morning, dragging the bulky device, a coil of cords around one shoulder. That had been the one of her other ideas that had turned out to be most feasible, though Audrey herself was pretty surprised that her collection of extension cords managed to reach all the way to the Sciences building and didn’t short out somewhere or catch on fire.
When she had plugged in the space heater and set it on high, Mina draped herself over the entire thing, cradling it beneath her.
“Oh my god,” she moaned. “So, this isn’t working at all, but it also does feel amazing.”
Audrey smirked, sitting on the bench. She pulled out a folder from her backpack while Mina was distracted, going on and on about the space heater.
“Winter’s almost over,” she said finally.
Mina propped up her head, face momentarily blanking. Her lips curved up into a big smile that nonetheless didn’t touch her eyes. “There’s usually a few cold days in April, right?”
“Mmm.” Audrey bit her lip. “You also haven’t killed anyone, as far as I know.”
“Any good monster can still have an off-year,” Mina said breezily. “I’ll just have to make up for it next winter.”
“I don’t think so,” Audrey said. “In fact, I don’t think you’ve killed anyone. Ever.”
Mina was silent for a moment. “Why do you say that?”
“People dying get noticed.” Mina opened her mouth, but Audrey shook her head. “Even fratty douchebros. I checked the police reports, and no patterns of murder, deaths by exposure, or even mysterious disappearances during the winters.”
Mina wiggled her fingers. “What if magic’s involved?”
“I found a reddit post and tracked down a guy named Doug,” Audrey said. “2013? He was a football player? Ring any bells?”
Mina looked down, hugging the space heater close.
“Sounded like you drained him a lot, but left enough for him to stumble over to a nearby building. He was okay, but of course no one believed his story. They thought he had gotten drunk and wandered out to pass out in the snow.”
“I never know for sure,” Mina mumbled over the low hum of the space heater. “It’s not a science. Every time it feels so warm and so good that I want to just take and take and take. Somehow I stop, and hope that they’re okay. That they’ll get up again and get to somewhere okay, or that someone will find them. I’m never sure. That’s why… at some point I just started saying that I killed them. It’s easier that way, right? That’s what monsters do.”
“But you’re not a monster, either. I found this.” She pulled out a printed sheet of paper, labeled ‘MISSING: Alexis Philomena Poe,’ and dated February of 1992. Above a small paragraph, in a dated black and white but still entirely recognizable, was a picture of Mina.
Mina sat up, still perched on the space heater. She smiled, the expression fragile. “Wow. You are good.”
“I told you from the beginning that I was,” Audrey said. “So I guess I just wanted to know… why? Why the secrecy?”
“I never liked Alexis,” Mina said. She gripped one wrist tightly with the other hand. “I... was close with another Alex. That was too cute by half, you know?”
Audrey shook her head. “But what happened? You went missing in January, and you’re connected with the Crook Pond, so part of this is obvious. But you’re not wearing winter clothes. Which means… you didn’t just fall in the pond, right? Something happened. It was on purpose. Did someone do this to you? Or did…”
“It doesn’t matter, okay?” Mina burst out. “I was-- Something happened but that was a long time ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore. This is how things are. I’m a monster now.”
“No, you’re not.”
Mina jerked her head from side to side. “I’d rather be a monster than cursed, or stuck, or… pitied.”
“I don’t pity you,” Audrey said, after a moment. “You know that, right?
Mina let out a sigh. “I know. And that’s the worst.”
“You just drain people a little. Is that so bad?”
“Yes.” Mina wrapped her arms tightly around herself. “I hate it. I tell myself it’s okay, convince myself first that the kind of people I trick deserve it, and then that no one deserves it. Every year I feel like I’m getting closer to either taking from someone until there’s nothing left or else giving up entirely and fading away. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“Fading away? Wait, if you don’t--”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. I know I’m always getting colder and colder, somewhere deep inside, and only taking someone else’s warmth really fixes that. None of this--” she bounced one of her heels off the space heater, “--really does the trick.”
“But this year, you haven’t…”
Mina’s mouth formed a thin line.
Audrey stood up, abruptly. She pulled off her mittens.
