Chapter 1: Fire

“Fire! Fire!” I yelled as I ran through the house. The alarms were going off, several of them at the same time, which could only mean the house was on fire. And though I did not see any flames, I could feel the heat.

I looked into my sister Kendra’s room, and she was passed out on the bed. I ran in, slapped her on the cheek, and yelled, “Wake up! Fire!” But she didn’t. I felt for a pulse and couldn’t find one. I started to pick her up to carry her out to where she might get help, but then I thought, “What if I can’t get out myself?”

Leaving Kendra’s unconscious body behind, I ran down the stairs. The way to the front door was clear, and I recalled I should test the door by touching it before opening it. It wasn’t hot, so it should be OK. I ran back up, threw Kendra’s body over my shoulder, and carefully came down the steps with it. I opened the door, and set her down on the ground as gently as I could. There were fire engines, police, and ambulances already there and a couple people ran over to check on her as I ran back inside and up two flights of stairs.

In contrast to the relatively undamaged first and second floors of the house, the third floor was clearly on fire. I opened the door to my parents’ room and wished I hadn’t. The room was fully engulfed in flames. There was no way the two blackened bodies on the bed had any chance of surviving. I closed the door and ran back down. Before I ran all the way out of the house, though, I stopped at my room. “What’s important?” I thought while putting on some proper clothes. “What’s hard to replace and I can grab quickly?”

I ended up picking up two things. In one hand, the bundle of papers related to my enrollment in college. I knew my parents were dead and maybe my sister too, but I still hoped I could go to the college where I was already enrolled and expected to start classes in a month. In the other hand, Frosty’s hat. With these things I ran out of the house. My sister’s body was no longer there, but I thought that the body some men were loading in an ambulance was hers. Firemen were going up ladders on the houses at each end of the row and they had other hoses spraying water into the roofs from the ground. I ran over to a policeman who seemed less occupied than the other people helping here.

“Was that you who brought that girl’s body out?” he asked me without any sort of introduction.

“Yes, sir!”

“Good job. I don’t know if she’s going to survive, but the paramedics thought there was a chance. They took her to MGH. Anybody else inside?”

“My parents, but...”

He could tell from my expression they were past saving.

“How bad was it?”

“You know what it looks like when you leave the roast in the oven twice as long as you should?”

“That bad. I am so, so sorry for you.”

The cop called for somebody on his radio and about a minute later a heavy-set black woman walked up.

“Mabel, this is, well, I didn’t get your name...”

“Jacob Reynolds,” I volunteered.

“Jacob,” the cop said to me, “Can you identify the girl you rescued?”

“Yes, she’s my sister.”

“Mabel, she’s victim 4 at MGH. Jacob’s parents are all burnt up, he says. Take him to safety.”

I followed Mabel as she led me to a car parked about a block and a half away, well away from the fire.

Once we were moving in the car, Mabel asked me, “Jacob, if I take you to a safe bed now do you think you can sleep?”

“Probably not. Not for another hour, at least.”

“OK, then we will go to the hospital and do some paperwork. Then sleep.”

Paperwork. I was just old enough to know what that meant. Who knows how many forms to fill out, probably most of them for my sister, who was actually at the hospital.

Mabel parked near the emergency room but not in the spaces actually designated for it, and we entered through the emergency entrance. We didn’t stop at the triage window that I remembered visiting when I was there for my own emergency years ago. Mabel led me directly to the elevator and to an office on the third floor.

“Jacob, I want you to help me complete your sister’s file. Right now she’s here as a Jane Doe.”

“OK.”

She typed on her computer for a bit and then turned the monitor so I could see a photo on it.

“Jacob, is this your sister?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you. Can you tell me her full name?”

“Kendra Rebecca Reynolds.”

We went through date of birth, address, known allergies and medication, my own information, my parents’ information, insurance information (I could only say that Kendra had the insurance the school offers), and I don’t remember what all else. Some of it I didn’t know but she seemed satisfied to fill in as much as I could provide. Finally, I was barely able to stay awake, and Mabel asked me to stand and follow her. I barely remember doing so but I awoke later in a bed in what I later learned was the non-emergency wing of the hospital. I found the remote for the TV in my room and found something halfway interesting to watch.

Another woman, Debbie, showed up awhile later.

“Jacob?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Would you like some breakfast?”

“Yes, please.”

It was clear she meant right now, so I turned off the TV, got out of bed (still in the clothes I hurriedly put on last night), and followed her. She led me to a cafeteria where I chose some food that looked good, and sat at a table with her. She only had coffee.

“You can call me Debbie. I understand you are one of the survivors of the fire on Harrison Street last night.”

“That’s right. Do you have any news about it?”

“They got the fire put out, but the entire row of houses was damaged beyond the point of repair. And that’s actually why I’m here, to find you a place to live.”

“Actually, I already have arrangements to go to college at UMass Amherst next month, including a dorm room. I guess I’ll need a place to stay until that’s ready for me, though. As well as a ride out there.”

“Well that actually makes things a lot easier. Are you 18?”

“Yes. Just turned last month.”

“Perfect. It’s not hard to find some place to put somebody up for a month, and since you’re of age, you’re on your own and don’t need to have a legal guardian appointed. So I can probably get you in somewhere today. So here’s the plan: We’re going to go back to that room you were in, make sure you’ve got all your stuff, and then you’re going to stick with me. I’m going to find you a temporary place to live, and help you confirm your financial arrangements.”

“What about my sister?”

“Is your sister in this hospital?”

“I believe so. Mabel took information from me last night after the fire.”

“OK, I’ll help you locate her.”

We went back to my room, where I found my bundle of college papers and Frosty’s hat were on the table beside the bed, and I took those things and followed Debbie back to the emergency room where we came in, and she found a nurse who could check on my sister. But the look on the nurse’s face told me the news was bad.

“I’m sorry. Are you Kendra’s brother?”

“Yes.”

“They got her heart beating, but she was too far gone. Every half-hour to hour she went into cardiac arrest again, and after seven or eight times, they weren’t able to keep her going. She died a couple hours ago.”

I put my face in my hands and cried for a while. I was really crying for both my parents and my sister, and myself, knowing I had to go on without them. After a while, I cleaned up my face, Debbie led me out into the parking lot to her car. I rode with her a short way to another building, a city office for social affairs, and finally inside to a room with her name on a sign by the door.

