Weather is annoying. It can’t help it.
Some places, it’s sunny, some places, it’s cloudy. Some places, it’s rainy, some places, it’s snowy. And yet across the entire planet, without exception, there is not one single place that has never been blessed with bad weather of some kind or another. If the problem can be boiled down to a single issue, it’s most likely that there’s always such a fine line between too hot and too cold.
For Judy, at the moment, it was too damned cold, and in a way that she was pretty used but not at all prepared for at the same time. The temperature was the usual too-damned-cold of the midwinter months, when the sun had run away over the horizon. That was normal, that was okay, she’d planned for that, same as every year.
What she hadn’t planned on was it going on ’till near April.
Well, that was fixable. Probably. With a bit of luck. Judy had a lot more than she’d need put away for her and the girls, just in case. But just in case was about half through, and getting a little more of it never hurt.
Fishing was a good start. Get a line, cut a hole, sit on the ice, wait. And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and THEN
wait a little bit more and there was a tug on the line.
Judy yanked up the fish and whacked it on the ice. One. Two might take a bit longer.
“So slow, so slow!” said a voice.
Judy frowned as she looked up. A voice had no call being so loud and warm this time of year. It was against the natural order of things. “Pardon?” she said.
The first thing that hit her was the smile. It was a big smile, a broad smile, a wide smile, a tall smile, a smile-little-smiles-looked-up-to-with-shining-eyes. It didn’t gleam, it glowed. The man it was attached to was nearly background after that.
“Waiting so long for one fish so small?” He laughed, a big, jolly laugh that made Judy’s knuckles itch. “Slow! Hah, I could outfish you two-to-one in my sleep!”
“Big talk from a big mouth with a little brain,” said Judy. “Go away. You’ll scare them.”
“Scare them? Hah! I invite them! The little scaly ones, they hear my voice and it calls them in like a mother’s lullaby, just you see. I bet you I can outfish you two-to-one with my big loud voice and your little quiet grouchy one, angry person!”
“Fine. Go fish over there.” A long way over there. Please.
“Hah!” The smile walked away.
Judy continued to fish as she did, maybe with her knuckles a little bit tightened. One fish (got it) two fish (a nice fat one) three fish (better chop the hole open again) four fish and five fish (skinny, discouraging things), and that was enough because she was about to freeze to the ice. There was no sign of the man on the lake, and she felt a vague sort of happiness in her heart that completely deserted her as she approached the shoreline and saw the waving, blurry little smile.
“Ten, and lively to boot,” it boasted. “What was your catch, fair lady?”
Judy gave him a look, and kept walking.
“Speak up now,” said the man, hurrying alongside her, “don’t be shy! We have a bet, didn’t we?”
“Ten,” said Judy, walking faster, “and no.”
“Surely you jest!”
“You said we had a bet, I didn’t. Stuff it.”
“Cruelty, such cruelty! At least give me one of your catch to make up for your cold, bitter heart, fair lady!”
Judy’s head hurt. “No. And stop yelling.”
“Ah, but we’ll settle this score yet! Come again, fair lady, and I’ll be waiting!”
Judy started humming very loudly and walked still faster. The man laughed, but didn’t follow.
“So that’s that,” said Judy to her mother, Anna.
“A twit,” said Anna, chewing her lip as she selected a large knife. Her other hand was busy moving the insides of the five fish to their outsides.
“You don’t say,” said Judy.
“None of that lip from you. See this lip that I am chewing? That is all the lip we permit in this household.”
“This is my house, mom.”
“Details and politicking. Give me that salt.”
Judy gave her that salt.
“That’s the stuff. Now, what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to find out how he’s cheating. Because you just told me that some smartass boy said he was a better fisherman than my girl, and I know that is a lie because the only one that could out-fish you was your daddy, until you out-fished him.”
“This isn’t a big deal, mom.”
“Sure it is. Someone flirting you up when you aren’t asking for it and making jokes on you, and you aren’t thinking of getting them back? The moment my girl takes that attitude is the moment I throw her out of the house and tell my grandchildren that their mommy got replaced by some stranger with her face on.”