“Look, that’s not going to work either,” Mina said in frustration. “I told you--”
Audrey grabbed Mina’s hands in her own. “Take me,” she said, not even flinching at the pain, the contact so bitingly cold that where her hands rested against Mina’s bracelet felt burning in comparison.
Mina jerked back, falling off the space heater. She stood up again, eyes wild. “No! What? No. It’s against the rules.”
“Screw the rules. What, rule three? Just because I’m a girl--”
“No,” Mina said, her voice wavering, but still enough force behind the word to cut Audrey off. “That was never rule three. Rule three is never to take someone who-- Who I might be--” She took a shallow breath, the next words coming out fast. “Who I’m in love with.”
Audrey’s eyes grew wide. She didn’t--couldn’t--say anything.
“I came up with that in the second year. When I saw Alex--Alexandria--again. I wanted to. It hurt so much, but I told myself I couldn’t. I made rule three. I knew it would go away in time, it would get cold, just like everything else. Just like this. I--”
“I don’t care,” Audrey said, and she pushed forward to kiss Mina.
It was incredibly, brain-meltingly cold, but Audrey hardly noticed. She could feel the heat being dragged out of her, her senses dulling, until Mina shoved back hard, pushing Audrey away to tumble into the snow.
“No!” Mina shouted.
Audrey looked up, her teeth chattering. “It’s okay,” she said. Her eyes refused to focus, and she kept blinking, seeing only flashes--Mina’s face crumpled in anguish, the silver bracelet on her arm seeming to glow blue, the vivid red of the scarf as Mina ripped it from around her neck to throw to the snow.
“You’re not thinking straight," Mina said, her voice choking. “It's just-- What if it’s some kind of magic? I must be messing with your head, without meaning to. This isn’t right.”
“I don’t care,” Audrey said with complete lucidity. “I want to do this.”
“I won’t let you,” Mina whispered as she turned to run across the ice.
Audrey could hardly stand, she was so cold. Her hands and feet were completely numb. But she scrambled after Mina anyways, screaming out as she watched Mina dive into the hole in the pond. By the time she had made it out to the center of the pond, the ice had already closed shut.
The next week, Mina wasn’t there, even on one day when the temperature was well below freezing. Audrey spent all morning walking out across the ice of the pond, carefully checking it out. In the center she found something--a place where the ice seemed thinner, and the water underneath was particularly dark.
She was ready the next day, but it had already warmed up again. She had to wait even longer, anxiously making plans and scrapping them and then making them all over again, before the weather got cold again. It was April, maybe the last day of the year the pond would freeze over, when Audrey showed up at the center of the ice.
She didn’t need the saw, after all. The hammer and chisel worked fine. The rest of the ice was several inches thick, but the center broke easily, revealing a familiar pool of eerie dark water. She looked at it for a long time, wondering if it was worth talking to the pond or if that would be stupid.
“I sure hope this works,” she said, finally. “If you can hear me, Mina, don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”
And then she took off her scarf. And her hat, and her coat. And her sweater, and her pants, and her boots, and more and more layers until she was standing there, shivering in an old t-shirt and some pyjama shorts. After a moment of thinking, she pulled her socks off as well, clutching her arms around herself for the marginal warmth they provided.
She looked up to see a passing student who had stopped in the path to stare at her, practically standing in her underwear next to a heap of clothing in the middle of a frozen pond. Audrey waved.
And then she dived into the pond, the waters closing over her.
The ripples in the pond lasted for a good thirty seconds. The student who had seen the whole thing screamed, and ran out onto the ice. By the time he reached the center, the ripples had stopped, and the pond was still once again.
Mina almost knocked over the student when she burst up from the water, dragging the limp body of Audrey behind her.
“What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck,” she repeated as a mantra. “Help me,” she barked at the student, struggling to heave Audrey out of the water. He grabbed Audrey by her stomach, pulling her body out to lay on the ice.
In the distance, an ambulance siren wailed.
“No, no, no,” Mina said, looking down at where Audrey’s body laid. Audrey’s face stared upwards with a glassy smile. “We have to get her to somewhere safe.” She grabbed both arms and began dragging Audrey backwards across the ice. The student’s feet skidded as he tried to lift her legs to help, and he fell flat on his face.