“This is my office. Here, I will collect information on your case and match you up with a suitable home.”

We went through all the name, address, date of birth, etc. again for me and for my now deceased relatives.

“Do you have any other relatives, more distant ones perhaps? Even if you only know their names and relationship I may be able to find them.”

“Not that I know of. My grandparents have all passed away, and neither my mother nor father had any brothers or sisters. I may have more distant cousins, but I never met them.”

“A girlfriend, maybe?”

“No. I did have one a year older than me, but she went to college out west and we decided a long-distance relationship wasn’t going to work and broke it off. I went on a couple dates the last year, but nothing that stuck.”

“OK, then. We try to place with relatives when possible, especially when it’s a short stay and wouldn’t be burdensome in the long term, but we can also use the foster parent system, especially when those relatives don’t exist. Since you’re 18, they won’t become your legal guardians the way foster parents usually are for the duration of your stay with them, but we can still put you with somebody. The Childhood Tragedy Management Fund still allows support for up to 6 months after an event like this for someone without other relatives up to age 22.”

“Huh. OK. I never knew.”

She had been typing on her computer during all this time and had already found a candidate. She turned her monitor and showed me a picture of an elderly couple.

“Sam and Marge Wilson, ages 75 and 73, live about a 10 minute drive from here and have a spot available. Let me call them.”

She did, and they were home.

“Hi, Sam. This is Debbie Dalton with social services. (pause) Yes, I have an 18-year-old boy here who lost his home and all his family in a fire last night. He’s already been accepted to college, and while I have not confirmed all the financial arrangements, he expects to go to UMass Amherst starting about a month from now, so he’d only be with you a short time. (another pause) Yes, I have him here. Let me put you on speaker.”

Then to me, “Jacob, I have Sam Wilson on the phone, and he’d like to speak with you.”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Hello, Jacob,” replied a friendly voice which I took to be Sam’s.

“Hi, Jacob, this is Marge,” said another voice.

“Tell me about yourself,” Sam said.

“Well, I’m 18 years old, I excel in English, visual arts, and archery, and I am undecided on a college major, but I am going to explore options at UMass Amherst next year and try to decide on something.”

“Do you cook?”

“Only a little. Mom was teaching me to make sure I could get by on my own, but started late and now I’m going to miss out on the last month of those lessons.”

“Well, I’m sure Marge will teach you some more, then. We’d love to have you come live with us. You’d get your own bedroom, get to use our kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom, and be responsible for some of the cleaning and doing your own laundry and helping cook some of the meals. We’ll provide the food, cleaning supplies, and other reasonable costs. And we’ll help you with your arrangements to go off to college, everything but the actual cost of attending.”

“Can you give me a ride out there next month?”

“It should be possible. If not, we’ll find another way to get you there.”

“And about laundry. I don’t have any other clothes besides the ones I’m wearing. The rest were at my house, and pretty much everything burned up, they tell me.”

Debbie interrupted, “The Tragedy Fund will provide you with some money to buy replacement clothes. They won’t be great clothes, but it’ll be something. I should be able to give you a couple hundred dollars today.”

“That’s great, Debbie. I can take the boy shopping and make sure he has clothes to wear.”

“This sounds great. How soon do I go live with Sam and Marge?”

Debbie answered by continuing to talk to the people on the phone, “Sam, if you’re able, we can get Jacob to you this afternoon.”

“Marge, what do you think?”

“I think he sounds great. Send him over!” Marge said.

“Fine with me,” I said.

There was some paperwork to do, including two separate applications to the fund, one for, we’d calculated it out, 37 days including today and the day I went off to UMass that I’d live at least partially with Sam and Marge, and a clothing allowance which came to $240. Debbie went somewhere, asking me to stay in her office, and came back after a few minutes with the $240 in cash. I had to sign what was essentially a receipt for the money, and the fund would reimburse Debbie.

“And our lunch has arrived here. We have pizza. I know you only ate breakfast about two hours ago, but it is lunchtime for people whose schedules didn’t get wrecked by fire. So come try to enjoy it.”

Back in the cafeteria, there were a bunch of pizzas, and I got some sausage and some veggie trio - mushrooms, olives, and onions - and brought it back to Debbie’s office on a paper plate since she was doing the same thing.

Over lunch we finished the paperwork, and after washing my hands I signed five forms she printed out. Some of these got submitted by mail elsewhere, but one form she put in a folder and set on the desk as she got ready to go.

“It’s time. The Wilsons have to sign this form also to officially start hosting you and getting paid out of the Tragedy Fund for doing so, but I’ll take it with us as we go over there.”

Chapter 2: The Wilsons

So we went over there. Sam and Marge each, separately, gave me a big hug, and they showed me to my room and around the rest of the house. After confirming I’d already eaten lunch, and that I had money to buy clothes, Sam went straight into taking me clothes shopping. We just went to Wal-Mart to get some cheap things so that I’d have enough to wear for a week, and a jacket. Also a few basic supplies like a toothbrush. That was all the money was good for. I tried everything on, so it took quite some time, but we had all afternoon. I was in no rush.

After I got home, I put my things away in the closet and dresser the Wilsons had supplied for me, taking care to remove all the labels and tags (they gave me scissors for those plastic ones). And I made my bed with supplied sheets, and that was it. I didn’t own much of anything and there wasn’t much else in the room, either. So I went back out to the living room.

At that time, Marge invited me to come help her start making dinner. It was only 4, so either this was going to be more of a lesson than just time to cook, or she was planning an elaborate meal. Or maybe the Wilsons just ate dinner at 5. It turned out to be a combination of the first and last; the meal was ordinary, but Marge didn’t do things at the same time that she could have, probably in order to ensure I had time to learn each task. And we ate at 5:30.

After dinner, I talked with the Wilsons and gave a longer version of my story. Eventually they got around to asking me about the hat.

Sam asked, “I noticed you brought with you a top hat. Was that a gift you received in the hospital, or did you save it from the fire?”

“I saved it.”

“It must be a very special hat for that to have been one of the very few things you saved.”

“It is. It’s Frosty’s hat.”

