Somerset to Suffolk Reads, book 1: The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

'She was smarter now, less likely to give in.'

My aunt gifted me a copy when I was in Ohio at the beginning of August. I had read it before. In my head, very clearly, I was reading it curled up behind the poetry shelves at the library where I worked in high school. But that is an impossibility, 10 years before Hoffman wrote this book. So it must have been in Lambeth, draped over a chair at the library, read in one sitting. In the late winter, early spring, before' whirlwind engagements and blue babies, and sleepy lurchers and kittens with claws. 

It hurt, reading it then. I remembered that much. Reading it again, with the same different eyes, knowing the intimate smells of sulphur but not of lightening, knowing the arythmia that come from being a different kind of scorched, of how metal can twist around itself and a person, the hurt is different, that guilt of not knowing the answers or the why when you're supposed to be the family reference desk makes it all seem impossible, until it becomes possible again.  So I read it again, thinking about San Antonio and the  Butterfly garden and how quiet things can be when all of the equipment gets shut off, when a spirit gets freed from its cage.

'Lightening has its own agenda'

In chaos theory, does it matter what colour the butterfly is?

'If he saw the expression on my face, I'd have scared him off. Had I looked in the mirror, I would have frightened myself. I was desperate, you know. I was mired in death and wishes, trapped in the wong skin.'

'People with sense run away from fire, but not me.'