“Water under the bridge, mom. He won’t even be there again.”
“What water, it’s all frozen, you are just talking crazy talk. And that man will be there, mark every word I just told you twice. Now take this advice out there with you tomorrow: you watch which way that man goes to fish, and you creep up on him and watch how he cheats. Then once you know, you wait ’till he boasts and you tell him how he cheats right to his stupid face. Got any more salt?”
Judy checked. “No.”
“Dang.”
Judy walked down to the lake. And she was pretty sure she wouldn’t ever see that man again, and she knew that she wouldn’t need to remember a single thing Anna told her. And she still wasn’t at all surprised when the man strolled up whistling as she was cutting her fishing hole and said “So, up for another bet?”
“Go away.”
“Come now, fair lady, giving up so easily? You did so well yesterday, I very nearly had to hurry to catch up!” He laughed, then caught himself. “Well, nearly.”
“Go and fish somewhere else.”
“I shall, I shall, I shall. And when we meet again, I guarantee that I will have caught three fish for each that nibbles your bait, and you can trust that word ’till the end of the earth.”
Judy sighed and concentrated on her fishing lure, and then, hating her mother just a little bit and herself a little bit more, she watched that man walk away out of the corner of her eye and made a note of that direction.
One fish, two fish. Set the pole up, fasten it tight (don’t want to lose that hook), and then off tiptoed Judy, feeling as stealthy as a toddler, creeping over the ice and trying not to breathe too loudly.
Finding the man was pretty easy. That laugh of his carried, and it never let up for long. A chuckle, a giggle, all leading into a big guffaw and then dying back down. In fact, he was so loud that she thought he MUST be right there at least three times, even though her eyes told her otherwise.
He had his back to her fishing hole where he sat, that must be the only reason he didn’t see her coming. The line danced through his fingers, half-fidget, half-play, half-haul, and up came the eighth or maybe ninth, so lively that it was fairly snapping at his fingers.
“Naughty!” he said, and then another one of those long, jolly, side-splitting laughs that made your fingers curl up into angry shapes all by themselves.
Judy was so busy trying to get them to unbend again that she nearly missed what was wrong with the man’s fishing hole. It was about twenty feet across and fish were swarming in it, dashing around under the surface like it was a summer stream.
First she stared, then she swore (very quietly), then she looked around for how the man could be doing a thing like that. Unless the answer could fit into his clothing or he was cutting fishing holes with his line, it was apparently not in front of her.
“Hoo hum ho,” chortled the man, and he pulled up the probably tenth fish as Judy slunk back to her line, thinking. She pulled in her third while she was at it, and her fourth, but she couldn’t make time from nothing and was only at five again by luck when she had to turn back.
The smile was waiting on the shore again, with the man. “Fifteen!”
“Mmm.”
“What? No praise? No adulation? Ah, such cruelty from the unappreciative – it makes me wonder I left my home to travel far and wide, if all men and women everywhere are brothers and sisters in their stingy praise!”
Judy started humming again.
“Ah, my prize is a song? How elegant! If you know the tune, I would not object to-”
Judy started jogging and humming, and didn’t stop ’till she was halfway home.
“Well now that’s strange,” said Anna.
“You’re telling me,” replied Judy. She was rubbing her sore feet by the fire.
“Just a big hole?”
Judy nodded.
“Strange. You’d better go ask mother then.”
Judy flinched.
“Don’t you give me that flinching. Your grandmother can’t help having her Condition. Just don’t talk too loud or get right up in her face and it makes no difference to anyone anyways anyhow.”
And that was why Judy had to go over to the spot where Carol was sleeping and poke her in the back.
“Huh?”
“Grandma Carol?”
“Whuh?”
“We’ve got a question for you now, grandma Carol.”
Carol scrubbed her eyes with a fury normally reserved for the filthiest of her descendant’s clothing. “Uh. Hmm. Er. Now, what was that, Anna?”
“It’s Judy, grandma.”
“I know that, I know, I know. But you do sound like her, you know. You both talk too loud and too much. Makes my head twirl.”