“Fuck!” Mina yelled out, dropping Audrey suddenly. She looked down at where her hands had gripped Audrey’s wrists, where ice had started to form over her skin. She looked down, and then over towards the path. The ambulance sounded like it was getting closer.
She grabbed Audrey’s wrists again and pulled with all her might, dragging her off the lake and over to the path, where she could rest Audrey’s body against the bench. She couldn’t tell if Audrey was breathing or not. She couldn’t risk touching her further to check her pulse.
Mina just knelt, staring at the body as she heard shouts approaching. She felt unimaginably cold, colder than she ever had in her life and death both, a cold that burned in her chest and throbbed in her veins and stabbed in her eyes. When she reached up to brush at her face, she realized the tears had crystallized into ice.
When Audrey woke up, she had no idea exactly where she was. At first, with all the white and with her mind still not entirely lucid, she was afraid she had wound up in heaven somehow. But then she realized that literally every part of her body hurt, and that didn’t seem to fit.
She groaned a little, squeezing her eyes open and shut, and a nurse swept into the room.
“I see you’re awake,” the nurse said. “That’s good.”
Audrey tried to say something, but wound up coughing instead. Her hands opened and closed, and she looked up with alarm, trying again. “I--”
“Shh,” the nurse said. “Don’t strain yourself.”
Audrey tried to sit up, her first clenching. She coughed again.
“Shh, shh.” The nurse pushed her back down, and Audrey was too weak to resist. “What do you need? Do you-- Oh.” She disappeared from view, and came back with something silvery glittering in her hand. “Did you want this?”
Audrey snatched it away, clutching the metal in her hands.
The nurse sighed. “We had to pry that out of your hands to begin with. You know, you were clinically dead for almost twenty minutes. It’s a miracle you made it at all. If it hadn’t been so cold…”
Audrey had stopped listening to her. She was staring at her wrists in wonder, where the caramel color of her skin was abruptly broken by a pair of pale bands. She turned her arms over, and could see how the shape looked just like a handprints, wrapped around each of her wrists.
Her parents were terrified and apologetic when she saw them shortly afterwards. It was only when she heard about the psych evaluation to come that she realized why. With her grades dropping and her behavior changing, everyone had assumed she was suffering from such acute depression that she had attempted suicide.
She didn’t feel it necessary to correct them. In fact, she didn’t say anything one way or the other at all, refusing to talk about the pond or what had happened that day. The psychiatrist eventually cleared her, but insisted that she begin seeing a therapist regularly. At first, Audrey only enjoyed it as a change of pace from the rest of recovering in the hospital, but eventually she began to appreciate having someone to talk to, particularly as her parents more or less came unglued in not knowing how to deal with her.
But when she politely but firmly insisted that she was okay, and that she wanted to go back to school, they listened. She was already planning on staying through the summer, after all, and had signed the lease. Even though it was late May before she was out of the hospital and had her strength back, with the help of her therapist, she quickly convinced her parents to let her get back to living on her own.
What came as a surprise was when she went outside for the first time. While she was confined to her bed, spring had come in full force. The trees and flowers had bloomed, the birds were back, and the weather was already warm once more.
On June 1st, she moved back into her apartment.
Everything was just how she left it, which mostly meant in a state of complete disarray. She started cleaning in the morning, before pausing to run to the store, where she pointedly ignored any strange looks at everything she had bought.
After she came back and finished filling up the freezer, she started tidying up again. It took a little longer than expected, particularly cleaning out the old fireplace that she had never used before. She smiled when she found the zippo lighter she had gotten months ago, and ended up using that to kindle the fire in the fireplace. By the time things were presentable and she had changed into her fuzziest purple sweater, the ice was all ready.
She ran the cold water from the tap in the bathtub until it was close to overflowing, and only then began bringing in the dozens of trays of ice cubes she had crammed into her freezer, dumping them out one by one into the tub. Once satisfied, and only making a little bit of a mess, she fished out the silver bracelet from her pocket and dropped it into the ice-filled water. She paused only briefly at the doorway, before walking out and closing the door behind her.
