The Abominable Beatrice

The ferocious December blizzard dumped nearly two feet of snow in the Appalachian highlands. Beatrice woke up to learn that school was cancelled for the day.

News travels fast in little towns. Beatrice’s father owned a scanner which picked up radio communications of the fire department and what little police activity there may be in town. The scanner informed of collapsing roofs on houses in the area.

Beatrice was quickly summoned to help her father shovel snow from the roof of the family’s house. Mounds of snow as high as the house itself were created from the snow removed from atop the Miller home.

Beatrice and her three younger brothers made igloos in the snow mountains while their parents locked them out of the house while they secretly wrapped Christmas presents.

The children dug holes in the snow with spade shovels and played within their carved out homes for hours. Beatrice even built a couch inside her room of the igloo and told her siblings to keep to the west wing of the place.

She sat back on her snow sofa, lit up a Lucy Strike and noticed how the snow seemed to suck up the smoke she exhaled, like a Ronco smokeless ashtray.

She imagined one day she would run off to Alaska, marry a woman and live in an igloo. She would be happy in a place like this, she thought. For Beatrice knew, even at thirteen, that there isn't much room in the civilized world for girls who smoke Lucky Strikes and for those can build a castle from frozen water crystals.