The Kingdom of Winter by Dana Sonnenschein

Father Winter leans against herds of woolly mammoths, their undersong trembling in his bones, his chill pushing them closer together.  He wrestles polar bears.  He charges wolves, snorting as they snarl, before he moves on, hurrying the reindeer in among snow-laden spruce and fir—where his daughter whispers White, white, to hare, ermine, arctic fox.  She brushes her hands along the reindeer’s ruffs and beneath the chins of the brown bears; she holds geese to her breast and stretches out her hands to stroke frost-white every wing and tail she can reach.

*

When the first thin ice chimes on the lake, you know Father Winter is coming.  Rising from the Arctic Ocean, rime splashing from shaggy, rolling shoulders.  Lord of the Cold.  Some see a mammoth, some, a man crowned with tusks.  He who rules continents and floes, glaciers above and permafrost below.  Even when the tundra flowers and reindeer and musk oxen browse on scarlet and ochre.  Every winter, he walks the north.  The ground freezes beneath his feet, and rivers congeal between their banks.  His daughter whirls across the land, caught in the wind’s embrace.  A snow maiden who warms the lost, as their hearts slow and their fingers lock, at last, on what they cannot hold.  The arctic wolves cavort when the first flakes fall, lick her hand, and curl into nests of snow.  She lays her hands on the shivering pup, slashed by a reindeer’s hoof, and then moves toward the shaggy horse, pawing weakly at the snow, digging for grass and roots.  Hunger no more, she whispers.  Sleep where winter lasts always, where wild horses lie down with wolves and none have fear. 

When the Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena break up in spring, she slips away, and Father Winter wades into the nearest river, follows it back to where the islands of ice never melt.  Every year, the thunder of his steps, the crashing ice. 

*

But the kingdom is melting, here three feet down, there mile-deep.  Cellar walls drip, roads flood, fields turn to bogs and lakes.  Along the rivers, cliffs collapse and ivory scavengers collect tusks from rotting hulks.  In Nalimsk, the sacred poles for tying horses tilt and cannot be righted.  In Yakutsk, buildings sink and crumple.  When Father Winter comes, he cradles a spindly, blackened foal and weeps.  Four hundred and fifty miles north of the city, where loggers clear-cut the taiga, the snow maiden spreads her eiderdown, warming the ground until it caves, opening what the Yakuts call a door to the underworld.  When she trails away, ancient trees see the sun again, and her frostbitten wolves bare their teeth and snarl.

Dana Sonnenschein is a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her publications include Corvus, No Angels but These, Natural Forms, and Bear Country.  Recent work has appeared in *Into the Void*,  *The Matador Review*, *The Prachya Review*,  and Terrain’s *Dear America* anthology.