Sorbet Rink

“Like the Mario Kart course”

The idea for this story was partially inspired by the freaky snowmen from a Mario Kart battle arena, but the music I always had in mind for it comes from a different Mario Kart course with a very similar name. It’s odd how much I’ve been inspired by Mario, since this isn’t even the only story I’ve written based off of the red plumber. I don’t know what that means about my writing, but it is what it is.

Also I may have deleted the edited version of this story by accident and only kept my first draft, but I also don’t know for sure that I ever had an edited copy. This is all I can find, so here it is. If I ever publish this for real, it’ll have several changes made.

“Sorbet Rink,” by Andy Sima (2016)

            “In my experiences, I have always found that the greatest season is, undoubtedly, winter.”

            And that’s how my essay began.  Kind of cheesy, isn’t it?  It sounds exactly like every essay ever written to answer that classic question, “What is your favorite season?”  I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher who hasn’t asked me that, either before or after a break.  Luckily for me, this time I was asked just before a break, and I was anxious to finish the essay and get out of there.

            Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t lie to get out of there faster, but I wasn’t about to spend more time than I had to thinking about the essay.  I had places to be, snowmen to build, hills to sled, ice to lick, snowball to throw, lakes to skate, trees to shake, trails to romp, and hot chocolate to drink.  It was the last day of school before winter break.  Why would I want to spend my time on an essay?

            Well, once the bell finally rang and the teacher bid us “Happy Holidays,” I was out of there like a comically oversized snowball down a hill.  I grabbed my backpack, grabbed my coat, grabbed my shoes, and grabbed my little brother, and we hit the bus as quickly as we could.  My first half of eighth grade was finally over, and I was about ready to burst with frozen enthusiasm.  My brother, I could tell, felt similarly.

            We rushed home and dumped our school stuff willy-nilly about our humble abode, and almost as quickly as we arrived, we were gone again.  Our red-faced, red-haired mother was caught in a frenzy of motion as we rushed to get to the greatest winter hangout of all; Sorbet Rink.

            “Sam!  Peter!  Remember to be back by dinner!” My mother called after my brother Peter and me.

            “Sure think, mom!” I yelled back, hastily pulling my hat down over my frigid ears.  Peter waved to our mother, and we tromped our way through the snow, down the hill, over the bridge, and to the frozen lake were all the kids gathered for winter festivities and games.

            The dull brown sign labelling the lake as “Sorbet Lake” couldn’t begin to capture the emotion we all felt at that magic place.  The entire neighborhood, boy and girl, rich and poor, old and young, gathered here for what felt like the entirety of winter break, and Sorbet Rink, Sorbet Lake in its frozen form, became our great equalizer.  There were no cliques here, no classism or racism or sexism.  For a few hours every day, for a few weeks at a time, we were free from the constraints of school and society.  There were no bullies in Sorbet Rink.  There were only kids.

            I met up with my fellow released convicts at the dock on the lake, where we always met every year.  Peter split from me to meet up with his friends and do whatever it was they did.  By the time I got to the dock, my ‘squad,’ might it be called, had already assembled in its almost entirety.  Much like a Spielberg movie from the 80’s or a feel-good teen drama, we acted much like an archetypal group of young friends.

            There was John, the ‘cool’ guy, there was Pudge, the ‘fat’ kid, there was Alfonso, the ‘whiz’ kid, there was Rose, the ‘hot’ girl, there was Karla, the ‘bookish’ girl, and then there was me, the ‘narrator.’  Obviously we weren’t just 2D projections of one characteristic, but every once in a while it was fun to pretend we were part of a cheesy kids movie.  It gave us something absurd to strive for.

            “Hey, Sam, how you been, man?” John said, passing me a fistbump.  We all passed it around similarly, and greeted each other in our customary way.  We smiled widely at each other and needed no further introduction.

            “Whatta wanna do now?” Pudge said.

            “I’m up for whatever,” John said.

            “You guys want to sled?” Alfonso asked.

            “Nah, the hill’s too crowded right now,” Rose responded.

            “We could go skating,” Karla suggested.

            “I don’t have my skates,” I chimed in.

            The conversation continued similarly for an indeterminate length of time, but we didn’t care, as long as we were together.  Our breath frozen and fogged in front of our faces, and our cheeks got red and icy.  Our eyes sparkled in the overcast winter light, and the snow reflected the glimmer of our happiness back at us.  Boy, I was sure happy to finally be back out here again.  That is, until our bliss was broken by the terrified shriek of a child.

