The Snow-woman
by Ross Jamieson
Touched by the snow-woman, his grandmother told him, in the frowzy speech of her afternoons. She turned his face towards the light to get a better look at the wine red smear on his lips, pinching his cheeks a little too hard. His mother came in and started to fret. What had he been eating? Nothing, said Logan, the Snow-woman did it. His mother said that was just a story. But she had.
He had been playing in the garden, looking for stones in the half-frozen earth, levering them up and checking for the milky white seams that shone with a vague kind of promise in his eyes; then she was there. It would become his earliest memory of a naked woman, and even as he was telling his mother, something was telling him to keep that part to himself, that the image was special. It had to be kept hidden, like the collection of stones in a box under his bed, each with its own unique lustre. The woman had been filthy, her pale skin etched in dirt, much like his own muddied hands. She stared at Logan, rolling something between her fingers, a little berry with an unctuous purple sheen to it.
Had he been eating berries from the bushes? His mother asked, wiping away at his mouth with a damp cloth. He shouldn’t do that- they might be poisonous. She went on scrubbing his mouth and Logan knew she wasn’t really listening.
The woman burst the berry and spread the juice, a surprising red colour, over her fingers; she crouched over Logan and daubed his lips gently, with care. The tracks of dirt in her skin were as intricate as tree bark. He had been scared, but at the same time it had made him feel warm and somehow significant. It made him remember and at the same time washed away the envy he had felt at his cousin’s christening, when the priest in his long, white robes had dripped water on the baby’s head and everyone had gathered around and cooed. The woman rose and turned away from him. She tugged a white sheet from the clothesline, knotted it around her shoulders and hopped the fence. Logan cringed to see the dirty handprints on the clean cotton; his mother was always warning him away from the washing. The woman ran through the long grass, across the back field towards the edge of the forest. From a distance, it looked as though the sheet moved by itself, flicking and snapping in the wind.
His mother said that’s what took the sheet – the wind. She was right about the berry being poisonous, though. A few hours later the skin around Logan’s mouth began to itch and a pink stain appeared just underneath his lower lip. His mother brushed it lightly with her thumb that night when she came to kiss him goodnight, a wrinkle of worry above her nose. She tried to make light of it – you look like your granny with her lipstick, she smiled. Logan’s grandmother put her lipstick on assiduously each morning, and to begin with would touch it up if it smudged. As the day grew on, though, she grew more forgetful, she went further away, as Logan’s mother put it – the line of her lip would blur and eventually she would go to wipe her mouth and then wonder why the back of her hand was pink.
Granny said it was the snow-woman, he told his mother.
What did she look like, then?
Logan searched for something to say that wasn’t the truth. Like Snow White, he blurted, for the similarity in the names more than anything else.
I don’t think the snow-woman is meant to be pretty, she said. You must have imagined it. Don’t pay your grandmother any heed. You should know by now, she goes away in the evenings, in her mind. Logan asked where she goes, and it was his mother’s turn to think of something to say.
Into the woods, she said at last, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she went down to collect the discarded lipstick – Pink Wisteria, it was called – and replaced it on her mother’s dressing table, as she did every night.
That day’s happenings faded eventually, into the dilute background of childhood, where the different strokes of event and imagination become indistinguishable with distance. Logan’s encounter with the snow-woman took on the same colour in his mind as the distant uncle who would visit occasionally and whose face he couldn’t quite remember, or the recurring dream that used to wake him in the night, of a white sheet snagged in a distant tree, gnashing at the wind with a peculiar menace. His lipstick mark remained, though, detached from the memory of how it came to be. It lingered like the shadow of a kiss that never happened.
He was teased for it, increasingly so as the years went on and he reached high school, where lips began to be put to a myriad of uses besides forming words. Though there were plenty of words thrown about as well. Girls wouldn’t look at him – I would, but I buy Ruby Red and you’re more Un-popped Cherry. Our colours might clash, eh? Laughter, puckering; he was too easy a target for boys, always ready to fashion footholds out of others’ insecurities – don’t pass Lippy Logan the fag, you’ll catch his herpes. A few of them even knew the old stories – you’ve had a kiss off the snow-woman. Next time you walk into the woods just stay there and she’ll find you, give you a happy ending! Nobody else will, Pash Rash.