Audrey was microwaving two mugs of apple cider when she heard a muffled “What the hell?” from the bathroom. She couldn’t help but smile, and carried the cider around to set on the coffee table, in front of all the blankets on the couch.
It wasn’t very long before she heard the soft sound of the door opening behind her.
“What-- How did you know that would work?” Mina said in a hushed tone.
“Oh, I totally didn’t,” Audrey admitted. “But I googled some stuff and figured it was worth a try. I’m good at solving problems.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous. You could have died. All for something that might not have worked.”
“Maybe. But in all those crappy romances, it works out somehow in the end, right? Deus ex machina to save the happy ending.”
A multitude of expressions flashed across Mina’s face, before she finally relaxed into exasperated relief. She crossed her arms. “I’m still cold, you know.”
“Yup.” Audrey took a sip of her cider and looked up with a sly grin. “But don't worry. I’ve got a few ideas for us to try together.”
This is a pretty good character piece, for the most part.
However, the intro doesn't really seem to fit with the rest of it, tonally; there's this aside about the story of the monster, and then it moves into narrating Audrey, but... I'm not sure the aside is useful, or that you're gaining much from using a different focus for that first paragraph. I'd suggest telling the whole thing from Audrey's point of view.
[EDIT] Sorry, I had one more point that I forgot to put in here (I read this last night and did the review this morning) in paragraphs 3/4, you use the word 'it' a whole bunch, and several times it's not really clear to me what you're referring to. Or, well, I can tell, but I think it would be better with a clearer structure. [/EDIT]
So I guess she grabbed the bracelet? That's clever, but I'm really not sure why she thought it would work. Something about 'research', but... I'd have liked to see it reflected in the story, so it wasn't quite so out-of-left-field.
The ice on your pond has to be magical, because there's no way it would be frozen enough to walk on from just a cold snap. I suppose Audrey might not know that, but yeah. IIRC, it should be five inches thick before it'll support someone, and that takes weeks of below-freezing temps.
I hope she remembered to buy naptha, too; last time I bought a zippo, it came unfilled. :P I eventually stopped carrying it (I don't smoke, I just like lighting things on fire) and all the fuel would evaporate in my pocket before I got a chance to use it.
I feel like the grades thing could bear being a larger part of the story; if the character has an internal issue they're struggling with at the same time as an external issue, that can be very compelling.
That one character's literally 'scumbag Steve', huh?
And they all lived lesbian ever after.
All in all, pretty decent, if not super compelling.
However, the intro doesn't really seem to fit with the rest of it, tonally; there's this aside about the story of the monster, and then it moves into narrating Audrey, but... I'm not sure the aside is useful, or that you're gaining much from using a different focus for that first paragraph. I'd suggest telling the whole thing from Audrey's point of view.
[EDIT] Sorry, I had one more point that I forgot to put in here (I read this last night and did the review this morning) in paragraphs 3/4, you use the word 'it' a whole bunch, and several times it's not really clear to me what you're referring to. Or, well, I can tell, but I think it would be better with a clearer structure. [/EDIT]
So I guess she grabbed the bracelet? That's clever, but I'm really not sure why she thought it would work. Something about 'research', but... I'd have liked to see it reflected in the story, so it wasn't quite so out-of-left-field.
The ice on your pond has to be magical, because there's no way it would be frozen enough to walk on from just a cold snap. I suppose Audrey might not know that, but yeah. IIRC, it should be five inches thick before it'll support someone, and that takes weeks of below-freezing temps.
I hope she remembered to buy naptha, too; last time I bought a zippo, it came unfilled. :P I eventually stopped carrying it (I don't smoke, I just like lighting things on fire) and all the fuel would evaporate in my pocket before I got a chance to use it.
I feel like the grades thing could bear being a larger part of the story; if the character has an internal issue they're struggling with at the same time as an external issue, that can be very compelling.
That one character's literally 'scumbag Steve', huh?
And they all lived lesbian ever after.
All in all, pretty decent, if not super compelling.
At 7,500 words circa, I thought I would wade through it, hah :)
Good news is no, I didn’t: it reads fairly easily, the plot is fine, and the characters are okay.