“I’m sorry, grandma.”
“Don’t be so sorry, it’s all right, it’s all right. You’re just perfect you know, just perfect. Now, what’s wrong?”
So Judy told Carol about the irritating smile and the man it was attached to, taking great care to keep her voice down at all times, even when she was describing the annoying laughs. And Carol nodded and listened and growled a bit, and when the tale was through she fussed it over and muttered to herself some.
“That man is irritating,” she told Judy. “You owe him a good fuss-making and an irritation right back at him. Up to some sort of tricks, he is. You sure you didn’t see anything?”
“No. No strange tools, nothing.”
“Hmm. Must be a trick he keeps close. What you need to do now, Anna, is you need to sneak up on him while he’s getting ready to fish, right away. You need to see how he puts up this special spot for himself.”
“Out on the open ice?”
“Don’t speak so loud! I have a Condition, and you know that. Carol knows that. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Sorry, grandma, sorry,”
“Should be. So you do that. And as for that ice, take my old white furry hide blanket with you and wrap your daughter up in that, and then, well, you can guess.”
“Yes?”
“Guess. Go on. Now let me get back to sleep, I need that sleep. This winter is too long and too dark, and all that dark is good for is sleep.”
Judy left Carol to her sleep and brought Emily with her. The girl was big for her age, still growing, and more than happy to have something to get her outside and running, even if the ice was a bit boring. And she got to wear her grandma Carol’s old white furry hide blanket. It was some sort of treat, apparently.
“Four to one?” asked the man, who showed up just as Judy was finishing up her cutting.
“Leave us alone,” said Judy.
“Ah, the child! Adorable, completely and utterly in every way! What’s your name, dear girl? No, no, how rude of me, I shouldn’t pry – hush, and I shall hush and be on my way. Good luck, fair lady! Good luck, little daughter!”
Carol counted to ten as the man walked away, then took ahold of the old white furry hide blanket from Emily. Her daughter opened her mouth to complain, then shut it as her mother firmly wrapped the line around her fingers.
“Stay here,” Judy told her. “Remember what you’ve practiced. And try to look obvious.”
Emily gave her a calculating look, then deferred pouting in favour of fishing. It took less effort.
The man walked, and as he walked he talked to himself – bits of nonsense, really – and laughed. And three times he looked over his shoulder, and three times Judy had to stop moving before she started creeping again, staying real close and real low to the ice while his eyes sailed over her white furry lump on a white frozen sea and bobbed back to that little brown coat by her fishing hole, right where she should be, waiting for him to say “Hah!” (it was always ‘Hah!’) and move on. It was chilly and she got a few mouthfuls of snow, but before her face started getting numb the man stopped and said “That’s that!”
Then he spat.
Judy wondered what he was doing five times in a row before she heard the sizzling. The man’s spit had melted a hole clean through the ice down to the water, and it was gnawing away more and more every second. By the time the drip-drip-splosh of fast-melt had stopped, the man had a practical ice-pond at the tips of his toes, warm as a summer sea. Curious, cold fish were already popping up in it like wildflowers, and there came that laugh again, full of joy and sharp and irritating as grit in your eyelids.
“I caught a fish!” said Emily.
“Good, good,” said Judy. “Let’s go home now. It’s a big fish, and that’s enough for now.” But the man was still waiting for them with his fish, twenty of them, early though they left.
“Too cold?” he asked, sympathy filling him to the brim. “Well, we can’t have the little daughters freeze, or who will be tomorrow’s fair ladies, fair lady? Still, my catch is twenty times yours! You really must pay me back tomorrow, or I’ll have to insist – giving way on this many bets without repayment is simply miserliness, no excuses permitted.”
“Emily, would you please sing us a song?”
“Oh how-” managed the man, and then Emily launched into her favourite one of Anna’s old tunes, plus or minus bits of one Judy had taught her, in a key that Carol had hummed for her. The combined effect was impressive, but the rest of the walk home was a lot quieter compared to the alternative.
“Well, that beats the hell out of me,” said Carol. “You got any ideas, Anna?”