And of course they made fun of him for spending so much time in the woods, but Logan didn’t care about that – hop the garden fence, across the field, over the ridge and down into the valley and all their noise was scattered by the tall, never-quite-silent trees. He could happily spend the whole day there, finding faces in the knots and gnarls of the trunks and sharing whispers with the rustling leaves. Sometimes he felt that the place was really listening to him and he would play up to his audience, putting on a bit of a swagger and allowing himself a little more posture than he ever would in human company – he was flirting, though with what he didn’t quite know.
One January day, she came for him. It was during the school holidays, when, already glad each morning to know he wouldn’t be seeing his classmates, Logan was doubly happy to find the world beyond his curtains made mute by a heavy snowfall. He’d never seen a snow like it, though his mother insisted they’d had several winters as bad when he was young. She told him to stay at home, that it was dangerous to go wandering the woods on a day like this, but he couldn’t resist – he slipped out while his mother was in the shower.
It was almost a different place, like something white and new had been lowered from the sky and laid over the landscape, with little outcrops of the old place poking through here and there. Against such starkness, the trees and their branches looked black almost, like the world had been crudely redrawn in slashes of ink. Enthralled, Logan paid no attention to where he was going. He got lost, and soon began to feel the nip and seep of the cold.
The snow took him up to the knees, spilling into his boots while washing the patina of dry mud from the leather. His breath left his body in heavy clouds and drifted off; seeing it, he felt that it was something else leaving him, some vital essence escaping from his body with every exhalation. He looked for familiar trees, but they all wore luscious new robes of frozen white, each the same and each with their backs turned to him.
Logan thought of the kitchen range and the smell of singeing wool when he would stand by it for too long, just come in from a cold, wet day in the forest; the gentle scolding of his mother, who would tell him he’d burn his backside if he stood there any longer. The thought dwindled, getting lower until it was just a faint orange glow, receding in the dark. The woods creaked, the air felt brittle as glass. The glow dipped lower, the cold slid down deeper, until even the memory of warmth left him.
It was then that she appeared, veiled in her same sheet, which time had eaten into a brutish, haphazard lace. Beaded here and there were pearls of ice. Through the holes in the cotton, Logan saw lips the colour of a crushed winter berry, hair and eyes black like the sodden bark of trees. She came forward, each slow step cracking the crystal-thin shell of ice that glazed the snowfall. She lifted her shroud, soaked and heavy, and draped it over the young man, folding him into her. Logan felt the orange glow rekindle in the depths of him in answer to the closeness of the woman. Her skin was clean and white, with an almost pink blush in places, as though she had scrubbed herself with snow; her hair glistened, perhaps from handfuls of powdery ice combed through its locks. The snow-woman’s breath moistened his cheek, like the exhalation of damp earth overturned with a spade.
Then they were on the ground, cocooned. The snow-woman’s dark, wet hair brushed Logan’s face and neck when she opened his jacket, sending a bead of water tickling over his collarbone. She frowned and pursed her sticky red mouth as she fumbled at the waistband of his trousers; he turned his head to the side to keep from having to see the swelling of his embarrassment. She put a hand on the side of his head to steady herself, pushing his face through the snow and down to the ground. He closed his eyes, but could smell the decay of mulch under the ice, thawed by the warmth of their bodies.
Afterwards, Logan ran, the buckle of his belt still clinking loosely, and quickly found the path home. It seemed strange that he could have lost it in the first place. He wondered if he could tell the guys at school. You don't know her, he could say. She doesn’t live around here.
He didn't say anything, and won’t. By the time he reached home, she had already become unreal to him, like she did before. He dreams of her, though, and always will: she crouches in the forest, hugging herself beneath her sheet; spring comes and her belly swells like a peach, with a hard little stone at the centre, waiting to be dug out.