Well, the story is full of impossible things, like Hat pointed out the ice that grows over ten centimetres thick during a single night. I would also bring out the fact that nobody else seems to notice Mina during all the time the story spans. And the extension cord trick was really hilarious; no one noticed? For realsies? Come on!
We never get to know why she’s haunting that pond. Unless I read badly. But that detracted a bit from the story.
Of course, the trope of the good monster you come to root for (think about Thorax) is a good trick to snare the reader into your story. Your own version is likeable, but lacks a bit of depth. Yeah, that’s normal, she lives in a pond. :P And your student is a bit two-dimensional also. She never has doubts, or whatever. And gosh, yeah, they spend a lot of time together on that bench. What the heck are they talking about?
In all, this sounds almost like a fairy tale. She reformed her, they fell in love and lived happily ever after.
So yeah, pretty nicely written, does not raise philosophical questions that’ll keep turning round and round in your mind.
There’s one thing you (purposefully, I suppose, though you’re rather explicit at times) eluded: how the hell are they going to have sex? :P
(Upper half of my slate)
Good news is no, I didn’t: it reads fairly easily, the plot is fine, and the characters are okay.
Well, the story is full of impossible things, like Hat pointed out the ice that grows over ten centimetres thick during a single night. I would also bring out the fact that nobody else seems to notice Mina during all the time the story spans. And the extension cord trick was really hilarious; no one noticed? For realsies? Come on!
We never get to know why she’s haunting that pond. Unless I read badly. But that detracted a bit from the story.
Of course, the trope of the good monster you come to root for (think about Thorax) is a good trick to snare the reader into your story. Your own version is likeable, but lacks a bit of depth. Yeah, that’s normal, she lives in a pond. :P And your student is a bit two-dimensional also. She never has doubts, or whatever. And gosh, yeah, they spend a lot of time together on that bench. What the heck are they talking about?
In all, this sounds almost like a fairy tale. She reformed her, they fell in love and lived happily ever after.
So yeah, pretty nicely written, does not raise philosophical questions that’ll keep turning round and round in your mind.
There’s one thing you (purposefully, I suppose, though you’re rather explicit at times) eluded: how the hell are they going to have sex? :P
(Upper half of my slate)
Story Title: The Monster At Crook Pond
Genre: Monstergirl Romance
... Can we say that's a genre now? It certainly seems to be one around Writeoff-land. I'm pretty sure every short-story round recently has had at least one, from different authors no less.
This was one of the two longest stories in the competition, but engaging despite its length. The two main characters felt like they had some pretty solid chemistry. That made up for a lot, including rougher character work around the edges (Audrey's parents are kind of non-entities storywise, and Steve is pretty much a walking stereotype of over-the-top awful for the brief time we see him) and some elements feeling underdeveloped (Audrey's brilliant research skills all taking place offscreen). Not nearly enough is made of the significance of the bracelet before it's suddenly an integral plot point at the climax of the story; it's more underexplained here than Belly of the Least's werewolf angle, but the rest of the story fit together well enough that I can still enjoy this even with its climax coming out of left field.
A large part of that is that you've got me rooting for both characters, which sounds like arbitrary praise about the sort of characters you chose to write about but was pretty central to my story engagement. I think Mina's rules and her concealed ethics were a really solid choice here, author; not only did they provide an intriguing plot reveal, but they also made her into a fundamentally good person, and we want to see things turn out alright for good people. That conflict between her needs and her choices is a powerful one. I would have loved to see more about what in her history led her to behave that way, but I don't know that I can penalize this for its lack.
All that said, I agree with above commenters that some of the premise here is a little silly. It bugged me a little that Mina was apparently some sort of warmth-sucking ice spirit but that when warmer days came around she just sort of vanished without consequence; it bugged me more that Mina apparently was the ghost of a girl who died in the pond, because the idea of that turning her into a cold spirit is awfully thematically dubious. The bits about ice thickness seemed kind of arbitrary, especially since if she had control over it, why would she be so much at the mercy of the weather? More exposition from Audrey researching Mina might have helped this, especially if we saw legends which explained how the rules worked.
On the whole, enjoyable reading.