“As in Frosty the Snowman?”

“That’s the one. The original.”

“Tell me what made it special for you.”

“Well, you know the Frosty story, I expect.”

Sam sang the Frosty song up to the line “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found.” At that point, I interrupted him. “There sure is.”

“What, your hat has magic like in the song?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Tell me about it.”

So I told the whole story, as much as I knew of it, anyway.

Decades ago, though I’m not sure how many, kids in the neighborhood I grew up in found the hat just like the song says. They put it on a snowman, and it animated the snowman. He could dance and play and sing. And he lived all winter long; even through periods when most of the snow melted, his snow stayed solid.

At the end of the winter, after all the other snow had melted, Frosty’s snow finally melted too. He still lived as some sort of water-man for a while, but unlike Frosty’s snow body, which stayed clean unlike the snow piles on the ground, his water body picked up dirt and he quickly became a mud man. The kids decided the mud man wasn’t very fun, and they took the hat off and let the mud collapse back into the ground.

But they saved the hat, and after the first significant snow each winter they brought Frosty back. And for several years it was that way.

One year, one of the other kids from the next street over got jealous, and told the kids on my street he could build a better snowman. The argument this turned into was settled by Frosty himself, who said, “Let him build the snowman, and move the hat over to it when he’s done. I’ll try that body, and compare it with this one, and tell you which I like better.”

The kids couldn’t come up with a good argument against letting Frosty himself choose the body he liked, so they went through with it. Perhaps not surprisingly, since the original group of kids hadn’t been competing when they made Frosty’s first body, the other kid’s body won the contest, and so Frosty stayed in that body and lived on the next street over for the rest of the winter.

And that kid kept the hat afterward too, but he played fair. When snow came the next year, and he built up Frosty’s body again, the first group of kids built their own, better snowman, and this began an annual contest to see whose snowman was better. That year the original group of kids won. The tradition expanded, and by the time I was old enough to participate, there were about 20 kids from 4 different blocks making 6 or 7 snowmen every year to compete for who would get Frosty.

There was an unspoken rule that whoever won would keep the hat until the following winter, and bring it back for the next competition. Usually the hat-holder wore it out to where the snowman-building was going to occur - the hat didn’t affect people, only inanimate bodies - and turned it upside down when he took it off during the actual building process, to avoid the possibility of animating some random patch of snow. It was the hat-holder who decided what day after the first snow the contest would be, but usually that was the first non-school day when there was enough snow around and the weather was not too bad. One year the winner’s family did move away, but he gave the hat to one of the other kids who built the snowman with him, to keep it in the neighborhood. He knew that the kids in his new neighborhood wouldn’t have this tradition, and so it was better to leave it here.

But I may not be able to keep this tradition going. Five years ago, two of those blocks of houses were demolished for construction of a highway, and the other remaining block doesn’t have any more kids on it. Last winter’s competition saw only three snowmen, all built by teenagers: One built by me and my sister, one by the two boys next door to us, and one by two unrelated girls, both of whose older siblings have gone off to college, who were the last kids in their families. And now all those houses burned down. I don’t know if any of those other kids survived, and even if they did I don’t know if any of them will live near each other after this.

“Wow! Touching story, Jacob. I find it hard to believe you found a real magic hat, but you believe it, and it’s imbued you with the spirit of sharing with the other kids in your neighborhood, and that’s good enough for me. If you want to find those other kids, why don’t you ask Debbie? I’m sure she’ll be in touch and she might have the contacts to locate them.”

“That’s a good idea, Sam. I’ll try it.”

The next day, Debbie did call, and we talked for a long time about my college plans, giving her enough information to check on things for me and make sure I’d still be able to attend. We also talked about family matters. It seems my family had some insurance, and she was still trying to collect all the information, but before I left for college, she was going to bring me in to sign some more paperwork about that. She also offered me counseling services.

“I also have to mention to you that we have grief counselors available. You seem to be taking this quite well, but if you want to have somebody to talk things over with, someone with more training in this sort of thing than Sam and Marge, I can connect you with someone.”

“I have actually been talking with them about it a bit already. But as I look at it, I was already planning to go off to college and live away from my family, so it’s not as bad for me as it might have been if this had happened, say, a year earlier. I was planning not to see them but a couple times before next summer. Now I have to plan knowing I will never see them again. But I’m dealing with it. I will let you know if I think I need your counselors.”

“OK. I think I get it. It’s a new thing for me, because I don’t think I’ve ever had to deal with this for someone at this stage in their life. But if you start feeling depressed, suicidal, or in any other way feel like you can’t cope with the loss, you call me right away. And if I don’t answer, call the counselors directly. I have put your name on file with them; they will know you and you won’t have to pay anything for their services.”

And she gave me both phone numbers.

“There is actually one other thing you might be able to help me with, Debbie. I’m concerned about the other kids on the block I was friends with. Maybe even more concerned than for my family, because I don’t know if they lived.”

“Sure, Jacob. I can try to locate them, let you know if they are alive or not, and tell them you’d like to contact them if they are. Whether they are alive is a matter of public record. Contacting them, however, requires consent. If you request to contact them, that implies consent on your behalf, but I also need theirs before I can arrange a meeting.”

“OK. Yes, please try to put me in contact with them.”

And I proceeded to give her the names, addresses (or former addresses, I realized, since nobody would live at those locations for at least several months before they rebuilt the houses), approximate ages, phone numbers where I knew them, and any other information I had that might let her find them for me.

Three days later, Debbie called, and let me know she had found all the kids, sort of. “Kevin and Michael McSweeny, your next-door neighbors, both died, along with their entire family. Sarah Bridges also died. Maria Templeton is still alive, though her parents passed away. She is staying with a grown sister in South Carolina.”

I thought to myself, “Many winters they might not even get enough snow down in South Carolina to build a snowman, much less keep it around any length of time. Probably best I keep it.”

Debbie added, “I can arrange a phone meeting with Maria if you like.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. Just tell her I saved the hat.”

“Um, OK. You saved the hat. I will relay the message.”

About a week later, Debbie called again.

“I gave Maria your message. She thanked me, asked about the other kids you already had me look up, and asked me to tell you she hopes you enjoy the hat.”

“Great. Thanks, Debbie.”