He had been playing in the garden, looking for stones in the half-frozen earth, levering them up and checking for the milky white seams that shone with a vague kind of promise in his eyes; then she was there. It would become his earliest memory of a naked woman, and even as he was telling his mother, something was telling him to keep that part to himself, that the image was special. It had to be kept hidden, like the collection of stones in a box under his bed, each with its own unique lustre. The woman had been filthy, her pale skin etched in dirt, much like his own muddied hands. She stared at Logan, rolling something between her fingers, a little berry with an unctuous purple sheen to it.
Had he been eating berries from the bushes? His mother asked, wiping away at his mouth with a damp cloth. He shouldn’t do that- they might be poisonous. She went on scrubbing his mouth and Logan knew she wasn’t really listening.
The woman burst the berry and spread the juice, a surprising red colour, over her fingers; she crouched over Logan and daubed his lips gently, with care. The tracks of dirt in her skin were as intricate as tree bark. He had been scared, but at the same time it had made him feel warm and somehow significant. It made him remember and at the same time washed away the envy he had felt at his cousin’s christening, when the priest in his long, white robes had dripped water on the baby’s head and everyone had gathered around and cooed. The woman rose and turned away from him. She tugged a white sheet from the clothesline, knotted it around her shoulders and hopped the fence. Logan cringed to see the dirty handprints on the clean cotton; his mother was always warning him away from the washing. The woman ran through the long grass, across the back field towards the edge of the forest. From a distance, it looked as though the sheet moved by itself, flicking and snapping in the wind.
His mother said that’s what took the sheet – the wind. She was right about the berry being poisonous, though. A few hours later the skin around Logan’s mouth began to itch and a pink stain appeared just underneath his lower lip. His mother brushed it lightly with her thumb that night when she came to kiss him goodnight, a wrinkle of worry above her nose. She tried to make light of it – you look like your granny with her lipstick, she smiled. Logan’s grandmother put her lipstick on assiduously each morning, and to begin with would touch it up if it smudged. As the day grew on, though, she grew more forgetful, she went further away, as Logan’s mother put it – the line of her lip would blur and eventually she would go to wipe her mouth and then wonder why the back of her hand was pink.
Granny said it was the snow-woman, he told his mother.
What did she look like, then?
Logan searched for something to say that wasn’t the truth. Like Snow White, he blurted, for the similarity in the names more than anything else.
I don’t think the snow-woman is meant to be pretty, she said. You must have imagined it. Don’t pay your grandmother any heed. You should know by now, she goes away in the evenings, in her mind. Logan asked where she goes, and it was his mother’s turn to think of something to say.
Into the woods, she said at last, and kissed him on the forehead. Then she went down to collect the discarded lipstick – Pink Wisteria, it was called – and replaced it on her mother’s dressing table, as she did every night.
That day’s happenings faded eventually, into the dilute background of childhood, where the different strokes of event and imagination become indistinguishable with distance. Logan’s encounter with the snow-woman took on the same colour in his mind as the distant uncle who would visit occasionally and whose face he couldn’t quite remember, or the recurring dream that used to wake him in the night, of a white sheet snagged in a distant tree, gnashing at the wind with a peculiar menace. His lipstick mark remained, though, detached from the memory of how it came to be. It lingered like the shadow of a kiss that never happened.
He was teased for it, increasingly so as the years went on and he reached high school, where lips began to be put to a myriad of uses besides forming words. Though there were plenty of words thrown about as well. Girls wouldn’t look at him – I would, but I buy Ruby Red and you’re more Un-popped Cherry. Our colours might clash, eh? Laughter, puckering; he was too easy a target for boys, always ready to fashion footholds out of others’ insecurities – don’t pass Lippy Logan the fag, you’ll catch his herpes. A few of them even knew the old stories – you’ve had a kiss off the snow-woman. Next time you walk into the woods just stay there and she’ll find you, give you a happy ending! Nobody else will, Pash Rash.
