Crystallised Thaw

Helen Humphreys has assembled forty plus vignettes about The Frozen Thames. Each story is unique and the time spanned goes from the actual 1142 to the virtual 1927 (the Thames didn’t freeze that year but Humphreys supplies an intriguing postscript based on lines in the draft of Woolf’s Orlando, lines not to be found in the published novel).

1809 gives us the tale of the boy, a miller’s son, who revives birds. Humphreys leaves us with the image of the boy telling his story in years to come.

The ice birds fell from the sky, he will say when he tells the story. I breathed fire back into their bodies. My hands were an oven that warmed them. I set them to flying again.

So much motion in the stasis of a telling.

And so for day 1399
12.10.2010