“That’s not all. I also collected all the information about your family’s insurance and financial dealings. An accountant here has checked all the details, and I’d like to bring you in to go over everything and sign some papers.”

“OK. I’m not doing anything, so any time.”

“I can be there in 10 minutes to pick you up.”

“OK. I’ll be waiting.”

Going over everything and signing some papers took about two hours, but here’s a summary:

• My parents had a mortgage on their house. They had paid off about half the price, but the house had appreciated in that time, so the remaining debt was only 1/4 of the value the house had before it had burned.
• They had insurance on the house. They had not kept up the insurance value to rising prices, but it would pay off the remaining mortgage and I’d get about $120,000 on top of that.
• They also had life insurance on themselves and a small policy offered through the school on Kendra. These policies would pay about $220,000 in total.
• As the only remaining relative, I would get all this money, and as insurance proceeds, it was 100% tax free.
• Also, after the home insurance paid out, I’d own the plot of land the house was built on. However, because it’s very small and was part of a row of attached houses, rebuilding is complicated. Since I wasn’t planning to live there, the easiest thing was to sell to a developer who could also buy the rest of the block and simplify the adjoining land issues. I agreed, and she said she’d try to set that up for me. She expected to get me $150,000 for the land, an amount which was stunning to me, and as a sale of my primary home this would also be tax free.
• The family’s car was parked on the next block due to limited street parking near the house, and it survived. That would be mine, too, and the Wilsons would store it for me until I got a license.

All told, I expected to have almost half a million dollars within a few months. The life insurance, because it did not have to go through dealings with the house, would pay out first, and I should be able to get an advance payment of about $10,000 before I started college, which meant I had money for buying personal stuff.

And I got a lot of advice how to manage this money; despite the large number, this was not a fortune I could expect to live off of long-term. More medium-term. I should expect this money to cover my expenses in college not covered by scholarships, a hefty down payment on a house after college, and a good cushion for unexpected expenses, but I was still going to have to go get a job like normal people after college. Most of the money was going to be invested for now.

And everything was set up for my entrance into college. Debbie even found me an extra grant for orphans I qualified for because my parents passed away before I started college. The $3000 a year it provided wasn’t a lot, but it filled a gap that would otherwise have been filled with loans or drawing from my insurance proceeds.

Chapter 3: College

The Wilsons drove me to college using both their car and mine, so they could leave mine with me at school, and I could take driving lessons locally using it.

I started classes, and had a cool roommate who was willing to drive me out to stores to get all manner of things I would have brought from home if they hadn’t all burned up.

I didn’t break out Frosty’s hat until Thanksgiving. Nearly everybody was gone from campus by Wednesday evening, so I went out to one of the fields and made a basic snowman, put the hat on it, and caught my old friend up on the changes.

“Frosty, this is the campus of UMass Amherst. I intended to leave your hat with the neighborhood kids after I came here, the few who remained in the neighborhood, anyway, but the whole block burned down last summer. The only kids of our group who survived were me and one who moved to South Carolina. So for now it’s just going to be me, unless I introduce you to some of the other college kids around here, but they didn’t grow up with our tradition and I’m afraid they’d be too freaked out. Maybe I’ll find another group of kids to pass you on to some day, or even have some of my own, but probably for the next four years we’ll be here. Somewhere around here, anyway.”

“Well that’s sad. Thanks for the update.”

“I only built you a basic body because I’m not sure the locals around here are really ready to see an animated snowman, so I’m planning to only keep you until Sunday when people start coming back from Thanksgiving break. But Christmas, and Spring Break if there’s still snow, I’ll bring you back.”

“Thanks, Jacob. A little time is better than none.”

At Christmas I was practically alone on campus for 3 weeks, and I tried out my advanced sculpting techniques. On a cleared patch of blacktop I sculpted a figure of a woman reclining, head raised, out of snow, and put the hat on her head. This kind of body worked much better for Frosty than the traditional three balls plus accessories, and she could move her arms and legs like a person would, instead of hopping around. And I kept her the whole time, even bringing her inside, where she quickly turned to an animated water-woman, but with clean floors, she did not turn to mud. Frosty found a dress in a clothing donation box in the dorm which she could wear, and kept it on most of her remaining time that break. It was another part of Frosty’s magic that the clothes Frosty wears don’t get wet.

Frosty was smarter than you might think. In several decades of winters, Frosty had figured out most of the “people” stuff, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised the first night she was in my room with me.

“Jacob, did you make me female so you could have sex with me?”

“Um, no, Frosty. That wasn’t ever part of my plan.”

“But would you?”

“I could, if you wanted to.”

“Thank you, thank you! Jacob, this is something I have wanted for a very long time, even before I knew you, but it was never a thing I could ask the kids for. I knew that not only was that wrong, but it was likely to get me permanently destroyed by some kid’s parents, especially keeping in mind half their parents played with me as a kid and knew the magic came from the hat.”

“Now wait, Frosty. Do you even have genitals? I know I didn’t sculpt any.”

Frosty lifted up her dress, and I knelt down in front of her. Her watery composition made it hard to tell, but when I looked closely, and felt her, I could tell she was fully anatomically correct. Somehow. Some other part of Frosty’s magic I hadn’t been aware of.

It didn’t work at first because she was too cold. Even though she had warmed to room temperature, a big mass of room-temperature water still feels cold to the touch. Think of a bath without hot water, yow! So I tried to come up with ways of heating her up. Trying to heat her from my body heat would have been way too slow and would have made me shiver for hours.

I came up with the idea of having her “drink” glasses of hot water. She couldn’t really drink it - the water did not merge with the water making up her body, and it dribbled out and made a puddle on the floor - but it transferred some heat to her. This was still too slow, and messy. We tried doing this on a large scale. She took pitchers worth of scalding hot water into the bathroom, the women’s room, of course. After she confirmed it was vacant I went in with her carrying more pitchers. While sitting on a toilet, she drank them down. That sort of worked, but after a dozen pitchers she was still not warm enough.

Ultimately, I just took her into the kitchen and she laid down on the stove with her head (and importantly, the hat) hanging off the end, and I turned on 8 gas burners full blast to heat her up. Once she felt warm to the touch, she hopped down, we turned all that off, and ran to my room where she stayed warm enough for half an hour for us to have sex. I came inside her, and my cum coated the walls of her vagina. It let me see the shape through the water of her body. If there was more than a vagina, I didn’t see it, though.

