The clockwork men stopped rowing. The ice held their oars tight and held the city tight, too. Micol turned the key in the back of one of the men.

“What are we meant to do now?” he said, when it didn’t lift and plunge the oar, and he kicked the clockwork man, hurt his foot, and hopped about, nearly falling onto the frozen waves.

“I’m going home to paint the tree on the wall. No point hanging around here,” I said. “Don’t matter how many men we wind up, they ain’t going to row.” And I pulled my headscarf lower so that it covered my forehead. He put his face by the clockwork man’s and he opened his eyes wide and made a non-face just like theirs. I left him behind. The wind was loud through the streets and it carried with it the silence from far-out on the sea. Old songs came from closed windows and I hummed along with them and pretended I was King Wenceslas trekking through forests with trees bending over me, snow-heavy, and my page warmed by my footprints. Up and up, I went, my legs aching as I climbed the levels of the city. The frozen sea became lower and lower and I saw the waves stuck in solid arches out and out to the horizon. And then I was at my door.

Mama had put the box of tree paints on my bed. It was marked by my green fingerprints from years before. I put my hand over them and remembered being so small, and Grandmama teaching me to paint the Christmas tree on the wall, her hand placing mine on the brush, her smell of onions cooked to caramel. She was so old, that I thought she’d lived when the trees were. But she’d just shaken her head, her eyes sad and dark, and she’d told me about the forest at the top of the world. No one had ever reached it, for it lay past the sea of tall waves - waves taller than cities stacked atop each other. And no city could pass through those waters without being broken into pieces as small as saucers, no matter how fast their clockwork men rowed. We’d painted tree lights and baubles on the branches, and I’d felt a quietness like the sun dimming into night.

“Third Christmas without Grandmama,” Micol said as he painted a star on the top of the tree. I listened to the swishing of his brush. “If she were here, she’d be telling us about the forest at the top of the world.” And he smiled but his eyes were like sad stones.

“Far past the sea of tall waves…” I began, but I couldn’t finish because my throat went lumpy.

“All the waves are frozen now,” he said. And our eyes met.

We were up early on Christmas morning, long before the day. We took our bags and ran down the steps, fast and quiet, and we didn’t speak until we reached the clockwork men. And then the sea was solid under our feet and we were striding out, up towards the top of the world, to walk under frozen waves taller than cities to where the trees waited for us or perhaps only the dark. 

Rebecca Harrison sneezes like Donald Duck and her best friend is a dog who can count.