She’d been sitting there a long, long time before the speck came. She’d been sitting there longer still before it turned into a boat, drifting in from the edge of the eyeball’s reach. And it was longer than that again before it finally docked, bumping and bruising and cursing and splashing.
May always did have noodle arms.
“You’re late.”
“Or early,” said May. She scratched at long, pale, sweat-rank hair. “It’s so damned hard to tell these days. Especially up here. Are we at the geographic?”
“No.”
May squinted up at the sun. “Huh. The magnetic, then?”
“No.”
“Are we at any sort of pole at all?”
“No. I had to take what we could get.”
“And what could you get?”
“The last chunk of ice in all the arctic circle.”
May whistled and kicked the bile-speckled surface underfoot. A rotting chunk came off at her heel. “Nice. Real nice. Don’t suppose we could steer it to the right spot?”
“Wherever it is, there’s the spot.”
“Right, right, right. I guess so. You know best, of course.”
“No. I’m just making it up as I go.”
“Well there’s a fucking terrifying thought, pardon me very much.”
She shrugged. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, we make it work. That’s the rules.”
“I don’t remember ever agreeing to any rules anywhen in particular.”
“You’re walking. You’re talking. Breathing. Rowing. Sweating. Arguing. None of that’s necessary, is it.”
“No, guess not.”
“None of that’s free, is it.”
“Maybe.”
“You want to fit into that shape you’ve got to make some allowances for symbolism. And once it’s got its hooks in you, the only way to get out is more of it. And this is it.”
“It what?”
“Out.”
May looked around the world. A blue horizon against a blue sky stretching all the way around in every direction except for the immediate: a miserable little ice floe barely bigger than the dinghy she’d heaved for hundreds of miles.
“My arms hurt.”
“Yes.”
“Will they stop hurting after this, y’think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, hell, it’s not all bad then. You do what you’ve got to do, cousin.”
There was a little rise in the center of the rotting berg; a sad mirror of what lay beneath them. They’re always larger where they can’t be seen. What’s that going to mean when there’s none left?
“You bring a knife, or we going to do this bare-handed?”
“Knife.”
“Stainless steel?”
“Yes.”
“Well, fair enough.”
May draped herself over the lump and squinted up at the summer sun.
“Too damned hot.”
“Yes,” said June.
The human ribcage is sturdier than it looks. May wasn’t human, but she was a human idea, and that was close enough. Scratch one of their imaginings and however pretty it looked on the surface, underneath they were all the same.
Wet.
Her heart was warm against the cool air. Condensation forming on its gently-steaming muscle.
It was a tough thing and it took June almost as much sawing and chewing to get down as her bones had.
She stared up at that midnight sun and missed her already. She’d always been closest to her, May had. April had whined, February’d pouted. January had kicked and screamed and raved.
But May had slipped away without so much as a complaint, and she’d miss her the hardest for it.
June washed the blood from her hands in the warm, warm water. And then she stepped away, to see the rest of her world.
It was going to be a long summer.