We did another experiment later where I had Frosty drink milk. This showed that she didn’t have proper internal organs. It was more of a single tube running from mouth to anus. She’d been “peeing” from there because that was the only connection. My guess is that the magic made just enough organs to make things work. For this reason, I figured she could not actually get pregnant; she probably had just a vagina down there, but no uterus and no ovaries, etc. The cum slowly dribbled out, too, and she had to wear my underwear with the crotch stuffed with toilet paper to catch it all for hours afterward. Later on, we figured out she could just sort of hug the radiator for 15 minutes during one of its heating cycles, and that warmed her up enough for sex, instead of all the messy drinking and peeing. So we did it several more times.

Two days before the break ended, people were starting to return to campus, and we agreed it was time for her to leave. Her chosen method of leaving was that I went into a toilet stall with her, she climbed into the bowl, I took off the hat, and her water falling into the bowl all at once caused it to flush. I waved goodbye, though she probably could not see it at that point.

At Spring Break, we still had snow, and I did the same thing, though there were more people still on campus and I had to keep her hidden in my room most of the time. One of the TV shows we saw together was about people making sand sculptures on the beach.

“Frosty, do you think you could animate a body made of sand if I put the hat on it?”

“Probably. It doesn’t have to be snow, but I don’t know the limits.”

Chapter 4: Sandy

By the end of the term, I had determined I wanted to try to live in a single the following year so I could keep Frosty around full time. There were few on campus, so I was looking for an apartment. I had two weeks after the end of classes before I had to move out of the dorms if I was not paying to stay there for the summer. While I could do that and move before the fall, this was the best time to find a semi-permanent space off campus, one I could stay in year-round, as lots of stuff was recently vacated. I did so, and since I’d gotten my license with weekend driving classes throughout the year, I drove my car full of the belongings I’d accumulated to my new home.

I had rented an apartment on the top floor of a three-story building with a private balcony in the back. The balcony was four feet deep and ran the entire twelve foot width of the apartment, with walls separating it from the neighboring balconies. That was what I wanted as a place to build Sandy.

The day after I moved in, I went out and bought a total of 200 pounds of sand in 50-pound bags and carried them inside, up the elevator, to my apartment, and out onto the balcony. Sand was heavier than water, so for the volume of a 120 to 130 pound woman, the smallest I thought I could make her and have her hold together, I needed 160 to 175 pounds of dry sand. I’d wet it down as I built the body, filling in air spaces in the sand, and she’d end up weighing about 250 pounds, but she’d still look like a woman of average size.

I was still doing other move-in things like stocking my fridge with food, so it was three days later before I had time to finish sculpting the first version of her body. But when I did, it worked. Sandy, as I decided was a better name for her in this composition and also because it could be a regular girl’s name, was able to use this body much like she had used the snow body. It didn’t seem to bother her at all that she was twice as heavy as before.

The new body had one significant advantage. Being made of sand rather than snow meant she didn’t “melt” when I brought her inside, and indeed, if I wanted to, I could take the hat off and leave her as a sand sculpture if there was a time I needed to hide her in plain sight. I just had to keep her damp to keep her from falling apart.

There were some issues with the color, though. While I thought the yellowish gray sand would be a good approximation of skin color, it only was if you didn’t look closely. A white person’s skin was actually a lot pinker than this. But pink sand exists, and I was able to buy it in 30 pound bags that cost about what the 50 pound bags of yellow sand cost, so I bought three.

I experimented, removing the hat to turn her into a sand sculpture, replacing patches of her skin with different mixtures of the two types of sand, and ultimately decided a ratio of 15 parts pink to 17 parts yellow worked for most of her body. Ultimately, I rebuilt her entire body using that mixture, with a pinker mixture on her palms and the soles of her feet, and pure pink on the lips. I added glass eyes, fake eyelashes, false teeth, acrylic nails, a wig, and a big floppy straw hat she could wear over the top hat, which would look more like something a woman would wear today. Finally, with all these accessories, Sandy was able to pass as a real woman. All the fake parts became indistinguishable from the real thing when she was animated.

So I took her out shopping for clothes, and I bought her a number of things. She was as flexible as a normal woman, maybe even more in some places, but she couldn’t have anything that would be tight while going on over her head. She had to wear the hat to stay animated and many such garments would not fit over the hat. So no T-shirts or pullover blouses, and no T-shirt-style dresses. Button-up shirts and dresses worked well, as did any kind of dresses she could step into. Sufficiently loose tops worked, as did ones with wide, elasticized necklines that she could step into, even if that wasn’t the intended way to wear them. Leotards were meant to be put on that way, and also worked. Any kind of pants or skirts worked. And I bought her bras, because even though she was made of sand, when she was animated, she did jiggle.

She also found she had a better ability to control her bodily functions in the sand body. She could drink and even eat, and hold it inside her until she wanted to get rid of it, which she could do in something that mostly looked like the natural way, except for the fact that the food wasn’t digested at all. But it flushed, and normally nobody else looked at your shit, so there was no problem. Of course, she didn’t normally need to eat at all, but if she was somewhere that she would be expected to eat something, she could.

She still cooled down to room temperature (or worse, if outside in cold weather), but 10 minutes lying in a steaming hot bath followed by a similar time for the excess water to drip out of her body got her back to a nice temperature for sex. The sand retained the heat for longer, too; one bath session like this kept her warm for hours.

It took most of the summer for us to get all the details right, but once I started going back to classes, she could get along in society like a regular person! I’d go to class, and she’d walk to the store three blocks from my apartment and buy food for the week and whatever else I needed. She did my laundry, and hers; though she didn’t secrete body oils or lose skin cells, any time her hat came off while she was clothed, bits of sand got into the clothes. She made my breakfast in the morning, made my lunch for me to take with me on campus, and made dinner in the evening. She cleaned all the things in the house that needed cleaning, took out the trash, and brought in the mail. She did it all for me, willingly and without me asking her to do it, all as her attempt to repay me for making it possible. For giving her a body that looked like a real person rather than an animated snowman.

