One More Double Axel

I spun in three dozen perfect circles and kicked my wife in the face with my figure skate, almost knocking her through the surface of the ice. The blade sliced through her right cheek, from the corner of her lips to her snow-capped earlobe. The inertia of my orbits was so powerful I watched her collapse from several different perspectives as I spun.

Last night in our hotel room we consummated our marriage, our mutual admiration and ambition to qualify for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia. We should have waited till after today’s qualifications, when the results for the pairs competition would be announced. Miranda was pregnant, but barely showing, and this was our only chance, so the judges and coaches were kept in the dark. I didn’t have any idea how close we had become beneath the pouring raindrops in those waning hours of morning, until the blood began to trickle across the ice and the Zamboni driver placed his lips to the glass and puffed his cheeks out like a blowfish.   

I could smell her perfume, the icy artic blue of her eyes as I held the wound while wide-eyed medics ran out onto the ice with a metal gurney. Yearning for air, gasping for life, making a snow angel, Miranda grabbed the cuff of my shirt, pulled me to her face. Gold glitter shimmered on her dress beneath fluorescent bulbs. United in shock we shook as one figurine as she whispered into my ear: “We were too close baby, we were too close sweetie, what happened baby?”

The medics placed pressure on the wound with gauze bandages, scurried off the ice with Miranda in their arms, leaving me on my knees, the polyester of my pants frozen into the ice, white rose petals from my partner’s costume marking a trail toward the locker room; as if the crimson dripping from the gurney wasn’t enough?

Rising to my feet, I skated from one corner of the rink to another and did a double axel, dancing like a fairy on the tips of my toes. I didn’t know what else to do. I chased my demons into the locker room, only to find my unborn baby’s mother ushered into an ambulance and I pursued them down the street, ice skates on and everything; the blades crunching against the pavement like the baby against Miranda’s uterus.

A siren; blue and red flashing lights, a kaleidoscope rainbow reflection in the window of the jewelry shop where I purchased Miranda’s engagement ring, a man talking on a megaphone: “Pull over sir, please step to the sidewalk.” Numerous unheeded warnings, I can see his shadows in the windows of the shops on Madison Avenue.

The cop takes me out with a Taser--a dangerous move considering the blades on my shoes. He cuffs me as I struggle on the curb. “My wife is in the hospital, I cut her face open with my skates….”

“You have the right to remain silent,” he tells me, handcuffs opening and then closing around my wrists, “…anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law….” Listening to my Miranda rights, I cry into my cuffs. The cop twists his neck toward his collar and clicks the radio: “Code eight; attempted murder, maybe murder in the first degree.”

Her cheek opened like a coconut, Miranda is crying, I can feel it, lying on the pavement, I explain the madness of my situation and an officer on bicycle backs up my story. “There was a bad accident during a figure skating competition,” he says. The cop takes me in and loosens the handcuffs, not removing them, but waiting for back-up.

A crowd has gathered. After many minutes they put me in an ambulance, ask me questions as paramedics check my pulse. I refuse to let them take off my skates. Wanting to make up for his suspicions and tasing me, the cop brings a wheel chair and swivels me into the hospital while the paramedics ask the nurses for a psychiatric evaluation. I collapse to the floor and they put me on a gurney, wheel me into the emergency room. I can see white ghosts huddled around my wife. Doctor’s saying: “Don’t push Miranda, that’s right, good job brave girl, give her another sedative please.”

Undergoing a c-section while getting her face stitched up, Miranda notices me out of the corner of her eye. “How’d we do?” she asks. “Second place before the short program,” I tell her. “How is she?” I ask the doctors. “Baby and mother will be fine,” one of the nurses replies, as little cries and a bloody miracle rises from the gurney, borne as if by the wind, out of the room, into an intensive care unit for newborns. Miranda smiles and falls asleep as the plastic surgeon finishes his stitches. I ask the cop to check me out and drive me back to the rink. Out of sympathy, he agrees. I leave me skates on; they’ve become part of my legs.

The pairs competition is over. Stands are empty and the Zamboni is cleaning the ice. I see our names: third place. Overwhelmed by joy and the elation of being alive and a Father, I open the door and glide out onto the ice, ignoring the obscenities from the Zamboni driver, skating farther onto the frost, my edges are worn and my grip is jagged, I pick up speed and do a double axel, landing it perfectly, an angel on ice, the Zamboni driver my only witness. I do figure eights skating backwards around his ice machine and land a triple axel, spin a dozen times in a majestic circle, finally a quadruple axel, almost landed, if not for the wheels of the ice resurfacer. As he drives over my right ankle, I think of Miranda, hold her in my sights as the snow falls from the Zamboni and I get trapped beneath the machine as it cleans the ice, blackness comes over me.     

Bio: Matthew Dexter lives and writes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He tolerates long walks on the beach, but hates sand between his toes.