            The forested lake valley immediately became silent, save for the blubbering of one unfortunate youngster.  We glanced at each other and silently moved towards the sound of the yammering at breakneck speed.  Once we got there, we found a kid of about fifth grade on the ground with a black eye and a telltale ring of ice about his face.  He’d been hit smack in the head with a snowball, and a hard one, too.  Around him stood a bunch of open-mouthed twerps, hands empty of ice or snow.  They looked around at each other, shocked.  None of them said a word, short of the poor kid with the swollen sight-hole.

            “Alright, buddy,” I said, kneeling down next to him.  “You need someone to walk you home?”

            The kid couldn’t get a word out, but instead kept crying.  I glanced menacingly at his friends.

            “One of you want to fess up?” I said.  They shook their heads and all turned to look at the trees off behind us.  I couldn’t see what they were looking at.

            “Any of you bozos want to explain what you’re looking at?” John said, ice-edged.

            The crying child controlled himself enough to point off into the distance where his friends were looking.  I still couldn’t see anything, but Karla filled me in.

            “What about that snowman over there?”  She asked, her voice without the sharpness of John’s.  By this point, about the entire valley of kids had gathered around to see what the problem was.  The fifth graders were well aware they had an audience now.

            “The- the snowman h- h- *hic* hit me!” The misty-eyed child stammered out, in between fits of crying.  I glanced, a smile playing at the edge of my lips, at my friends.  They all smiled similarly, except Pudge, who was on the verge of cracking up into outright laughter.

            “The snowman hit you?  How?  Did it, I don’t know, leap out and grab you?” Pudge said, making motions with his hands to go along with his voice.  The fifth graders shuffled their feet nervously.

            “See for yourself,” one of them said.  They all started walking towards the snowman, and we, having no other choice, followed suit.  The entirety of our winter wonderland participants moved as one to see the suspected snowman.  The fifth graders surrounded it, staring at it as one might stare at an unnerving painting or one’s uncomfortably ugly great-aunt.

            The problem here, we soon realized, wasn’t that the snowman was ugly, but rather quite the opposite.  The snowman was perfect.  Too perfect.  It was symmetrical and shaped in the kind of way that conjures images of computer models or mirror reflections.  Its face was simple, and contained two eyes made out of coal, a carrot for a nose, and small pebbles to make a mouth.  Except all the pebbles looked exactly the same, as did the two pieces of coal.  They were perfectly placed on the snowman’s face to elicit the kind of fear that can come only from the uncanny valley.  I also thought to myself, where the hell did the coal come from, anyway?

            “You said this thing hit you?” John asked, as unnerved as the rest of us.

            “W- with a snowball,” the tear-streaked kid said.  We all looked at the snowman’s symmetrical stick arms, apparently incapable of motion.  We shifted our weight from one leg to the other, and glanced our eyes.  No one said anything.

            “Let’s knock it down,” Alfonso spoke after a while.  There was a moment of silence, and then a roar of agreement.  Everyone was eager to destroy the snowman, as it creeped out all of us.  I don’t believe anyone was convinced that the inanimate balls of ice actually harmed the child, but it still stood to reason that the thing was unnatural, and not made by any of us, and therefore deserved to be destroyed.  We made quick work of it, and it put up no fight.

            “Is that better, sweetheart?” Rose cooed to the frightened child.  He sniffled and nodded, and his friends glanced at each other, and then to the pile of snow that had once been humanoid in shape.  They all shivered uncontrollably.

            “Hey, Mikey, let’s go home,” one of them said to the formerly crying child.  ‘Mikey’ stood up and immediately headed away, back towards the town, along with the rest of the fifth graders.  When they got to the top of the hill that hemmed in Sorbet Rink, they all turned and looked back at us.  Mikey waved at us, and kept walking.

            We all looked at each other.  No one was sure what to make of it.  Never, in all my years at Sorbet Rink, had anyone ever left before dinnertime, even if they got hurt.  Something was terribly, terribly wrong here.  And I was determined to find out what.

—–

            Well, I certainly got an inkling of what the problem was when I returned the next day, and I found, to my shocked surprise, another snowman exactly like the one we had knocked over yesterday.  Actually, scratch that; we found two abominable snowmen in place of our one.

            “Alright, who the hell did this?” John yelled at the assembled crowd.

            “Someone had better speak up, or else!” Pudge screeched gleefully.

            “Or else what?  You’ll eat us?” someone in the crowd murmured.  There was a wave of laughter, and Pudge’s smile cocked in good-natured disdain.

            “Laugh all you want.  You won’t be laughing when I start nibbling on your toes!” he responded.

            “Forget Pudge, here,” Alfonso said.  “How can we figure out who’s terrorizing Sorbet Rink?”

