The Ice Shelf
Ice, Epictetus, Elisa Rae Shupe.
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The ice shelf came down over my window at the end of January. There was a week of brutal, mind-breaking cold — minus thirteen, minus nineteen — and then one morning, I walked into my office and saw a waterfall of ice hanging down from the eaves. It was made of icicles, some as thick as my forearm is long. They hung down past my window, past the top floor of the house, and almost skimmed the ground. They melted, and re-froze, and merged together, and became a wall blocking my view.
I didn’t see the ice shelf growing. I didn’t notice any regular icicles outside my window first, although they must have been there. It just appeared — glittering and huge, gold where the light hit it. It was beautiful. It was miraculous. It was, I realized after some Googling, probably a sign that my roof was about to collapse.
Get the ice shelf off your roof, all those Google results instructed. Otherwise the ice would melt, and the water would soak through the wood, and the wood would collapse, and I would be living under the sky again. All the pages had different instructions for how to to do it: Put a heated coil along the edge of the roof (how?) or climb up on your ice-coated roof (no) and sprinkle salt.
I used hammers. Hammers and a snow shovel — my partner got a stepladder and whacked at the ice with the shovel until a huge chunk of it came down and slammed him in the chest, at which point he decided that he would not die to save our roof from the ice shelf. I have nothing better to do, and my country hates me. So every morning, I open my window and swing a hammer into the ice.
Sometimes it does something, sometimes it doesn’t. The thin icicles shatter satisfyingly. The thick ones hang in there, chipping off a little bit at a time, like a bag of bodega ice. The chips fly off in odd directions and slice up my hands. I keep swinging. I don’t think removing the ice is the point any more. The point is having something I can hit until it breaks.
On January 27, a woman wrapped herself in a trans flag and hung herself off the side of the VA hospital in Syracuse, about a half hour away from home. I didn’t know she was a woman, at first; newspapers used “they” or “he” pronouns. I didn’t — at first — know her name. The only reason I even knew she was trans was the timing of her death — Donald Trump had just signed an executive order banning trans people from military service — and the fact that she died within eyeshot of a university campus, so a lot of people saw and were able to identify the flag.