FOR THE LATTER PART of the first month of her fifth year, the girl does not speak. She will not speak again until her sixth birthday, but she does not know this yet. The fear that her secret will be revealed permeates her every move, and she looks under the stalls in the Institute restroom before she parks herself in front of her tiny, low mirror to inspect the places where the teeth used to be.

It is a curse, she decides, but surely one she deserves. She has done something ghastly, irreparable, though she is unsure what. And so she stops speaking, both so no one notices the gaping absence in her mouth and so she saves herself from saying something that might inaugurate more loss—her ears or her fingers, her hair or her nails.

But a being, particularly one who has crested the precipice of age five, cannot successfully manage the lot of life alone. Too much loneliness, particularly at that age, can mean a condition settling in. And so the girl crafts the presence of others in her mind. First they are just abstract thoughts: three of them, like an ellipsis—uniform and united, pointing onward to denote a something else. But as her fifth year progresses and more of her teeth abandon her, the abstractions take shape on her wall and soon start to look distinctive: one a form that echoes a crushed hope; another an illformed idea; the final a memory, abandoned. In this way, the shapes she crafts become her cohort, and she releases the guilt and longing locked tight in her chest to her trifold shadow forms.

Meanwhile, her father continues his telling. And in the telling, the girl becomes further acquainted with the darkest logic of the world: that if something is begun—a meal or a journey, a story or a girl—it must always end.

Years later, after the girl who becomes an Ice Sculptor has left and is gone herself, the Multiversity of the Mid-North will name a room after her, and eventually a writer will want to tell her whole story because it strikes her as gothic. The Writer will sift through the Ice Sculptor’s bookshelves and notes—the print catalog of the girl’s life. The Writer will get a travel grant to conduct research on the Ice Sculptor’s papers. On her visits to the Multiversity of the Mid-North, The Writer will end each evening with a shot of whiskey at a local bar because, while she knows that childhood is, essentially, a complicated system of ongoing discovered disappointments, she also knows that few lives can point to a single moment and deem it The Beginning of Childhood’s End. The Writer will sip the whiskey tentatively from the miniscule glass and she will think that all the Ice Sculptor’s sorrow gestures back toward the telling of a tale. The Writer will think briefly that her work as a writer is less about sharing a story and more about parsing together the loose strands of an unraveling fabric through which the character of the Ice Sculptor is threaded. The Writer will think she is less a writer and more an archivist. Then she will finish her shot.