And of course they made fun of him for spending so much time in the woods, but Logan didn’t care about that – hop the garden fence, across the field, over the ridge and down into the valley and all their noise was scattered by the tall, never-quite-silent trees. He could happily spend the whole day there, finding faces in the knots and gnarls of the trunks and sharing whispers with the rustling leaves. Sometimes he felt that the place was really listening to him and he would play up to his audience, putting on a bit of a swagger and allowing himself a little more posture than he ever would in human company – he was flirting, though with what he didn’t quite know.
One January day, she came for him. It was during the school holidays, when, already glad each morning to know he wouldn’t be seeing his classmates, Logan was doubly happy to find the world beyond his curtains made mute by a heavy snowfall. He’d never seen a snow like it, though his mother insisted they’d had several winters as bad when he was young. She told him to stay at home, that it was dangerous to go wandering the woods on a day like this, but he couldn’t resist – he slipped out while his mother was in the shower.
It was almost a different place, like something white and new had been lowered from the sky and laid over the landscape, with little outcrops of the old place poking through here and there. Against such starkness, the trees and their branches looked black almost, like the world had been crudely redrawn in slashes of ink. Enthralled, Logan paid no attention to where he was going. He got lost, and soon began to feel the nip and seep of the cold.
The snow took him up to the knees, spilling into his boots while washing the patina of dry mud from the leather. His breath left his body in heavy clouds and drifted off; seeing it, he felt that it was something else leaving him, some vital essence escaping from his body with every exhalation. He looked for familiar trees, but they all wore luscious new robes of frozen white, each the same and each with their backs turned to him.
Logan thought of the kitchen range and the smell of singeing wool when he would stand by it for too long, just come in from a cold, wet day in the forest; the gentle scolding of his mother, who would tell him he’d burn his backside if he stood there any longer. The thought dwindled, getting lower until it was just a faint orange glow, receding in the dark. The woods creaked, the air felt brittle as glass. The glow dipped lower, the cold slid down deeper, until even the memory of warmth left him.
It was then that she appeared, veiled in her same sheet, which time had eaten into a brutish, haphazard lace. Beaded here and there were pearls of ice. Through the holes in the cotton, Logan saw lips the colour of a crushed winter berry, hair and eyes black like the sodden bark of trees. She came forward, each slow step cracking the crystal-thin shell of ice that glazed the snowfall. She lifted her shroud, soaked and heavy, and draped it over the young man, folding him into her. Logan felt the orange glow rekindle in the depths of him in answer to the closeness of the woman. Her skin was clean and white, with an almost pink blush in places, as though she had scrubbed herself with snow; her hair glistened, perhaps from handfuls of powdery ice combed through its locks. The snow-woman’s breath moistened his cheek, like the exhalation of damp earth overturned with a spade.
Then they were on the ground, cocooned. The snow-woman’s dark, wet hair brushed Logan’s face and neck when she opened his jacket, sending a bead of water tickling over his collarbone. She frowned and pursed her sticky red mouth as she fumbled at the waistband of his trousers; he turned his head to the side to keep from having to see the swelling of his embarrassment. She put a hand on the side of his head to steady herself, pushing his face through the snow and down to the ground. He closed his eyes, but could smell the decay of mulch under the ice, thawed by the warmth of their bodies.
Afterwards, Logan ran, the buckle of his belt still clinking loosely, and quickly found the path home. It seemed strange that he could have lost it in the first place. He wondered if he could tell the guys at school. You don't know her, he could say. She doesn’t live around here.
He didn't say anything, and won’t. By the time he reached home, she had already become unreal to him, like she did before. He dreams of her, though, and always will: she crouches in the forest, hugging herself beneath her sheet; spring comes and her belly swells like a peach, with a hard little stone at the centre, waiting to be dug out.
Artwork by Rebecca Brown.
©' The Treacle Well 2013