Tier: Strong
Genre: Monstergirl Romance
... Can we say that's a genre now? It certainly seems to be one around Writeoff-land. I'm pretty sure every short-story round recently has had at least one, from different authors no less.
This was one of the two longest stories in the competition, but engaging despite its length. The two main characters felt like they had some pretty solid chemistry. That made up for a lot, including rougher character work around the edges (Audrey's parents are kind of non-entities storywise, and Steve is pretty much a walking stereotype of over-the-top awful for the brief time we see him) and some elements feeling underdeveloped (Audrey's brilliant research skills all taking place offscreen). Not nearly enough is made of the significance of the bracelet before it's suddenly an integral plot point at the climax of the story; it's more underexplained here than Belly of the Least's werewolf angle, but the rest of the story fit together well enough that I can still enjoy this even with its climax coming out of left field.
A large part of that is that you've got me rooting for both characters, which sounds like arbitrary praise about the sort of characters you chose to write about but was pretty central to my story engagement. I think Mina's rules and her concealed ethics were a really solid choice here, author; not only did they provide an intriguing plot reveal, but they also made her into a fundamentally good person, and we want to see things turn out alright for good people. That conflict between her needs and her choices is a powerful one. I would have loved to see more about what in her history led her to behave that way, but I don't know that I can penalize this for its lack.
All that said, I agree with above commenters that some of the premise here is a little silly. It bugged me a little that Mina was apparently some sort of warmth-sucking ice spirit but that when warmer days came around she just sort of vanished without consequence; it bugged me more that Mina apparently was the ghost of a girl who died in the pond, because the idea of that turning her into a cold spirit is awfully thematically dubious. The bits about ice thickness seemed kind of arbitrary, especially since if she had control over it, why would she be so much at the mercy of the weather? More exposition from Audrey researching Mina might have helped this, especially if we saw legends which explained how the rules worked.
On the whole, enjoyable reading.
Tier: Strong
A little wordy occasionally, and a few grammar hiccups, but relatively minor stuff.
This wasn't description heavy, but some stood out; the Monster's initial introduction was particularly well done, I thought.
I enjoyed the first scene, but its ending didn't quite work for me. If I was chatting with some girl in the middle of winter, and then she jumps into a frozen pond and doesn't come back up, I'd flip out, no matter what monster business or ancillary strangeness there was.
I'd expect the next scene to be exploring the repercussions of the first scene; either dealing with the fallout of the authorities, or coming to grips with the existence of the supernatural. Instead she just walks by the pond again, and the emotional turmoil is downplayed to an offhand mention of hallucination. Did she find out about the legend at this point, and that's why she's going by? Are monsters normal here? I'd really like to get more of a sense of her thoughts and reactions.
I enjoyed the dialog between the two on their second meeting and later. Dialog and characterization were one of the strong points of the piece. I Chuckled at the dogs bit.
I also quite enjoyed the 'trying different things out to figure out the supernatural' montage. As well, it was super engrossing one you get into the meat of what's going on and the backstory.
One niggle: she fills the bathtub to 'close to overflowing' and then dumps a bunch of ice cubes into it? It seems like they'd displace the water and make more than a little bit of a mess.
Google is even more powerful than I realized. She's awfully coy about just what it is she googled, though. I'd actually like to know more about this. Akin to this is that there's very little worldbuilding, so I have no idea of how normal or abnormal this is.
Overall an enjoyable piece. I enjoyed the characters and their chemistry, and the action was effective. My biggest complaint was not enough of a glimpse into Audrey's head, which made it difficult to understand her actions. Similar to that was not understanding enough about the world. Despite these, the story's strengths handily exceeded its flaws, and I'm glad I read it.
This wasn't description heavy, but some stood out; the Monster's initial introduction was particularly well done, I thought.
I enjoyed the first scene, but its ending didn't quite work for me. If I was chatting with some girl in the middle of winter, and then she jumps into a frozen pond and doesn't come back up, I'd flip out, no matter what monster business or ancillary strangeness there was.
