Peter and the Inevitable Thaw

My boots left a trail of grey slush on the welcome mat. The bell above the door announced our arrival with a cheerful, inappropriate little jingle. Behind me, I dragged Mr. Flake, his bottom scraping unevenly against the floorboards. He was already beginning to glisten.

The bell was a liar. It rang with a tinny brightness that suggested welcome, that suggested everything was fine. Nothing was fine. My boots, heavy with city slush, squeaked on the tile just inside the door of The Cafe on Portage. The sound was like a small animal dying. I felt the drag behind me change in texture as Mr. Flake’s base caught on the bristly welcome mat. A soft, scraping sound. The sound of erosion.

“Just a moment, Peter,” Cathy said from behind the counter. She didn’t look up. Her hands were busy with the chrome monster that hissed and screamed all day. The air was wet and hot. It felt like breathing soup. I hated it. Mr. Flake hated it more.

I tugged him past the first empty table and chose one by the window. It was the coldest spot in the room, but cold is a relative term. For Mr. Flake, it was a furnace. I propped him carefully in the chair opposite me. He listed slightly to the left. One of his twig arms, the one that was supposed to be waving, drooped. He was already developing a sheen, a subtle, greasy glisten under the yellow lights. He was dying. Again.

Cathy finally turned around, a dishrag in her hand. She wiped a clean spot on the counter that was already clean. Her eyes landed on Mr. Flake. They didn’t widen. They just… registered. This was our third visit. The novelty had worn off, replaced by a kind of weary acceptance.

“The usual?” she asked. Her voice was flat. It was a voice that had accepted the fundamental absurdity of a small boy dragging a three-foot snowman into a heated establishment for a cup of hot chocolate he would never drink.

“He’s not feeling himself today, Cathy,” I said, my voice low and serious. I straightened Mr. Flake’s scarf, a threadbare strip of red wool my mother had discarded. It was getting damp. “The warmth. He says it’s a vulgar expression of molecular agitation. A brutish, chaotic dance toward dissolution.”

Cathy paused her wiping. “The snowman said that.”

“He expresses himself through a series of profound, internal vibrations,” I explained, adjusting a piece of charcoal that served as his left eye. It was starting to sink into his face. “I am merely his interpreter.”

She nodded slowly. A puddle was beginning to form around the base of Mr. Flake’s chair. It was small now, but it was aggressive. A confident puddle. “One hot chocolate. And a floor sign.”

She disappeared into the back and returned with a plastic yellow A-frame that said CAUTION: WET FLOOR. She placed it next to our table with a decisive clack. It was a monument to our tragedy.

The hot chocolate arrived moments later. The mug was warm against my cold hands. The steam rose and mingled with the general humidity of the room. It felt like adding a single drop of water to the ocean. I pushed the mug to Mr. Flake’s side of the table. A symbolic gesture. He did not, of course, have a mouth in the traditional sense, just a grim, downward-curving line of pebbles.

“He finds the concept of consumption to be the ultimate vanity,” I informed Cathy, who was now pretending to be busy at the cash register. “To take something into oneself, to break it down and absorb it, only to perpetuate a state of being that is itself temporary. It’s a fool’s errand.”

“Right,” Cathy said, not looking at me. She tapped a few buttons. The register beeped.

I watched a single drop of water detach from Mr. Flake’s carrot nose and fall with a soft pat onto the tabletop. It was a perfect, clear sphere of him. His essence. It rolled for a second before flattening into a meaningless wet spot. I felt a tightness in my own chest. A familiar ache. The price of eggs was up again, my mother had said this morning. My phone was at twelve percent. None of it mattered. Only the drip. Drip. Drip. Another piece of him gone.

“He told me this morning,” I continued, my voice barely a whisper, “that form is a prison. He longs for the sublime anonymity of water. To be a puddle, a vapor, a part of a cloud. He says being a snowman is a cosmic joke. A fleeting, ridiculous shape given to something that is meant to be shapeless.”

The puddle on the floor had connected with the leg of the table. It was expanding its territory. My sock felt damp. The heat from the vent near the wall clicked on, a rush of dry, suffocating air. Mr. Flake seemed to shrink before my very eyes.

“Is it better to have existed for a short, beautiful time in a state of defined selfhood, only to dissolve into nothingness?” I asked the room, though I was looking at Cathy. “Or is it better never to have been formed at all? To remain a part of the undifferentiated whole?”

Cathy walked over with a mop. She didn’t say anything. She just started swabbing the floor around Mr. Flake’s chair. The mop head was a dirty grey. She pushed the water into a little pile, then pressed the mop down, and the water vanished into the grimy strings. She was erasing him. Unmaking him. I felt sick.

“He finds your pragmatism… distressing,” I said. The words felt heavy and useless in my mouth.

“Peter,” she said, leaning on the mop handle. The wood was dark and worn. Her knuckles were red. “It’s a health code violation.”

The bell on the door jingled. A woman in a large parka came in, stomping snow from her boots. The blast of cold air was a momentary reprieve. Mr. Flake seemed to stand a little taller. Then the door closed, and the oppressive warmth settled back in. The woman ordered a latte. The espresso machine screamed. The world kept moving, indifferent to the quiet, dignified dissolution happening at my table.

