The Journey Prize Stories 24 Written by Astrid Blodgett

Ice Break

When you are a child, life does not always make sense. Things can be hard to understand, and small everyday problems can quickly turn into a world crisis. In the short story Ice Break from the anthology The Journey Prize Stories 24 written by Astrid Blodgett in 2012, we are following a girl Dawn and her life does a U-turn when she’s losing her father and sister in a car-accident, where their car crashes trough the ice on a lake. We’re following how our main character Dawn is tackling the situation.

The story is told in a limited first-person narrator and is told from Dawn’s perspective. Dawn has got a new job as a babysitter which says that she is young. One could argue that she is about 12-14 years old. Dawn is on a trip with her father and sister, when the accident is happening. They should have been on a fishing trip, but they did not succeed. Dawn does not have a great relationship to her father, and she pays her sister Janie for going with her on the fishing trip, because she does not want to be alone with her father. “He was always grouchier when it was just him and me. He was scary when he got mad. And he never knew what to talk about with me so it was uncomfortable and we both ended up saying all the wrong things.” (P.3.L.90) Dawn has got a new job as a babysitter, and the fact that she wants to use all of her earned money on her sister says, that she really does not like to be alone with her father. One could argue that Dawn has a very good relationship to her sisters Janie and Marla. They are doing cozy things together, and it seems like they enjoy being together. “It was after noon. We’d slept in, my sisters and I, and we’d been reading the colored comics and doing Saturday morning chores. Mom looked over at us – Marla, Dawn, Janie – all in a row on the kitchen bench, eating brunch.” (P.1L.18) One day Marla, which is the oldest sister says that she knows something Janie and Dawn does not know, but she only wants to tell it later. What she is alluding that Mr. and Mrs. Pichowsky, who most likely were a pair of friends of the family, got a divorce last year and the mother moved away with the kids to Deepest Darkest Mill Woods, and Marla, Dawn and Janie does not see the kids anymore because they live there. What Marla alludes is that the same thing could happen for their parents. Therefore, one could argue that the kids can feel that their parents’ relationship is not as good as it has been.

The structure of the short story is very unusual and at sometimes a bit bewildering. The story is divided in two stories. One of them takes place before and after the accident and the other one is a flashback where Dawn is looking back at the accident. The story starts with the sentences “We’re a long way out on the lake when the ice breaks. It’s late, after three, probably. The sun is low in the sky.” (P.1L.1) After that the story goes back to before the accident. This kind of structure makes the story exciting to read, because you want to know why the ice breaks and what happens next all the time. In the start, it is a bit confusing, but when you get it, it is a very special but also fascinating way of writing a story. The gaps between the flashbacks and the rest of the story gets smaller as the story goes on, and in the end these two chronological stories melts together to one story.