Thomas Mixon
She was good, and he was bad. He smoked in the kitchen and lied about it. He called groups of people the wrong names on purpose. And yet, there was the ice rink. He was the town’s maintenance foreman, and set it up every year. After he weeded, mowed, filled the gaps between the boards, he flooded the area. He would send a nasty email to the town manager, telling him to let everyone know that it wasn’t ready yet. The town manager would find a polite way to relate this to everyone, and send out a less nasty email.
When it was level, and all the layers were frozen, he’d leave work to pick her up. She worked at home, using a Class H Homestead license to bake vegan pastries in the shapes of endangered animals. She would use the IUCN Redlist, online, to find species with declining populations, and make her own cookie cutters. She’d use foil and cut an outline of a Michoacan Pocket Gopher until the teeth were just right.
She’d do the cutting at night, when she wouldn’t be interrupted. During the day, she would turn off the oven when he’d randomly show up. He’d often leave work without telling anyone. Usually he would sit in the kitchen, scrolling his phone. But in winter, once it got cold enough, he’d let her on the ice, before anyone else. He’d say, “To test it,” even though he’d already smoothed it out.
When he built things, or fixed things, he took his time. No one could argue with the results. Other employees of the town could, and would, argue about him, amongst themselves. But the culverts were in good shape. The potholes were fixed. And the outdoor rink was perfect.
She would bring malformed pieces of near-extinct pit viper cookies to her friends. One of her friends would say, “Leave him,” before getting crumbs everywhere. But most of them didn’t mention him.
Especially Garrett Grinch. His name was funny because he was very nice. He worked as a supervisor at a small commercial printer in town. He had gone to high school with her. And prom, just as friends. He had a crush on her then, had a crush on her after, had a crush on her when she showed up in the small office, an even smaller bit of frosting in the corner of her mouth. He knew the only way to win her over was to pretend the bad guy didn’t exist. Her boyfriend was the bad guy, he was the good guy. It was right there in his initials, GG.
So when her boyfriend got sick, Garrett feigned a general sympathy. Inside, he was celebrating. It was colorectal cancer. He would give her a hug as she made her rounds, ask how she was holding up. As he drove home, he’d laugh the whole way. That mean fuck was going to die. There was justice in the world.
And, within a year, the bad guy was no longer living. Garrett went to the funeral, wore his best supportive face. She had stopped coming by his office, but he didn’t take it personally. Through some snooping around he discerned she hadn’t visited anybody, very much. He played it cool, waiting for the right moment.
Which came as winter came. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the ice rink. The town hadn’t hired a replacement for the bad guy yet. Garrett wasn’t good with his hands, but this was his chance.
He called his father, another bad man. His dad was taken aback, thought it was a trick. Garrett wasted his whole lunch break convincing him he had no ulterior motive. He said, “I need this.” His dad snorted on the line. His dad eventually told him he wouldn’t need to worry about the supports, if he filled it right.
A couple inches a night, let it freeze. Then again the next night, for about a week and a half. Garrett asked if he was sure. His father said, “Did anything bad ever happen to you on my ice?” By which he meant the backyard, growing up. Which was funny because a lot of bad things happened, just none his father would consider bad.
The town was thrilled. They gave him supplies. They offered to cajole a couple guys into assisting him, but Garrett wouldn’t have it. He told them he could do it himself. Just like the bad guy. The dead, bad guy.
After a week, it didn’t look right. Not only was it uneven, but the plywood was bowing. He blamed it on the inconsistent temperature, and forged on.
After the second week, he almost called his father again. He threw his phone down. He emptied the hose until the cracked screen was completely submerged.
By the third week, there was snow. If he shoveled only some of it, the rink almost looked safe. It didn’t matter. The forecast said there was going to be a rare heat wave that would melt everything anyway. He had one more day to show it to her. He left work early, like the bad guy, drove to her house.
She saw him before he could knock. She had the curtains open. She had an oven mitt on one hand, holding a baking sheet. With the other she was trying to clear space on top of a table by the door, littered with sympathy cards and vases. The skeletons of summer funeral flowers fell to the floor, when she caught his eye.
She was surprised. He apologized, said his phone was broken. As she let him in, he accidentally stepped on a picture of the bad guy’s face. He started to apologize but then saw the bad guy’s face everywhere. All the treats lining the counters, the bench, the chairs, all in the shape of creatures on the brink. All with his face.
“Busy,” she said, when he asked how she’d been. She didn’t offer him anything to eat.
He pointed to the closest brownie. “What animal is that?”
She said, “A butterfly splitfin.”
He said, “It looks like a fish.”
“It is a fish. You used to be able to find it in a river, only ten miles of a river, in Mexico. Now, the only sustainable population is trapped inside a water park.”
There was no good segue. He didn’t want to say, “Speaking of water attractions…” or “Guess what river I’ve made…” She was trapped, like the near-extinct fish in the water park, he thought. But he could never say this, and she could never admit it. He had to be careful. A timer went off in the kitchen. Something smelled like burning.
She fanned smoke away from the stove. She opened all the windows. She coughed.
He said, “Let’s go outside.” There were ice skates in the entryway, overturned. He said, “Bring those.”
She said, “Why?”
He said, “Because I have something to show you.”
By the time they got to the rink, it was dark. He turned on the floodlights overlooking the field. She said, “I’m not going on that.” He made a great show of shrugging, and smiling. He could play the fool. Sometimes people needed a jester. Especially if they were sad. He slid around a bit, pretending to fall, then really falling. He saw his phone, trapped below the frozen surface. He saw it ringing. How it still worked, he had no idea. But it was lighting up, the call ID showed it was his father.
She asked to go home. They made vague plans to meet up again, soon.
After she left, he waited in her driveway for a long time, thinking any moment she would come out and say something, change the course of the evening. She didn’t.
When he got to his house all the lights were off. He didn’t want to turn them on. He didn’t want to go inside. He stumbled over a box, on the porch. He ripped it opened, using his keys. It was his new phone. He activated it by the light of the moon, but didn’t feel poetic. He attributed this to the desire to speak to his father. Who was a bad man. Who was like an animal. Who you were taught to leave alone in the wild, but who changed the boundaries of what and where was wild.
“Who is this?” his dad asked.
“Did you know there is a kind of fish that can only be found in a waterpark?”
“It says unknown number.”
“I got a new phone.”
A pause from his dad. Then, “Everyone knows about butterfly splitfins.”
Garrett Grinch was too cold to be dreaming. He barely heard his father. He knew it was going to get warm overnight. A freak kind of weather front was moving in. There was nothing dangerous about this. There was nothing miraculous about this. He muted his line and let his father complain about politics. He looked up the IUCN Redlist. There were so many mammals, birds, with down arrows next to their names. There were so many shades of red, so many tabs and filters. Endangered. Vulnerable. Threatened.
They even had flowers. He stared at a purple one for a long time. He stopped seeing his breath in the air, but he was still breathing. He stopped seeing his breath, but he saw his face. He was a plant, not an animal.
Before his battery died, he told his father about the rink. And then his father told him what he’d done wrong.
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Thomas Mixon has poems and stories in Acta Victoriana, Eye to the Telescope, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He’s trying to write a few books.