The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

was starting to think the Naked Man had a secret life, one Marie knew nothing about. “I don’t think you’re going to look much better than this,” Marie told me as she considered my image in the mirror.
    I figured she was right. I bought the dress, along with a pair of sandals, and wore them out of the store. I tore off the tags in the car and then I sat there recuperating from my efforts, air-conditioning turned on full blast. I had that tingling feeling in my fingers that the neurologists said was perfectly normal, given that I’d been hit by so much voltage.
    I pulled myself together and got back on the Interstate. The only thing I knew for certain was that my tires were safe. Even if my brother seemed to be avoiding me lately, at least he’d spent a great deal of time looking through a consumer’s handbook before buying my new tires in New Jersey. I wasn’t about to skid, so I drove fast.
    Everything looked the same on the road. There were white egrets picking at trash. The grass had turned brown in the heat. We were moving into summer, the season people in Orlon referred to as hell on earth. They laughed about it, though, and none of them seemed intent on moving anyplace cooler. I kept the air-conditioning on in the car, but I opened all the windows. Fresh air in these parts was like a blast from a furnace. My dress blew up and I couldn’t hear the clicking in my head so badly with all that wind.
    One of my “effects” was that I had to pee all the time. Again, perfectly normal, I was assured. I stopped at a gas station where there were a couple of guys hanging out, drinking sodas, passing the time. They whistled at me. They did, and I really had to laugh. I waved at them. I figured I must have entered the land where there were no women if a pathetic specimen like me drew whistles. I didn’t look at myself in the restroom mirror. I just peed and got out of there.
    I had looked up Seth Jones’s address in the phone book, then gotten myself a local map of Orlon County. All the same, my destination was farther out in the country than I’d thought. Florida was bigger than New Jersey, and people drove more. It didn’t seem to bother them one bit, just like the heat, like lightning, like the anole lizards you’d find skittering around your trash cans. When people told you a place was close by, it could be a hundred miles away. I just made up my mind to forget about the time. What had time ever done for me? When I finally got off the Interstate there were groves of fruit trees on either side of the road. The road got smaller, the groves got bigger. Lemons, oranges, and then the signpost for Jones’s property. This was where it had happened. In a few days it would be the one-year anniversary of his strike. I had found the article in an old issue of the Orlon Journal stacked down in the basement of the library, just a brief report in the Metro section. Several people on the Interstate who saw the flash said it appeared to be going straight, east to west, as though a rocket had been fired. A huge rainstorm followed, leaving an inch of rain in less than an hour. Someone driving past the Jones property saw a deep hole in the ground and steaming black smoke rising.
    An ambulance was dispatched and the EMTs who first arrived declared the victim dead at 4:16 p.m. There was no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. They tried to get his heart started, but no luck. The dead man was delivered to the morgue in the basement, and forty minutes after the lightning struck, the technician on duty turned to see the victim’s chest rise and fall beneath the plastic sheet. He was rushed to intensive care. His fingers and toes were black with soot and he was sizzling, hot to the touch. His heartbeat was still sluggish, so they put him in a tub of ice, hoping to shock his system into starting up. It worked. The victim groaned, shivered, and lifted himself out of the tub, demanding his clothes and his boots. Mr. Jones left the hospital an