“No mother, that puzzles me thorough to the core. It’s cheating, true, but no kind that’s ever crossed my eyes or ears ever in my life.”
“Slow down and talk quietly,” said Carol. “This is a puzzle.”
“A puzzler,” said Anna.
“No, a puzzle. The puzzler’s the one who made the puzzle, and that’s this smiley man. Didn’t I tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Yes you did,” said Anna.
“Did you tell your daughter?”
“No,” said Judy.
“Well! Now why would you do that sort of thing?”
“She was smart enough to know it on her own now, wasn’t she?” said Carol.
“Don’t get sharp! Too sharp, now, now, now. Now. What are we going to do about this?”
They sat there.
“Tell him he’s a jerk,” suggested Emily.
“No,” said Judy.
“No,” said Anna.
“No, what we need to do is ask my mother,” said Carol. “Why didn’t one of you think of that?”
“Because grandma’s up and died years ago by now,” said Anna.
“Well! That’s no call to not go asking her questions, is it? You’ll make her feel unwanted.”
“I’m not asking any dead person questions,” said Anna. “That sort of thing is just not what I should be doing, and besides, I never was her favourite grandchild at all.”
“And it’s a good thing I wasn’t asking you to go do that, Anna, because mother only had one great-grandchild before she died and that was little Judy. Judy, won’t you be a dear and talk to mother for us?”
“Yes Judy,” said Anna. “That’s a good idea. She liked you a whole lot when she was alive and she probably won’t do anything too nasty.”
Judy looked at Emily, and found no support. She sighed, deeply and thoroughly. “How do we do this?”
“Well,” said Carol, “first we take this handful of…stuff.”
It was mostly plants, or at least maybe plants. “Right.”
“And we is you, because of my Condition.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you roll those eyes at me! Take that to the fire.”
“Alright.”
“And toss it in.”
Judy tossed the stuff in.
“Now just yawn.”
Judy yawned, and accidentally yawned herself out of herself. But that was okay because there wasn’t a roof anymore, and she bounced off the belly of something big and pink instead.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked.
“No,” said the thing, which had forty five eyes and no nose. “Try again.” It flicked her gently, and she landed on the other side of the building which was also the other side of the universe.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the ground underneath her, which was made out of faces.
“No,” said the faces. All of them had no ears, and all of them had two sets of eyebrows, one above and one below. “Try again.” They all sneezed, and she fell back inside the building which wasn’t there anymore but now its roof was.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the roof.
“Yes?”
“I could use a hand with a man who smiles too much.”
“Didn’t your grandmother tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” The roof scratched its hip. “Listen, that smiley man’s causing his fair share of troublesome right now, and it’s to more than just you. That’s why I’m helping you right now, that and you’re a nice good girl who makes me very proud, all right?”
Judy nodded, and had to reattach her head.
“Careful! See, this is why you don’t need encouragement to do this sort of thing. Just get him to stop smiling, that’s all you need to do. And tell Emily she’s a pretty little thing, and she ought to sing more often. You and your mother were too quiet, that’s your problem.”
Judy nodded, and this time her head came off and didn’t reattach. It hurt an awful lot, and she had to work her way through half of the kettle of tea Anna had made in the meantime to get rid of the ache.
“Got a plan?” asked her mother.
Judy rubbed her face. “Sort of.”
“Good enough then.”
The next day Judy saw hide nor hair of the man, not on the shore, not on the ice. Not as she cut her fishing hole, not as she set the line, not as she drew up no fewer than ten fine fat fish. She looked left and right and all around as she wrapped up her line and strung her catch, and he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the shore when she came back, and she walked halfway home without a single other soul to break the quiet of her breath.
“Thanks, Mary,” she said to herself and anyone else that could be listening, “but I guess it’s alright now.”
“Hello!” said an extremely cheerful voice in her ear.
“Go away,” she told the man, reflexively.
No, that wouldn’t do. And it didn’t, because that smile never flickered for an instant. “A fine catch! A full belly for all! Such a pity, such a pity, alas and alack. I’d bet you that I’d have to bring home no fewer than five times your catch, and today you exceed the furthest reaches of my imagination!”
