Page 1 of Knottingley Ever After
Prologue
~IRIS~
Five Years Earlier…
The puck rockets toward me like a small black sin, and I drop to my knees.
Pads slam ice. Glove snaps shut. Leather, rubber, and the dullthumpof vulcanized whatever-the-hell-pucks-are-made-of biting into the palm of my catcher.
The arena holds its breath.
So do I.
The world narrows to the smell of cold; that scorched, mineral bite of fresh ice that lives in the back of my throat like spearmint and metal, and the burn of frozen sweat plastered to my forehead beneath the helmet.
Then the siren screams.
It detonates above the rink, a shrieking, glorious wail that meansovertime is dead, the puck didn’t cross, we did the impossible.
Knottingley.
Tiny, half-frozen, perpetually overlooked Knottingley.
We just took down a bigger league team.
The crowd loses its collective mind. Sound crashes against the glass in a tidal wave I feel through the soles of my skates, vibrating up through my shin pads into my chest cavity, where my heart has decided it’s a snare drum auditioning for a hardcore band.
I stay frozen for a beat longer because if I move, I might cry, and Iris O’Shea does not cry on national broadcasts.
Iris O’Shea cackles, chirps, throws elbows, and occasionally bites if a defenseman gets a little too generous with his stick. She does not weep into her chest protector during a televised game.
I yank my mask up.
Cold air slaps me. Sweet, sharp, beautiful Yorkshire arena cold, with that under-layer of damp concrete and old popcorn grease from the snack stand that I have loved since I was four years old and my dad first dragged me to a peewee scrimmage.
“OFFICIAL!” someone roars from the bench.
Then they hit me.
The whole bloody team.
A wall of pale blue and white jerseys collides with my crease like an avalanche dressed in laundry detergent and adrenaline. I get tackled, hugged, slapped, and very nearly motorboated by Pete, our right wing, who screams“O’SHEA! O’SHEA! O’SHEA!”directly into my helmet vent.
“Pete, your breath smells like the inside of a hockey bag and a bad decision?—”
“IRIS, WE’RE GOING TO THEFUCKING SHOW!”
“Not if you give me second-hand chlamydia from your mouth first!”
He cackles, picks me up by the chest protector, and shakes me like a Polaroid.
The smell of him is a full sensory assault: stale Lynx body spray, peppermint Gatorade, the specific dampness of syntheticunder jersey baked in his own glory, and that yeasty, sour-sweet locker-room funk that no detergent has ever conquered.
It’s home.
…and also disgusting.
I love it.
