The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

ICE CREAM AND TOMBSTONES by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1955, Nina Kiriki Hoffman grew up in Southern California, fled to Idaho, and now resides in Eugene, Oregon. I bet she has cats. Hoffman has burst rather suddenly onto the horror scene, rapidly earning acclaim for her thoughtful and unpredictable manner of messing with your brain.

Hoffman says: “My first novel, The Thread That Binds the Bones, came out from Avon last year. Am working on another for them, and looks like I sold a fantasy young adult book, too. Been selling lots of stories to anthologies.”

I’ll be watching.

She was sitting on my mother’s tombstone, eating an ice cream cone. I wanted to kill her.

“Hi, kid,” she said. “Nice day, huh?” She licked the strawberry scoop, between the chocolate scoop and one that looked like coffee, but might be maple or butter rum or something like that. Then she leaned back, eyes closed, and let the sun shine on her face.

For the middle of winter, it was a pretty nice day. Sun in an ice-blue sky shone bright enough so that bare trees looked brown instead of black and skeletal. I wanted to kill this woman, but I couldn’t help wondering how she could eat ice cream on a morning when there was still ice across all the puddles, and piled slush along the streets. I had stepped in a puddle on my way here with the flowers, broke through the ice (it was half an inch thick), and splashed water on my sneakers and socks. My feet were freezing. It was my twelfth birthday, and nobody had given me a card or a present at breakfast—maybe they forgot. I felt grumpy.

“Get off there!” I yelled.

She crossed her legs so she looked like some kind of leprechaun or something perching on the stone. She wore pink satin slippers, black-and-white striped socks that went up above her knees, and what looked like three coats on top of each other. Some sort of dark wool skirt stuck out from under them a little. She also had a green muffler around her neck and she wore tan knitted gloves with holes in most of the fingers. She looked familiar, and I didn’t know why.

“Oh, now,” she said, “now.”

“Go on!” I yelled. I ran at her, wanting to push her right off so she’d break a leg or her head or something vital.

“Lexi,” she said.

I stopped. She said my name as if it belonged in her mouth. It gave me pause. Most everybody called me Alexandra, except Daddy. He called me Lexi. He said it was what my mother had planned to call me before I was born. When my stepmother, Candace, called me Lexi, I yelled at her to stop it.

“Lexi,” said this woman, sitting up straight and opening her eyes so she could stare at me. Her eyes were brown, like mine. She licked the chocolate scoop on her ice cream cone. “Want a bite?”

I felt so cold inside I couldn’t even speak. I shook my head.

Her hair was brown like mine, too, and she had those cheekbones and that chin, what Daddy called a valentine face, pointed at the bottom, broad in the middle, with at widow’s peak at the top—a face like mine.

“I wanted to talk to you about the flowers,” she said. She held out the ice cream cone to me. “Sure you don’t want some?”

I looked at my mother’s gray granite tombstone. MOIRA ALONZO it said, BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. The day she was born and the day she died. She had died the day I was born.

“I don’t want any ice cream,” I said.

“Yes you do. Everything you do says so. Lexi, I’ve been dead for twelve years now, and you only started bringing me flowers six months ago.” We both looked down at the frozen roses from yesterday, and the dozen pink and white carnations I was carrying today. I was babysitting for everybody on our block, and spending all the money on flowers.

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring them before,” I said.

“I don’t want them now, honey,” she said. “They aren’t really mine. They smell funny. They smell like you’re thinking about somebody else when you’re buying them and bringing them here.”

I looked at the carnations in their waxed paper. I sniffed them. They smelled like carnations always smell, spicy and fragrant.

“By the time they get here, the flowers have turned to knives,” she said. “I would rather not have my grave covered with weapons.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Lexi,” she said, her voice soft. “Every evening you buy a bouquet and put it in the refrigerator where everyone in the house will see it. You’re spending all your energy trying to hurt someone, and that’s like eating ice cream in the snow.”

I thought about Candace, who wanted me to call her Mom. She was always trying to touch me. She wanted to hug me every time I came home. It was enough to make me want to leave home forever.

“What you do is up to you, of course,” she said. “Happy birthday, honey.” She offered me the ice cream cone one more time, and this time I took it from her. She smiled and disappeared.

I laid the carnations on the grave. Leaning against the tombstone, I took my first lick of the ice cream, from the bottom scoop. Definitely coffee, my favorite flavor. It tasted good, but now my tongue was freezing, along with the rest of me. I tasted the other two flavors anyway. It was the best ice cream I’d ever had.

Still holding the cone, I knelt and picked up the frozen roses. They wore clear sheaths of ice. Then I looked at the carnations.

School would start in a half an hour and I had to go home and collect my lunch and change my shoes and socks. I hesitated a long time, staring at the pale flowers against the dark earth and grass of the winter grave. The ice cream cone didn’t even pretend to melt. At last I collected the carnations too. I left the ice cream sitting upright in the little vase place on the grave.

I put the roses in the trash by the cemetery gate.

I took the carnations home and put them in a glass, then placed them on the desk in my bedroom. Maybe everybody else forgot it was my birthday. My mother and I knew it. I sat on my bed and changed my shoes and socks. When I looked up at the flowers, they were blurry. My face felt hot. I thought it was as good a place as any to start warming up.