Chapter 5: Dating

Having Sandy around made dating weird. I hadn’t anticipated her body working so well. I hadn’t worried about it in the summer because my potential dates were away, but since classes started, the two girls I’d been occasionally dating are both back in school with me, so now what am I supposed to do? I have a great, always willing, live-in sex partner who is 100% devoted to me. Should I tell them I’ve found somebody else?

I took a step back to consider the whole situation. The purpose of dating is either to find a sex partner or a future wife. I didn’t need other sex partners; Sandy was great. What about marriage? Could I marry Sandy? I could certainly take her with me to school events as my date; it was permitted for students to bring non-student dates to those events, and she’d pass as long as I found a way to cover up the hat. Maybe get engaged to her, get her a ring to wear. That would be as good as marriage for most purposes.

I wasn’t sure I could marry Sandy, officially and legally. But engagement is certainly a thing we can do. There are no official requirements for engagement, and we never have to officially get married. To make it look real, all I have to do is buy Sandy a ring. I know some engagement rings with huge diamonds are expensive, but there are more affordable ones, and I was sure Sandy would be overjoyed with any kind of engagement ring at all. Sizing the ring would be easy. When I made Sandy’s hands, I was having trouble getting slender lady fingers to hold together, so I actually made her hands the same size as mine. So if the ring fits me, it’ll fit her.

I thought through all of this on one of my walks home from class one day, and decided that at my first opportunity I’d go buy the ring. So I did, and proposed the first weekend in October.

“Sandy, will you marry me?”

“Yes! Jacob, what a wonderful surprise!”

“I hope you like the ring.”

“Yes, Jacob. It’s beautiful. But I wonder if we can really get married for real.”

“I’m unsure of that, too. But there are no legal requirements to be engaged. If we can’t get married, we can stay engaged, promised to each other, forever. Or the rest of my life, anyway.”

“What would it take?”

“Well, I haven’t checked the specifics, but my main concern is about identity. They probably would want you to produce some document saying who you are. A government issued ID, a birth certificate, something. In order to register the marriage and make it official, you’d probably need something like that.”

“Oh, that exists, somewhere. In the 60s there was a girl who really loved me, more than most of the kids. She was the first to ever build me a girl body and I chose it over other, better-sculpted ones just because nobody had ever given me that option before. In the 70s when she was an adult, but still living in the neighborhood, she registered my birth. Sally O’Roarke was her name.”

“Hmm. I wonder what it would take to find her. I bet somebody in my old neighborhood knows where she lives now.”

I called Debbie, and the Wilsons, and had them hunt for Sally for me. I told them if they found her, to give out my phone number and to tell her it was about the hat. If this woman really had Frosty’s birth certificate, she’d understand what that meant and not question them about it, and just speak to me about it.

About a week later, Sally called me.

“Hi. Jacob? This is Sally O’Roarke.”

“Hi! It’s great to hear from you.”

“The others told me about the fire. You saved Frosty’s hat?”

“Yes. We were still building bodies for Frosty up to the winter before last, though we didn’t really have a next generation of kids to pass it on to, and then the fire messed everything up.”

“That’s amazing the tradition lasted so long, though it is sad it ended.”

“I’ve built a sand body for Frosty now, and I’m calling her Sandy.”

“Her? You built her a female body?”

“I was inspired by a piece of art I saw somewhere, though her body has evolved well beyond the original design. But she lives 24/7 now, and I added a lot of details to make her look like a real woman, and she loves me for it. She does chores for me and other things like a real person.”

“That’s why Sandy told you about me, I guess.”

“Yes, Sandy told me you were the first to ever offer Frosty a female body, and that you even registered her birth.”

“Oh, yeah. About that: I used Frosty as a fake dependent on my income tax for years. I applied for a birth certificate for her one year, and added a social security card when that was required to keep claiming the dependent. Somehow, I never got audited, never had to show she existed. I stopped claiming her as a dependent years ago, since she got too old to be a child anymore, but I have the documents somewhere if you want them.”

“That would be great.”

“I’ll find them. I never thought Frosty would use them for real.”

I gave her my address. It was about two weeks later when the birth certificate and social security card arrived via a certified letter. Reo O’Roarke was Sandy’s official name. In a short note, Sally explained that the name Reo meant “freeze” in Gaelic. That was fine; Reo would be her given name, and Sandy would be her nickname because most people around here were not comfortable with the Gaelic. She loved to play in the sand at the beach as a kid, I could say. (A complete lie, but who cares.) And because Sally had made Frosty female, she had recorded her gender as female on the birth certificate. I realized I had not even asked about that, but fortunately it worked out.

I pointed it out to Sandy. “Reo O’Roarke. Did you know that was your official name?”

“Yes. Sally told me. She was one of the few of the children who knew my secret who stayed in the neighborhood in adulthood and interacted with me at all as an adult. She didn’t actually have any kids of her own, but she called me her daughter, even when the kids had made me male.”

“Wait, were you actually male the rest of the time? Did you have a penis and all?”

“Sometimes. You couldn’t ever see it. The snow that made up my thighs and the other parts of my body down there always concealed it. But sometimes, maybe if the child who built it had really intended to make a man, I did have male parts. Other times I was actually neuter. It didn’t matter to me because I wasn’t going to use those parts, and I never chose one snow-body over another based on whether it was male or neuter. The time Sally made me a female body was the only time I used gender to decide. At that time, I only chose the female body because it was a new choice, something different after so many years as male or neuter, but now that I’ve really lived as female with you this time, I have to say I prefer being female.”

“I didn’t intend what we have now when I built your first female body, but I’m glad you’re female, too. And now there’s nothing preventing us from getting married someday. You’re 41 years old according to your birth certificate and I’m 19, but such marriages are allowed.”

I didn't rush into marriage, though. I stored the documents away until such a time as we needed Sandy to do something official that needed them. I took her to events as my date, she wore my ring, and that was that.

Chapter 6: How Old is She?

One evening, we brought up the idea of having kids. As far as I could tell, having ejaculated in her during sex dozens of times, she could not get pregnant. She didn’t have periods. We knew she had a vagina, but it seemed like that was as far as her reproductive system went. She was 41 now, so if we found a way for her to have kids, it wouldn’t seem impossible; some women had children in their 40s.