            “Is this really all that important?” One of the high schoolers commented to her friends.  I looked quizzically at my group, and then to the crowd.  The wooly-hatted assemblage kicked their feet around and glanced at each other.  No one outwardly seemed to care all that much.  No one except the fifth graders, who had ran in fear upon seeing the new snowmen.

            “Anyone have any ideas about these two… things?” Rose asked.  There was no response besides the empty stares of a few dozen kids. 

            I thought for a second about the dynamics of our multi-aged personage as the group retreated to their respective past times, and realized that no one seemed to care not because they didn’t, but because they were afraid to.  If they cared, or appeared to care, it would then require them to acknowledge their fear of these snowmen they didn’t understand.  Because, if I knew one thing above anything else, it was these snowmen were creepy in a kind of cerebral way.  And there was something about their faces, too… They seemed more detailed today than yesterday.  It didn’t help that the two looked exactly alike.

            Well, if no one else wanted to face the problem, I guess it had fallen to me.  “We have to take these things down,” I said, suspiciously eying the malevolent snowmen.  The one smiling face yesterday had multiplied to become two slightly more detailed, slightly more unhappy faces.

            “Why, though?  Why not just let them be?” John said.

            “Why?  Because they’re weird, that’s why, dingus” Pudge said.  John knocked him on the head.

            “They are pretty unnatural,” Rose said.

            “What are we gonna do about it, then?” John said.

            “Knock ‘em over, that’s what,” I answered.  Spinning my eyes from face to face, I nodded, and we turned to the snowmen before us and went to town.  It was decidedly more difficult this time around, as we lacked the small, versatile hands of a number of grade schoolers, but we could put our full weight into the kicking and smashing of snowy flesh.

            Our actions did not go without notice, and we gathered a smattering of viewers, mostly of the younger variety.  They watched apprehensively as we decimated the sculptures of ice, and when we had finished, they cheered loudly.  It seems I had made the right decision in removing the frozen aggressors.

            I smiled to the kids, and looked back at my friends.  We had done good work this day.

—–

            At least, we had thought we had done good work.  The next day, upon returning to Sorbet Rink, we found not, not two, but four identical snowmen.  Like some sort of watery hydra, cutting down one head left two in its place.  Except these two were more grotesque than their predecessors.

            There was a distinct difference in these snowmen, in that they were no longer shaped in the typical spherical pyramid design; they were more formed and contoured, and their faces were no longer simple smiles of coal and rock, but rather carved faces with details and emotion.  And those emotions were anger.

            To say that the snowmen had grown beyond unnerving was an understatement; these icy beasts were now inducing full-on fear.  As they had evolved over the days from one to two to four, they had also evolved from smiling to neutral to angry.  Their mouths had twisted into snarls, with definite teeth and definite eyes filled with fury, like a storm about to hit land.  Their stick arms had become branches, and had five fingers apiece, five fingers with which they doubt longed to wrap around our skinny necks.  The snowmen had become snowmonsters, and came to life in the same kind of detail that surrealist horror paintings do; only in ones nightmares.

            The one thing they noticeably lacked was legs.  Thankfully, the snowmen were rooted to the ground, and I was sure that, given actual appendages, they would have wasted no time in running to our houses and skinning us alive.  But for now, thank the cloudy heavens above, they appeared immobile.

            “Who the fuck is building these things?” John roared.  “What kind of a sick bastard would-”

            “Language, please,” Rose said.  Pudge smiled.  John didn’t.

            “You’ve gotta do somepin about it!” My brother whined.

            “I agree,” I said, turning to face the snowmen.  I put my hands on my hips, and turned back around.

            “Here’s what gonna happen,” I said.  “We’re going to destroy these snowmen.  They are not alive, and can’t hurt us.  Right?”

            “Right!” the audience eagerly chimed in, though most of them certainly felt otherwise.

            “Whoever is building these had better stop, or we will figure out who it is. This has gone too far.”
            “These things are creepy as hell, and no one wants them here!” Pudge yelled.  The crowd whipped up into a fit of rage and agreement.

            “Who’s ready to get rid of these things?” Rose yelled to the crowd.  And, at our command, they full upon the indignant snowmen like flood waters released.  The structure of the sculptures was no match for the fury of their fists, and in their clamor, John, Pudge, Rose, and I slipped away to discuss the finer points of my plan.  And my plan didn’t just involve ripping the snow to shreds.

            “I’m pretty damn sure those snowmen are gonna be here tomorrow,” I said to my group.

            “And there’ll be eight of them,” Rose said.

            “And they’ll be really gross-looking,” Pudge said.

            “So what do we do about it?” John said.

