Over the years I have made some art-by-mail subscriptions, in which the subscriber would get one book every three months for a year. I always planned them in advance, and created a holder for the set. For example, The Hand Correspondence had handmade envelopes that tied together in a bundle; Catching a River had a mesh slipcase; The Lending Library was a flag book with library pockets that held the bookettes. In The New York Review of Books, in 2003, I read about the phenomenon of "critical opalescence," where, at 374 degrees Fahrenheit, water is neither a liquid nor a gas but is somewhere between them, creating a shimmering sparkle. I knew this had to be a book. Critical Opalescence, then, became an art-by-mail subscription, each book titled with a number (3, 7, or 4) and a condition of water: Ice, Tears, Ocean. The stand-alone stories contain amusements, coincidences, and reflections – events, that seemed to be in-between fiction and nonfiction, on the border of believability. I'm posting one at a time.
Here is Critical Opalescence: Ice. The stories take place at the ice skating rink.
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