Time & Sound by Mary Thorson

My daughter steps on the ice in my dad’s driveway and it cracks. She sounds like my oma when she says oh, stretched out and blue wide-eyes. 

“Mama, watch,” she says. 

I tell her to hurry because it’s so cold. Don’t you want to get your sister, I say, knowing she is not listening. 

There is a story I know about cracking ice. My oma told me, or she told my father, her son, and then he told me. I guess, in the telling of it, some things could have been lost, but the thing that remains is the sound the ice made when it cracked. My oma, a teenager, something I could never imagine, even with pictures, even with stories, crossed a lake or a river or a straight or a sound, fleeing the Russians as the Germans lost the war. A plane flew over them and shot. They must have looked so small from the air, the Treu family, which means true. The bullets missed their bodies but cracked the ice and the mother told them all to run. 

In my memory of this story, they dropped things as the holes in the ice appeared around their feet. They dropped bulging leather suitcases and rolled up blankets and stuffed animals–the last thing is what tells me I created this detail because they’re dropping my stuffed animals. It’s my white polar bear with the green cardigan my oma crocheted me that fell from her younger brother’s hand. See? The time is wrong. 

There is another story, and I’ve connected this story to that story but I’m not sure these happened together–that it was the same body of water; the river, the lake, the straight, the sound. A train had fallen through the ice–or carriages more likely because Germans built efficiently and they would not have built train tracks on ice. My oma helped move frozen bodies from the water. Children who were all blue pale. It doesn’t make sense, because how could she have gotten so close without falling in herself, but it’s this image that makes me say, “Lucy.” It comes out too panicked, and my daughter gasps like she has done something truly wrong, but I can’t help it. “Get off the ice, let’s go,” I say. “Run.”

Mary Thorson is from Milwaukee, WI. She received her undergraduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her MFA at Pacific University’s low-residency program in Oregon. She has been previously published in various literary anthologies including Worcester Review, Milwaukee Noir, Rock & a Hard Place, and Tough, among others.

23 June 2023