Jae Vail

rinks without ice

Those last years, we were building ice rinks like it was going out of fashion. And it was. Nobody wanted to go ice skating anymore.

Our boiler pipes frozen shut, winter crept into our homes one night and kept with us for good. We switched off our fridges at the walls, left bottles of milk in the cupboards next to the bread. We washed ourselves by the sink in pairs with water drawn from the kettle, exposing our limescaled bodies to the porcelain one piece at a time.

But we kept building ice rinks.

At first, they were small, spontaneously erected without ceremony at the edge of parks, in small town squares, on school playgrounds. They were temporary structures, open to the air. We tried to tune out the Christmas music blaring from the speakers as we walked past on our way to work, to school. We watched as leaves and other detritus blew onto the empty ice, soon obscured by inches of snow.

But we didn’t go ice skating. We threw out our television sets and radios, stopped feeding our pets. We lit our homes with candles during the evening, sewed ourselves into our winter clothes.

Our desire for building ice rinks only grew stronger. After we’d finished with the smaller ones, we built large structures on brown-belt sites, down by the docks, between the old factories where we used to work. They took much longer to construct, months, sometimes years. We dug deep foundations with cranes and in articulated lorries, we carted out the upturned soil. We created car parks and cafes for them, though we never turned on the coffee machines, never fed any change to the meters. The generators keeping the ice cold, running 24 hrs a day, buzzed so loud you could hear them a quarter of a mile away.

But we didn’t go ice skating. At the end of each day, we took the keys out of the ignition, stepped down from our cranes and lorries and walked home, ate dog food cold straight from the tin. We gathered on the street, broke down our parents’ old furniture and tossed it into the fires burning in metal drums.

In our twilight years, when everything was frozen — when our crops stopped and rotted in the quiet, quiet earth — we built ice rinks like cathedrals at the centre of our cities. We furnished their exteriors with precious metals, carved gargoyles into the chrome, etched our mottos in Latin above the entrances, hung chandeliers in opulent lobbies filled with ice sculptures and swirling golden staircases. We held grand opening ceremonies with long speeches and red ribbons to be cut and crowds gathered as far as the eye could see.

Beneath the floors, we engineered rows and rows of chillers the size of jet engines, through which we lay a labyrinth of pipes and tubes and capillaries to keep the place cold. Every morning, dozens of automatic resurfacers glided out onto the ice like a flight of swans, buffing the mirror-like finish to perfection. Brightly lit and humming with electricity, our rinks were vast frozen lakes, sparkling and large enough for a thousand people to skate at once. If we had looked down from above, we would have seen our gaunt faces staring back at us, as if we were trapped beneath the surface.

But we didn’t go ice skating. We burned our grandmothers’ books, boiled up our shoes and belts for broth. We danced up and down on the spot, if only to help the movement of our thickening blood. And we held each other tight, counted the remaining sundowns. Until we couldn’t, until we couldn’t anymore and our hearts seized shut.

Jae Vail is a writer based in London. They hold a Ph.D. in music from the University of Manchester. Their writing is published by or forthcoming in Litro, Pilot Press, Fairlight Shorts, Stone of Madness Press, Lit.202 and others.