Midnight in the garden of ice and plenty

The cold made pins and needles on her skin. And there was a lot of skin. It was the rage that year. There were clots of young men dressed in clear plastic, their rosy cheeks... all of them... bare to the snowy night. There were women in ermine, old ladies with diamond teeth. When they opened their mouths, the light sparkled even through the cloud of their breath.

Vitelina needed more cream towers. The first batch of fifty had been consumed within minutes. The patrons were crowding around the ice table, rending the edges of it slick with melt. All the food was white or clear. The spun sugar goblets dissolved when pale punch was dribbled in, leaving hands sticky. The white cygnet meat sweated with crystals of ice.

It was the first party of 2157. Madame Faurme was entertaining one hundred fifty-seven guests in her garden outside of the city. It was one of those affairs. It would have to be memorable.

Vitelina had served at many of Madame Faurme's parties, but never one this demanding. The temperature of the spouting mermaid fountain had to be constantly checked as the night went on, lest the water fail to seize into ice as it touched the growing stalagmite at the base of the flow. Likewise the mischievous cherub fountain.

The night was growing colder; the stars were painfully close. Above the garden a wet mist began to hang, risen from the fountains and sugar-goods and breath and trampled snow. And sweat. As Vitelina pushed toward the house, she came upon a tangle of youths in sharp rustly plastic, stuffing snow into whatever warm folds appealed to them. Their hair was plastered to their bodies. Their grunts and laughs were muffled in the hovering fog that reached to obscure the stars.

By the time Vitelina had returned with a triple-deck platter of cream towers and radish flakes, she could scarcely see where she was going. She led herself through the garden by sound. The greatest mass of guests was there by the food, and when she unloaded her platter, they fell around her with gleaming eyes. The wireless lights were floating in a soup of white above their heads now, but the light was enough to show their teeth, their white and glittering teeth, and the still-rosy glow on their cheeks.

The vodka moat would have to be replenished.

Vitelina stepped slowly to the faucet beyond the bleachedberry hedge. The snow was wet and pasty and clung to the sides of her glistening plastic shoes. Her toes throbbed in their cold cage. She would make more money working eight months for Madame Faurme than she would in the next ten years. But the toes, the toes. And her hands... the handle of the vodka faucet was slick. She lifted it and beyond her vision, a silver glissando tickled the air.

And was it colder when she returned to the food-heaped ice tables than when she had first passed that way? Vitelina pulled her polar bear hood around her tighter. She watched the guests warily. The sugar goblets dipped into the vodka moat, over and over. Shards dissolved, fell steaming in the white slush below. Tongues appeared to do their pink work. Everything was wet. No one was shivering but Vitelina. She turned and the flush on the cheeks of the woman behind her frightened her. Vitelina hurried to the garden's edge.

She would do rounds. She would look for something to clean. There, ten steps through the fog along the outer hedge, where the sounds of the eating and drinking were almost too muffled to be heard, she found something. It was a woman, her legs wrapped around the translucent body of an ice stallion, her blonde hair long and lank, sufficing for a mane on the unmoving beast. The strange woman did not shiver. She was already cold. White.

Vitelina wanted first to go back, but she decided to go on. Twelve steps more into the fog, she came upon lovers, lying blankly in the snow, which did for clothing on them. Their ermine wraps were tossed aside. They had been pushing snow atop each other in smooth mounds when they lay down to close their eyes. The sweat on their cheeks had already frozen to crystal. The vodka reddened their skin no longer.

Five steps onward, there was a circle of trillionaire septuagenarians, their riches now in faux diamonds that hung at their lips from imagined confections of snow. They lay now where they had consumed, on a round bench of ice three feet thick. All Vitelina could hear was the chattering of her own small teeth. The warmth had been sucked out of the night from above, and the air seemed so sharp she feared for the coverless skin of her arms and her thighs.

Madame Faurme would be in her drawing room, where she spent every party. She would be watching through the windows. She would be disappointed, of course, that she could not see her guests through the fog. She would want to know at once if anything had happened that would reflect unfavorably upon her reputation. If the cooks had botched a dish, Vitelina must report it. If the ice sculptures were melting badly, Vitelina must report it. If guests were behaving in a rude fashion, she must report it all the quicker.

Vitelina hung in the air, her feet lost to her as the miasma thickened. She could not feel them. They were gone.

Tremblingly she turned, feeling her way along the pale hedge until she reached at last the black door to the kitchens. She walked as if on stilts. She could scarcely tell with her numb fingers, but she felt the black door must be warmer than the outside. Some heat existed here, from the world of the house. The garden was dead silent.

Vitelina slid her hand to the right, along the brick of the house, pushing her numb feet through the snow, which was freezing up in an uneven mess. Her steps began to crackle and squeak. The sound seemed to follow her, unnerving her until by the time she reached the door to the undergarage her heart was racing. She yanked open the door and thumped onto the dark stairs, pulling the door closed behind her, fearing the skin of her palm might be left behind on the slick metal knob. She reached in against her fluttering chest, fumbling for her key. When she clenched it, she saw a light wink on hazily on in the concrete distance, and she made for it.