I'd expect the next scene to be exploring the repercussions of the first scene; either dealing with the fallout of the authorities, or coming to grips with the existence of the supernatural. Instead she just walks by the pond again, and the emotional turmoil is downplayed to an offhand mention of hallucination. Did she find out about the legend at this point, and that's why she's going by? Are monsters normal here? I'd really like to get more of a sense of her thoughts and reactions.
I enjoyed the dialog between the two on their second meeting and later. Dialog and characterization were one of the strong points of the piece. I Chuckled at the dogs bit.
I also quite enjoyed the 'trying different things out to figure out the supernatural' montage. As well, it was super engrossing one you get into the meat of what's going on and the backstory.
One niggle: she fills the bathtub to 'close to overflowing' and then dumps a bunch of ice cubes into it? It seems like they'd displace the water and make more than a little bit of a mess.
Google is even more powerful than I realized. She's awfully coy about just what it is she googled, though. I'd actually like to know more about this. Akin to this is that there's very little worldbuilding, so I have no idea of how normal or abnormal this is.
Overall an enjoyable piece. I enjoyed the characters and their chemistry, and the action was effective. My biggest complaint was not enough of a glimpse into Audrey's head, which made it difficult to understand her actions. Similar to that was not understanding enough about the world. Despite these, the story's strengths handily exceeded its flaws, and I'm glad I read it.
On the whole, I thought this was actually pretty good. Mina and Audrey were pretty interesting protagonists, and the development of their relationship felt very natural. I also liked how it was a more relaxed romance (at least up until the climax), where how the characters interacted was more important than the thrills the romance would cause.
If there'd be anything to adjust, it'd be cutting down on some of the descriptions. Don't get me wrong, for the most part, they're excellent and really help place the scene. However, there were a few instances (i.e. the part where Audrey puts on winter clothes) where the description went on a little too long. There's nothing wrong with building your environment, but make sure it doesn't sag too much.
A decent romance with interesting interactions.
If there'd be anything to adjust, it'd be cutting down on some of the descriptions. Don't get me wrong, for the most part, they're excellent and really help place the scene. However, there were a few instances (i.e. the part where Audrey puts on winter clothes) where the description went on a little too long. There's nothing wrong with building your environment, but make sure it doesn't sag too much.
A decent romance with interesting interactions.
So, again, let me preface by saying this was pretty well written. It's a little... "literature" toned for me, but that's not really a mark against it. Just a personal thing. Characterization is good (though Audrey kinda dives crazy hard into love - like, distressingly hard. Like, I'm not sure I want to root for this romance because this feels destructive.)
That said... this story is pretty more or less what I think of when I think of lesbian monstergirl romance. There's nothing wrong with executing well on familiar tropes, of course, but this really does adhere very, very closely to them. Nerdy main, punky monster. Love at first sight. Getting called out on lesbianism. Brief scare about another lover. All consuming love. Suicidal gesture. It all works out. These are all things I think of when I think of this story type. Again, nothing wrong with that all told. I loves me some familiar tropes and I often get a bit snobby about pulling twists just to twist.
That said, the biggest flaw in this story is the end feels... unearned. We don't actually see Audrey do anything, so her solving the mysteries is kinda out of nowhere. This is further compounded by the fact that I'm... not actually sure -what- she did. I might be missing something obvious, but that end feels really out of nowhere. Like, it in fact seems to go against established knowledge (things that enter the pond stay in the pond).
That said... this story is pretty more or less what I think of when I think of lesbian monstergirl romance. There's nothing wrong with executing well on familiar tropes, of course, but this really does adhere very, very closely to them. Nerdy main, punky monster. Love at first sight. Getting called out on lesbianism. Brief scare about another lover. All consuming love. Suicidal gesture. It all works out. These are all things I think of when I think of this story type. Again, nothing wrong with that all told. I loves me some familiar tropes and I often get a bit snobby about pulling twists just to twist.
That said, the biggest flaw in this story is the end feels... unearned. We don't actually see Audrey do anything, so her solving the mysteries is kinda out of nowhere. This is further compounded by the fact that I'm... not actually sure -what- she did. I might be missing something obvious, but that end feels really out of nowhere. Like, it in fact seems to go against established knowledge (things that enter the pond stay in the pond).