I stayed for another twenty minutes. By the time we left, Mr. Flake had developed a noticeable slump. His pebble smile was crooked, as if he’d had a stroke. The puddle was now a lake. I paid Cathy the four dollars for the untouched hot chocolate. As I dragged Mr. Flake toward the exit, his base left a long, wet smear across the floor she had just mopped. I didn’t look back. It felt like a final act of defiance.

A week later, we returned. It had been a hard week. A brief warm spell had taken its toll. Mr. Flake was noticeably shorter, more compact. His carrot nose, once jaunty, now drooped with a kind of profound sadness. I’d had to repack his middle section twice, scooping up slush from the yard that didn’t have too much grass in it. He was less pure now. Contaminated.

“He’s been contemplating the nature of memory,” I announced as we took our usual table. Cathy was already approaching with the yellow sign.

“Let me guess,” she said, setting it down. “It’s a cruel fiction we construct to give a false sense of continuity to a series of meaningless, disconnected moments.”

I stared at her. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” she said. “Hot chocolate?”

I nodded mutely. She had trivialized his insight. She had turned his torment into a bit. A routine. The indignity was almost too much to bear. Mr. Flake’s left twig arm fell off and clattered onto the floor. I bent to retrieve it, but there was no purchase in his soft, yielding torso. I laid the twig on the table like a fallen sword.

“He says our physical form is just a vessel for the decay of our ideals,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. I could feel the cold dampness seeping through my jeans from the chair. Mr. Flake was melting faster today. The air felt thicker. More hostile.

I watched the other patrons. A man in a suit typed furiously on a laptop, his face illuminated by the blue light. Two women were laughing, their heads thrown back. They didn’t see. They didn’t understand the slow-motion horror unfolding by the window. To them, he was a charming seasonal eccentricity. A curiosity. They didn’t see his existential plight.

The hot chocolate arrived. I stared into its dark, glossy surface. A distorted reflection of my own pale face looked back. A drip from Mr. Flake’s underside hit the saucer with a soft *plink*. The sound was deafening.

“This can’t go on,” I said, looking at Cathy. She was wiping down the milk steamer, her back to me. “Every day, he comes here to be with me. And every day, this place—this terrible, warm place—unmakes him. It’s a paradox. The cost of our friendship is his very existence.”

Cathy turned around, the rag in her hand. She looked at me. Then she looked at the sad, slumped shape in the chair. She looked at the expanding puddle. She looked at the fallen twig on the table. She sighed. It was a long, deep sigh, the kind of sigh that carries the weight of a thousand melted snowmen.

“You know,” she said, walking slowly toward our table. “I have an idea.”

My heart, or whatever the lump of dread in my chest was, clenched. Ideas were dangerous. Ideas were what got us into this mess in the first place. The idea of friendship. The idea of bringing a being of pure cold into a temple of artificial heat.

“What is it?” I asked, suspicious.

“In the back,” she said, pointing with her thumb toward the kitchen door. “We have a small freezer. For the ice cream bars in the summer. We’re not using it now.”

I stared at her. A freezer. A small, white box of preserved cold. My mind couldn’t process it.

“He could sit in it,” she continued, a note of triumph in her voice. She thought she had solved it. She thought this was a solution. “We’ll keep the door open, of course. He can sit in the freezer while you’re here, and he won’t melt. No more puddles. No more… dissolution.”

The word, his word, sounded grotesque coming from her mouth. She offered it up as a gift. A fix. A mundane, practical, horrifying fix to my beautiful, profound tragedy.

A freezer.

He wouldn’t melt. We could sit here for hours. Days. Weeks. His form would be preserved. His shape would be static. He would be safe. He would be… a thing in a box. The sublime journey of his return to the elements, the poetic arc of his thaw, the very thing that gave our time together its desperate, fleeting meaning—all of it, arrested. Halted. For convenience. To prevent a wet floor.

I looked at Mr. Flake. His single remaining twig arm seemed to gesture toward the door. His charcoal eyes, sunk deep into his slushy head, stared out at the grey, cold, honest world outside. He was speaking to me. His internal vibrations were a roar.

“He says no,” I whispered. The words tasted like ash.

Cathy’s face fell. “No? But… it would solve everything.”

“It would solve nothing,” I said, standing up. My chair scraped against the wet floor. “You don’t understand. The thaw is the point.”

I looked at her, this woman with her mops and her freezers and her simple, terrible answers. She saw a problem of logistics. I saw the meaning of life and death playing out in a puddle of lukewarm water on her linoleum floor. We were speaking different languages.

Without another word, I began to drag Mr. Flake toward the door. He was heavy now, water-logged and defeated. He left a thick, slurry trail behind us, a final, messy testament to his being. I didn’t bother with his fallen arm. It belonged to the cafe now.

I pushed the door open. The freezing air hit my face. It was clean and sharp and real. Mr. Flake seemed to sigh in relief, a tiny shiver running through his dense, wet body. The bell jingled its cheerful, stupid lie as we left.

The door clicked shut behind us, leaving Cathy and her freezer and her perfectly mopped floor in the warm, suffocating silence.