            “Here’s my idea;” I started.  “After we’re to bed, we get warm clothes and blankets, and we hide out here in the dock house, and wait to see who’s building these things.  Then, once we figure out who, we oust them tomorrow and put an end to this.”

            We nodded in agreement.  This defilement of our sacred place had gone on long enough.  To put it dramatically, it was time for an exorcism.

——

            Everything went according to our plan, and at about midnight, the four of us had met up in the old dock house with enough warm clothes to make the devil sweat.  Thankfully, it was also one of those weird warm winter nights, where it seemed comfortable enough to sit around.  And so we sat. 

            Since there were no snowmen to be seen, we deduced that we either beat the culprit there, as we intended, or they weren’t coming out tonight.  Either way, the problem would be solved by the end of the evening.

            We passed the time in silent camaraderie, eagerly awaiting the approach of our victim with each ticking of the clock.  We played cards, as the light reflected by the snow was more than enough to see, and between hands we peered from the darkened doorway of the dock house.  We waited, and we waited, and we waited.  Our eyes began to droop as two in the morning approached, and there was no sign of our snowmen builders.

            “Goddamnit, they aren’t coming tonight,” John said.

            “Man, I want to sleep,” Pudge yawned.

            “Maybe your speech today scared them off?” Rose said to me.  I highly doubted it, but I appreciated the comment anyway.

            “Let’s wait around just a bit longer,” I said.  There was an electric tension in the winter air that gave me the impression that something was going to happen.  I just didn’t know what.

            The clouds overhead swirled and eventually parted, letting the moonlight bathe the snowscape in icy celestial light.  Stars turned coldly overhead, millions of miles away, but still very much present in the evening sky.  Trees stood like barren monoliths around us, and they framed a perfect image of the valley by Sorbet Lake where the snowmen had been.  I held my breath, and waited.  Something was happening.

            As the moon lighted upon the white expanse of snowy canvas, I thought I saw movement.  But not in the kind I expected.  I strained my eyes and focused my ears, and in the whispering of the wind, I heard the tell-tale sound of someone making a snowball.  And out in the field, I saw something taking shape…

            Eight white lumps began to rise from the ground like the tentacles of a giant octopus, and they rose without any assistance or guidance from human hands.  My friends and I watched in silent horror, mouths agape, as the snow swirled around itself, spinning and turning and falling in and out in rhythm like the lungs of God, and the lumps took shape out of nothing and moved like a liquid.  Faces and arms and legs twitched in and out of existence, and expressions of reckless abandon, tortured torment, pure giddiness, absolute fury, and simple melancholy boiled in and out of the white flurry.  The eight changing, pulsing masses writhed like monsters being born, and slowly began to settle into one singular shape.  First two legs, muscular like a mountain, then a torso, chiseled and perfected like a body builder, then two arms, wooden but still very much flexible, and then a face, twisted in fury colder than absolute zero, a face which beheld so much malice and ill will that it made me physically sick to look upon it.  Pudge actually wretched next to me.

            After what felt like a horrendous eternity, the snowmen stopped all movement, and the eight of them stood there, monuments to evil, and I got the impression that they were very much staring at us.

            I turned to look at my friends.  They, like me, couldn’t believe what they had seen.

            “Did those things-” John started, face paler than pale, but stop talking soon after.  It was unnecessary to ask.  We all knew what we had seen, and were all horrified.  It soon dawned on us that we were locked together in a mutual brotherhood of secrecy.  There was no way we could tell the others what we had seen.

            “What are we supposed to do now?” Rose said.  “No one will believe us.”

            “We’ll be the laughing stock of the schools,” Pudge agreed, after he had finished emptying his stomach.

            “Whatever we do, these snowmen can’t be knocked down again,” I said solemnly.  “We’ll come up with a clever story.  Tell them that it’s a political statement or something, by a local artist.”

            “Kids ain’t gonna respect that,” John said.

            “Yeah, but they’ll respect us,” I said.  The others knew I had a point.  “But,” I continued, “For now, we go home.  We go to sleep.”

            “Speak for yourself.  I’m not sleeping tonight,” Pudge said.

            “We try to go to sleep,” I corrected, “And tomorrow we forget about this.  Agreed?”  The other murmured their agreement.  We all stood up, and avoiding looking at the snowmen.  I felt prickles on the back of my neck, like someone, or something, was watching me.

            “You know what I’ve been wondering?” Pudge asked.

            “What?” I responded.

            “What’s gonna happen when spring comes?”

            I stopped and turned, staring at Pudge, then the snowmen.  I felt something drop in the pit of my stomach as I saw the snowmen’s faces turn to smiles.