I told her, “I think if we have have kids, it will only be a fake one like Sally did, to give you a younger identity to assume decades from now. Because you don’t really age. You’re really older than the 41 your birth certificate claims. The hat wasn’t even new when the kids started using it on a snowman. How old is the hat, anyway? How many years has it been, anyway? Do you have memories from before the kids in the 60s?”

“The 50s. Sally was a child in the 60s, but the kids in your old neighborhood first made me into a snowman in December of 1950.”

“And before that? Where did the hat come from? Do you have any earlier memories?”

“I do. I have never spoken of them since I became Frosty, because the kids only knew me as their snowman, and increasingly, as the snowman of generations of past kids. But I do have memories stretching back to about 1890, a time when hats like this one were in style.”

“Wow. So you’re like 120 years old? Tell me how you got started.”

“A wizard enchanted the hat, and put me on a body made of wood. He’d used some other magic to carve a man-shaped body out of a tree trunk, and used the hat to animate it. I was his servant until he died of old age in the 1930s. His heirs inherited me, and one of them wore me once or twice, and finally sold me with a bunch of the wizard’s other, non-enchanted clothing to a second-hand store. One of the kids bought me to decorate his snowman when he was trying to impress the others. Then, for the first time in 15 years, I was on a body that could be animated.”

“And now, even though I haven’t asked you to, you’ve effectively made yourself my servant, doing whatever you can to try to make my life easier, even while I try to make you my equal. Why? Is it part of your magic that you want to be a servant?”

“Hard to say. It could be. But the worst part of my life the last 60 years or so was not having a body for 6 to 8 months out of every year. I’m alive all that time, but with no body, no sight. I have to be on a body with eyes in order to see. But I hear, all the time. I knew all the things that were going on around me, but I couldn’t participate. And since I knew so much, had learned so much over what is now more than a century of life, it hurt me something terrible to stay isolated, in a closet somewhere, hearing the world around me but otherwise unable to participate in it.”

“Interesting. But good to know. I am sorry that in my first year in college, I only managed to give you a body during the school breaks. But that time is over. Now you have a permanent body and an identity. As long as I have anything to say about it, you’re going to be animated 24/7, 365 days a year. And you don’t have to stay my servant. I intend to make you my wife, which makes us equals. While the marriage oaths say you should serve me, they say I should serve you as well.”

“And you are; you have already served me by building me this body and letting me use it all the time. My original master basically treated me as a slave, and took the hat off the body at night for fear I’d try to escape, or murder him in his sleep, or whatever other calamity he thought I’d cause. And I admit I thought about some of those things, but only because he treated me the way he did. If he had not died in his sleep, while my hat was not on my body, I might still have that body. The kids were innocent, though. When I had a body, they let me stay animated overnight, continuously until it was no longer believable that a snowman would still exist. Even though I didn’t have a body the rest of each year, they gave me one as much as they were capable of, based on their understanding of me.”

“And if I hadn’t had the bright idea after seeing these sand sculpture competitions that maybe your body didn’t have to be made of snow, you might have remained only a snowman to me, too. You should have spoken up sooner.”

“Oops. My fault,” Sandy admitted.

“Did you ever have any other kind of body besides the wooden or snow ones?”

“A few times the wizard put the hat on some other temporary body for some specific purpose. I think my body can be made of any non-living material, but it has to be vaguely humanoid in shape. The basic 3-ball snowman, with stick arms and stones or such for facial features, is probably just barely humanoid enough, and for that I am very grateful, as I might never have been animated again if it wasn’t. The other thing I don’t know, and you narrowly missed a chance with your sister, is whether I can animate a dead person’s body.”

“The thought passed through my mind for a brief moment when I was coming out of the burning house with your hat, but when I saw them loading my sister in the ambulance I forgot about it.”

“You don’t have to try to test this for me, really. If the chance occurs, and if it won’t be too traumatic for you or others to see the dead body animated if it does work, then you can try it, but definitely don’t go looking for a corpse for me to animate.”

“Yes. Of course. I won’t be that macabre. But that reminds me of your 120 years. Think you’ll still be around after I’m gone?”

“Quite possibly so. The wizard also put other enchantments on the hat so it’s not going to rot or fall apart with age. It might get burned, or crushed, or sliced into bits, and some aspect of my consciousness may or may not survive such destruction, but it would likely mean the end of the magic actually working since the hat has to be worn.”

“Now you have me imagining having shredded hat bits scattered on a statue’s head and shoulders constituting wearing it, or embedding the ashes in something else that can be worn. We could only find out by trying it, and again, that’s not something I am going to test on purpose.”

Chapter 7: Generations

Sandy had noticed she still had control of her body for a second or two after I took the hat off when I was reshaping her, while her body was in the process of changing back into sand. So Sandy tested and confirmed that she could move the hat from one body to another, as long as she was close enough to move the hat basically all in one motion.

This was really important. It meant that Sandy had the power to make or modify her own body. For modification, she could make a temporary body, perhaps one suited to sculpting, transfer the hat to it, fix up her primary body, and transfer the hat back. So I set up practice sessions for Sandy, starting by building her a crude second body. This one didn’t have any of the special touches using differently colored sand, nails, hair, etc. but it had arms and legs, hands with fingers, and basic facial features, enough for her to use to modify her other body. And then I let her go at it, using either body to modify the other.

I wasn’t worried about Sandy using this power to leave me. It was more important that she have more abilities to get along without me in case we got separated. She could continue to work on her bodies while I was away at classes. During her practice transferring the hat while I was present, she fumbled once and I had to restore her to life, but after twenty successful transfers in a row I agreed she’d mastered the exchange. And during her practice body modifications, she only made very small changes, lengthening her fingers slightly and narrowing her face slightly.

In the spring, after she was happy with her appearance, I took her down to get an official ID based on her birth certificate. The certificate didn’t have finger or footprints (of course, since there was nobody to get those from!) and she had no prior ID card, so she had to sign a statement that she was Reo O’Roarke. They gave her a temporary one and the permanent one would be sent to us. It was three weeks later when she got her ID.

