He was pretty sure he'd read a fairy tale once-no, a folktale-when he was younger, about a mother with a starving child. Or maybe it was Inuit folklore.

It's important that they lived in an igloo-the mother and her son.

The mother had beautiful brown skin, beautiful black hair that hung to her waist. It kept her warm in the winter. But her child, her son, was starving. They had no food. The cold had killed all of their food. They sucked on shards of ice to stay alive but it only made them colder. They fell asleep each night to the sound of their chattering teeth.

One day the mother plucked the hairs from her head, one at a time, each as strong as rope, and weaved them into a net the shape of a squid's head. When she was done she was bald and she shivered. The skin on her head was pale, dotted with black pores, where the roots had held deep.

She went to where the ice ended and the water began, dragging the net behind her, humming to herself. It was night. The moon rippled white on the water. She cast the net of hair and caught a whale, dragged it home by its tail, thrashing, moaning, leaving a slick trail of shined ice behind her.

Inside the igloo, they pried open the whale's jaws, working together. They climbed inside where their laughter echoed and rang. He pretended they were living in a cave. They stayed warm and feasted on the soft beds of pink krill in the whale's belly. They breathed through its blowhole. They used the base of its tongue as a pillow. The whale died slowly. The cold kept its body from rotting.

In the spring, the yellow sun melted the igloo, the ice, the cold. They emerged from the whale and ate its flesh, still laughing. The mother's hair had grown back. Her son thought she looked beautiful.

This is how he remembered the coldest winter of their life. As a fairy tale. No, a folktale. But he was so young then. How else could he?


previous | next

Added to The Corduroy Mtn. on March the Seventeenth in the year Two Thousand and Nine.