The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

The Bind

I looked down at my lap. I was wearing a white dress with a red sash. But for whom or for what? I looked up. “What?”
“Now she’s willing to talk!” Mother scooched forward, triumphant. Her beehive skewed toward her forehead. “Are you hungry?”
“I am not.”
Mother’s bosom heaved in a furious rhythm. Her navy-blue bodice flared up to her chin. She was like an ocean with a face.
“She must be hungry,” she said to Sister.
The room was dimly lit by sconces, the icy flickers of very white candles.
I closed my eyes and opened them.
“She isn’t hungry,” Sister said.
Sister was fifteen, which made her three years older than me. Her waist was so narrow, it vanished into her gown like the stem of a flower. She liked to twirl and leap, wield her mirror as she practiced changing the emotions that played on her face.
“You must be hungry,” Mother gestured to the table. The fruit glistened and appeared warm.
I thought about the rolls Sister and I used to wrap in loud white paper and bind in red twine. How Mother set these loaves into Sister’s basket and mine, then opened the back door onto a howling backdrop.
Once, Sister and I cut a potato sack to make clothes for our dolls. We fashioned a dress and a bonnet for one, pants and a jacket for the other. From the cotton balls Mother used to put her face on, we designed for the first doll a muff to warm her hands and a mustache for the second. When Mother found them, adorned in their cotton and burlap, she slapped us senseless.
“She isn’t hungry.” Sister’s gown made a crunching sound as she leaned forward. Like the tulle that carried that cupcake of organza was woven with metal.
I studied Sister in wonderment. Then the room coughed fabric. I saw reams of charmeuse, furls of lace, and tried to cover my face —
I could not cover my face. This was on account of the rope fastening my wrists to my chair. How long had I been tied here?
“Clarissa?”
Who is Clarissa? My wrists burned as I wriggled them against the rope. “Untie me.”
“Gobbledygook,” said Mother.
I regarded Sister’s shoe, which protruded the hem of her gown. “Let me see your foot.”
“No.”
“Show me.”
As Sister tucked it under the hem, winced, then let it hang out from the fabric, my attention wavered between her face and her foot. There was the gold toe of her shoe, crusted in sequins, but beyond that, such smallness.
“What’s happened?” I demanded, dizzy. Sister’s foot was the size of a kiwi. Then something occurred in the space between my heart and my throat. Once, Mother threw Sister’s ballet slippers into the flames. To this day, I could smell the pink burn of the silk in the fireplace.
Mother and sister stared at me strangely. Then, there was that heaviness again. The feeling of stepping out of water, having been swimming and buoyant for hours — I couldn’t breathe.
The scissors dazzled the gloom as Mother stood.
Once upon a time, Mother folded herself into another person, cinching the excess and rounding off the corners. I never understood how she laced herself up without the help of a second set of hands — how did Mother tuck herself into the panels of bone and fabric alone, day after day?
“You’re getting smaller, Clarissa,” Mother said approvingly. “You’ll like it better this way. Won’t she, Elizabeth?”
Sister made a motion with her head. “It takes time,” she studied her shoes. “But for me, it wasn’t the same.”
And then I understood. I understood as I imagined Sister’s toes gnarled into thimbles. I understood as I pictured her golden child’s boot bearing inside it the smallness Mother wished for us.
“The recovery was different, is what she’s trying to say.” Mother walked towards me.

I knew I had not acted as Mother expected. That I had refused her attempts to girdle my waist into that system of strings. But that Sister — what had become of her?
Sister had been the one to pass me the rolls when Mother marched us and our baskets into the woods. The one to rip the fruits and vegetables out of Mother’s garden and arrange them on her head like a tiara. I had become used to the sounds of her in the bathroom, stabbing her finger down her throat after dinner.
When I was able to stand, the ropes cut from the chair, the room tilted into focus. I was aware of the food and the candles. The moon of Sister’s face, the smallness of her waist and her feet — now she could no longer spin and leap with those shriveled feet.
I imagined her mirror floating in front of my face, until I realized there was her hand, holding it up for me to see. There was a party dress and there was a girl inside it. Between that girl and the dress was the corset that made that girl fit.
As Mother descended on me, I was conscious long enough to see that she was the one to tighten the strings, but that Sister was the one to hold me in place. I already knew how it felt not to breathe.

Suitable Prey

After her flight is delayed, then cancelled due to inclement weather, Jane orders a vodka martini, extra dirty, then uses it to wash the pill down when the bartender isn’t looking.
Technically, the pills weren’t prescribed for her; they were prescribed for Rolly. But Jane had been the one to ferry her brother to and from the orthopedic surgeon. The one to sit his procedure out in the waiting room, flipping through outdated issues of Women’s Health and People.
Now the bartender wants to know if Jane wants another. Another? He drinks openly as he mixes the next round.
Last summer, they rode their bikes to the lobster shack, to the ocean. On the beach, Rolly used a wine opener to crack open their dinner. More than dipping the first bite into the butter, Jane enjoyed watching him mine the last bits of fluffy meat out with his fingers. The tang of sweet brine as he fed her.
Rolly swore off taking medication after the procedure. After the procedure, his mouth still puffed with cotton, he said, No thank you, no nothing. Something to do with the attainment of insight through enduring the pain.
Here you are. The bartender swaps a fresh glass out for the empty. Let me guess: weather’s got you stranded.
Jane nods slowly. The bartender has a mushroom-colored bowl-cut, wooden gauges. The look of a person with a noun for a name.
Any idea how long you’ll be stuck here?
Jane runs her tongue along her teeth. Tells the bartender something that could be interpreted as suggestive but will more likely reveal that her own emptiness is all she has to give or to gain.
Suitable prey, Rolly had said of the crab whose belly they watched two seagulls tear into with their long, hooked beaks.
When Jane’s husband and their two children returned from the camping trip too early, out of her marital bed went Rolly. Even now, months after, sometimes Jane swears she can still feel her brother beside her. That she can taste him in the Grey Goose of her silver martini and in the refrigerated air of the airport. In that fat white pill she took into the stone of her body.
You okay?
Jane looks into her glass; she looks up at the bartender. She arranges her mouth into a no-nothing smile and lies.

THEODORA ZIOLKOWSKI is the author of the novella On the Rocks, winner of a 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award, and Mother Tongues. Her writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Glimmer Train, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Short Fiction (England). She teaches creative writing as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

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