Meanwhile, in addition to the usual money I gave her for buying food, I gave her a small allowance for anything she needed to improve her body. With this money, she bought a package of modeling clay and some small flexible tubes. I wondered about this, but I saw how she was using them pretty soon. She had opened the lower torso of her body and used the clay to line cavities for her vagina and uterus, made two small clay blobs for ovaries, and used the tubes to make the fallopian tubes. Obviously, she thought that if she explicitly made a full reproductive system, the body would have that system, and she’d be able to get pregnant.

Sure enough, three weeks after she started living in that updated body, she had a period. I wasn’t ready to have children yet, but now it seemed like we could, and we had to use protection with sex. Or else I just had sex with her other body, which did not have these parts. That was what we actually did most nights.

And it meant I needed to buy tampons. Or Sandy did. She bought most of the household supplies anyway, so I just told her to get whatever she needed. We were worried a bit when Sandy’s period didn’t come again a month after the first one, but it showed up later, about 6 weeks after the first one. This made me suspect that only time she spent animating that body counted toward its period, and I set up a log for her to record exactly when she was in each body. Using our best estimates of when each period began, this showed 28 days, 4 hours between the starts of her second and third periods, which was very much what we would expect, so I treated this assumption as valid. It meant that if she got pregnant, she’d have to spend 9 months in the pregnant body before she could give birth, assuming her pregnancy ran like a normal human one.

Sandy and I married a week after I got my degree. We tracked down and invited the family of Maria Templeton, the other survivor of the fire that killed my parents and sister and most of our neighbors, in addition to several of the other kids I’d competed with building snowmen who had moved away before the fire, and my temporary foster parents the Wilsons, and shared Sandy’s story with all of them.

We waited until after I started a job and we’d moved into a house before we allowed Sandy to get pregnant. And by that time she was happy with her main body, and we left the other one on the back porch as a sculpture. Except for putting the hat on that body to allow Sandy to move it easily, she didn’t use it anymore and stayed full time in her main body. And that was important; it meant when she did get pregnant it would only go 9 months, not 13 or so.

It worked. Her next period did not come on schedule, and though she did not experience every symptom some pregnant mothers did, she grew in the expected way months down the line. It was unfortunate that Sandy could not go through all the care pregnant mothers did. We did some of it, but a lot of it didn’t make sense, or would show how Sandy wasn’t actually human.

Our solution was that we moved away from the standard health care system for Sandy, and instead procured the services of a midwife. That allowed us to pick and choose exactly which services to participate in, and when we decided to let her in on the fact that Sandy wasn’t completely normal, we only had to explain it to this one woman. While she might think we were a little kooky, I am sure she had other eccentric patients who were equally convinced they weren’t normal in some way. Whatever the case, she accepted it without argument.

Fortunately, nothing went wrong, and the home birth we had set up worked like it did for any other woman. Mostly, anyway. The midwife noted how when Sandy’s water broke, much less of it came out of her than it did for a normal woman and it seemed to seep out slowly, still dripping even after the birth was complete. But we had an apparently normal daughter, who we named Sally, after the woman who had unwittingly made it possible for us to get married.

One of the many things Sandy had done to her body to make it more realistic before she put her other body to rest for good was to install what she hoped worked as milk ducts. She’d gotten some microtubes that were being discarded unused by some department at the university and cut them into 2 to 4 inch lengths, bundling one end together to terminate just beneath the “skin” covering her nipple and the other ends spread throughout the breast. Of course, nothing happened until near the end of her pregnancy, but her breasts enlarged during pregnancy like a normal woman’s would and we confirmed milk production in the final weeks. And we confirmed it was milk and it stayed milk once separated from her body. So she was able to breast-feed Sally from the first day of her life.

And fortunately, everything worked normally. Sally never turned to sand, exuded sand from her body, nor had any other strange symptom any different from what a normal human baby would undergo. We chose not to have any more children, and were happy we could have the one. Sally was perfectly normal, and developed in exactly the way a girl should.

It took the infant Sally to finally test the destruction of the hat. At some point while Sandy was caring for her daughter, Sally managed to knock the hat off Sandy’s head, and by the time I found out, Sally had sat on the hat and crushed it. Fortunately, the crushed hat still activated Sandy’s body, and we took the opportunity to embed the crushed hat more fully inside other hats Sandy could wear.

I never registered a fake birth for Sandy to have a new life. Things were too computerized, with too many checks, and it wouldn’t have worked the way it did in the 70s. But we found the opportunity after Sally grew up.

Sally turned out to be lesbian, in an era when that was accepted better in society than it ever had been. She married another woman named Debra, who we at some point let in on Sandy’s secret. Sally got pregnant with donated sperm, and arranged a home birth, with Debra and Sandy and me present. But Sally’s son was stillborn, and when Sandy realized that, she suggested, “Put my hat on him.”

We finally got the chance and confirmed that a corpse worked to activate the hat. Sandy decided to stay in the new body and let her old one be retired, and didn’t mind that she was male again. Sally and Debra registered their son’s birth under the name Sandy, since that worked as a boy’s name, too, and we prepared to allow Sandy to live a new life as a child.

That wasn’t without some complications. The hat was too big for Sandy to wear all the time, but in the decades Sandy had been using it continuously, it had been crushed and ripped and reconstructed a few times. Debra sewed it into something like a bib, which the child could wear to stay animated by Sandy. It also turned out that he didn’t grow normally, and stayed the size of the stillborn corpse, so we ended up burying the corpse and using a series of sand sculpture bodies to allow the new Sandy to appear to grow normally. Debra modified the hat into several other garments to keep those bodies animated, ultimately making it into a beaded necklace with a cross attached, a religious artifact nobody would question if Sandy wore it 24/7. And Sandy enjoyed his childhood. While the years as a snowman were sort of like a childhood, playing with all the kids, he knew there was a lot more he missed, and he was glad to get the chance to experience it properly.

Pansy, a granddaughter of Maria Templeton, had become enamored of the whole Sandy story, and even more so after meeting him when we had a reunion of many of the Frosty families on the occasion of another wedding. Sandy and Pansy eventually got married. Sandy designed a detailed male reproductive system for his body which proved to work as well as the female one had two generations earlier. I lived long enough to see my great-granddaughter born to them, and I trusted these future generations to do right for Sandy.