“Not difficult in the slightest sense,” said Judy.
“Cruelty,” said the man, “is of no avail, when all I need do to refresh my happiness is to look upon you, fair lady! Although, of course, I must insist on the terms of our bet, regardless of my fondness of you. Behold!”
Judy beheld almost against her will. At least a hundred fat little fish were strung up on the man’s line, maybe far more. His arm nearly wavered as he held them high, but his smile stood firmer than a stone.
“How small,” she managed. “Though that’s normal for you.”
“Your awe overreaches your words, fair lady,” he replied without so much as a moment’s loss of focus. “Truly, I do not deserve your company.”
“You don’t deserve the company of the densest of the smallest of the fish on that line,” said Judy. “I feel pity for it, having to endure so much wind and noise.”
The smile held, but Judy fancied she saw a bit of a brittle shine on its edges. “Ah, but I kill them quick and merciful, so that they suffer little,” said the man. He seemed to perk up. “And besides, there’s no harm at all in a little conversation. One cannot live on one’s own, after all.”
“You talk to yourself enough for three; are you calling yourself lonely now?”
The man laughed and laughed, a big roiling belly-bellow that sank Judy’s hopes with each second it dragged on. The smile wouldn’t end, any more than this conversation would, even with home in sight. Emily and Anna and Carol were all outside with tea, waiting for her triumphant return, and she winced inside at the thought of bringing the man up to them with no way to get rid of him, not with that smile hanging about his face. Especially Emily. The poor girl had already suffered the man once, but…
Oh, there was something she’d forgotten.
“…of course, I need not take payment in fish,” the man was saying, as Emily ran up to hug her. “Maybe…”
“Emily dear,” said Judy, “great-grandmother Mary gave me a message for you!”
Emily blinked.
“She says you should sing more often.”
Emily beamed, and just like that, just as she opened her mouth, just for a moment that Judy would’ve missed if she and Anna and Carol weren’t all watching the man like a hawk, his smile blinked right out. And even when that smile was gone, even when that man looked as scared and miserable as a lost baby, that warmth kept coming out of his face, right through his eyes and ears and nose and everywhere else, and with it came light.
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding,” said Judy, and something about her voice made Emily close her mouth again right away.
The man blinked very fast, shook his head, and tried smiling. “Sorry?”
“You’re a very bad liar,” said Carol. “And if that’s the best smile he can do, I’m very ashamed of you, Judy.”
Now it wasn’t a smile at all, just teeth. “No call for rudeness now, fair ladies-”
“Easy for you to spit up a little melt with all that in you,” said Anna. “No harm in that, none at all, but why you’ve got to go and go lying to my girl like about bets when you plan on cheating, well, I don’t see why.”
“I never said I wouldn’t do it!” said the man, and now his smile was all gone and the fire he’d hidden was all there to be seen for anyone, hanging in the breeze with no smile to cover it up. There wasn’t a face there, either. “I never said!”
“I never agreed on any bet either,” said Judy, “but somehow there was one.” Anna was thumping Carol on the back, her mother was coughing and hiccuping. “And I don’t bet, and I sure as sure don’t make bets with anyone I don’t trust. And I don’t trust you, mister Sun, because you ran away out of the sky and left us in the dark and cold just so you could have a tease and laugh at me. And I don’t care how much people don’t appreciate you, that makes you a twit, and my family doesn’t like twits.”
The Sun was glowering now, a good smoulder. The snow was melting into puddles up to his ankles. “You never said please or thank you or even ‘you-did-a-good-job!'” he shouted. “All I wanted was a bit of fun!”
“I’d stop yelling,” said Judy.
“No! I’m not listening to you! All you do is sneer and ignore me and complain and that’s when I’m TRYING TO BE NICE! Can’t you all JUST ”
Carol’s Condition occurred.
It had been a long winter, and it had been a cold winter. But these sorts of things balance themselves out, across the world, across the years. For instance, that summer was the longest and warmest in decades, and the winter never quite dipped below dusk. The sun didn’t seem to want to come down from the sky.