The Empire of Ice Cream Read Online Free PDF Page A

I held back my tears not to ruin the reunion with the boy. “She stole it from one of the humans aboard ship and saved it for you.” Here he produced a little square of paper that he began to unfold. When it was completely undone and spread across the table, he smoothed it with his hands. “A picture of the Day,” he said. There it was, the sun, bright yellow, the sky blue, a beach of pure white sand lapped by a crystal-clear turquoise ocean. When it came time for Magtel to leave, he told me he still had his axe and it had come in handy many times. He told me that there were many other Willnits aboard the big ship and it was a good community. We did not say goodbye. He patted Phargo on the head and got upon the back of the large white bird. “Thank you, Eelin-Ok,” he said, and then was gone. If it wasn’t for the picture of Day, I’d have thought it all a dream.
    T HE T IDE C OMES I N
    The waves have breached the outer wall and the sea floods in around the base of the castle. I have folded up the picture of Day and have it now in a pouch on a string around my neck. Phargo waits for me on the turret, from where we will watch the last seconds of While Away. Just a few more thoughts, though, before I go to join him. When first I stepped into myself as Eelin-Ok, I worried if I had chosen well my home, but I don’t think there can be any question that While Away was everything I could have asked for. So too, many times I questioned my life, but now, in this final moment, memories of Phargo’s whisper-bark, the thrill of battle against the rats, fishing on the lake, the face of the moon, the taste of blackberries, the wind, Greenly’s earnest nature, the boy holding my hand, flying on the night bird, lying with Meiwa in the mussel-shell bed come flooding in like the rising tide. “What does it all mean?” I have always asked. “It means you’ve lived a life, Eelin-Ok.” I hear now the walls begin to give way. I have to hurry. I don’t want to miss this.

The Annals of Eelin-Ok
    Story Notes
    When I was a kid, the New York Daily News ran a comic in its Sunday color funny pages called “The Teenie Weenies.” This was a full or sometimes half-page comic of only one large panel. It was about a tiny race of people who lived under a rosebush. They rode on the backs of dragonflies, made feasts of acorns, battled mice, and generally lived the good, small life. I was enchanted by them, as I think most kids are by diminutive representations of things. Remembering this comic and the wonder it wrought in me was the impetus for “Eelin-Ok.” As I’ve gotten older, I rarely feel that same enchantment, although there are other experiences equally as powerful. One place I still can sense it is at the beach where my wife and I and our two sons have been going every summer since our family started. So it was that my small hero wound up living in a sand castle at the edge of the shore .
    I dedicate this story to one cool kid, Chieko Quigley, ice skating aficionado. “Eelin-Ok” was published by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow in the second volume of their young adult series for Viking , The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm. The story won the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, an annual juried award given to a speculative short story of “exceptional literary quality.”

Jupiter’s Skull
    Mrs. Strellop had a little shop called Thanatos in the Bolukuchet district at the south end of a cobbled street facing the canal. On evenings in late summer, for those few breezy weeks preceding the monsoons, she would fix her door ajar with a large, dismorphic skull and sit by the entrance, inviting in passersby for a cup of foxglove tea.
    She was a handsome woman of advanced years with a long braid the color of iron that she wound around her neck twice and tucked into the front of her loose blouse between her breasts. Her