Today, December 17, Birta had hauled the coffeepot off its perch to wipe at the brown circular stain that marred the bows and cherubs. She scrubbed at the gummy plastic with a steel-wool sponge, then used a cloth to wipe away the debris, then attacked the same spot with the sponge again.

  The store around her was close and humid with the breath and sweaty coats of townsfolk clustered at the three tables to the left of the register. At one table, Talía Dittósdottir flipped through a book catalog and wrote down titles on a notepad, muttering names and authors; at the next table sat Kai Baldursson and Haddur Jonnisson, engaged in a loud discussion about the young men in the fishing cooperative, who had left that morning to hike up the mountain and hunt a reindeer herd for the ritual.

  “We’ve always found one in time before, and this is the fifth time it’s come in my lifetime, so I don’t see why we wouldn’t catch one again,” Kai said.

  “God’s will is God’s will,” muttered Haddur.

  Haddur’s son was Egill, Birta’s most recent boyfriend, who had become involved with the American military and left for that country more than five years ago.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t go with him,” Magret still said sometimes. “You’ve always wanted to travel.” And Birta couldn’t explain to her that she didn’t want to go to America as the accessory to Egill’s journey. She didn’t want to bring a piece of Fiskurfjörður with her into the wider world. She wanted her departure to be hers and hers alone, even if that meant her departure would never come.

  She knelt down, her bony knees smarting against the hard floor, to gain leverage in her fight against the dirty tablecloth. She gripped her sponge tight between thumb and forefinger, attacked the stain.

  “Birta.” Ingrid, who had once been one of Birta’s closest friends, turned around from the third table. Ingrid’s two children, straw-haired twins, played on the floor at her feet. She had dyed her hair again, a strange magenta color that Birta understood from magazines was popular in the Soviet Union. “Did you hear what Haddur just said? ‘God’s will is God’s will.’”

  “Do you take issue with that?” Haddur set down his coffee cup so it sloshed onto the table.

  “The more powerful will belongs to those folks down in Reykjavik who paved the fjord-road. They did that since that last ghost winter. You can’t tell me that that road didn’t drive the reindeer further back into the moorland. If we end up without a skull, I say we should blame—Kathinka!” She set down her coffee and scooped up her daughter from the floor. “Do not put that in your mouth,” she cried. She pulled a kroner from between the girl’s lips. “Birta. Birta. Did you see this? Someone left this on the floor. How dangerous. Don’t you sweep under here?”

  “Ingrid, you’re a schoolteacher. Surely you have kids putting much worse in their mouths every day.”

  Ingrid huffed. “Kathinka could have choked.”

  “I’m glad she didn’t.”

  Ingrid stared at Birta for a second; Kai and Haddur had gone silent, staring at the steaming mugs in their chipped-nail hands. Then Ingrid sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just worried.” She hugged Kathinka close to her chest, and Kathinka pummeled Ingrid’s shoulder with one little fist, trying to push her away. Ingrid stroked her daughter’s hair and looked at Birta as though waiting for her to say, “I’m worried too.” Birta only gave Ingrid a tight smile and returned to the coffee stain. She had wiped away ten percent of it, she estimated. She gave the tablecloth another swipe.

  A breath of cold air as the door swung open, and Magret entered, her breath rasping with the cold. She had a towel over her shoulder and carried a duffel bag, a hot pink one she’d purchased when they were twelve. Now its strap was frayed, and duct tape bolstered one of the seams.

  “Ten laps today,” she announced to Birta and Ingrid. Her cheeks were bright, her breath labored. “That’s the most I’ve done in two years.” She coughed.

  Birta slid a mug beneath the coffeepot, filled it, and handed it to Magret, who sipped, her eyes watering. When they were children, the town had raised money for and built a 25-meter pool in the community center to comply with the new government regulations about swimming lessons. Within a few months, Magret had become the best swimmer in Fiskurfjörður. She had won the school backstroke competition every year, and was always selected to demonstrate the proper way to haul an unconscious person through the water: Birta remembered many long afternoons, when she longed to go flip through magazines and dream of the land beyond the mountain, or of Reykjavik and New York and Paris and Rome, which she instead spent on her back, her eyes closed, Magret cradling her limp body from one side of the pool to the other.

  But Magret hadn’t had that kind of stamina for ten years, since her breathing problems had started when they were twenty-two, and Birta didn’t understand why her friend still insisted on swimming several times a week.

  “Oh, Magret, will you take her?” Ingrid lifted Kathinka up high, and Magret set down her coffee and seized the grasping little girl. Magret cooed, presented the girl with her finger, even though Birta knew for a fact that Magret disliked children.

  “Aren’t you a sweet girl,” Magret said, petting the child’s head, bouncing her on her hip. “Birta,” she said, as Birta worked away on the stain. “Birta, has your mother come by? I ran into her at the community center.”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “Well, she told me that Hanna Gerðursdottir came all the way down here from that sheep farm her husband owns half an hour up the fjord to tell us that her husband had an ewe that went off and he had to shoot it, so, there’s our sheep skull for the ritual.”

  “Oh,” said Birta, and suddenly, she wanted to cry.

  “We need someone to drive up there and get it.” Magret glanced around, at Ingrid, who had never learned to drive, at Kai and Haddur, whose eyesight was too bad for the journey, even though they would never admit it. “You need to do it, Birta.”

  “I’m working.” Birta dropped her sponge. “Can’t it wait until later, when we close up?”

  “Drive up the fjord-road after dark? Asphalt doesn’t make it magic. Come on, go now and you’ll be back in an hour. I’ll watch the counter for you.”

  Birta no longer wanted to cry. Instead, she wanted to take Magret by the shoulders and shake her.

  But Kai, Haddur, Ingrid, and even Talía were watching her, and so she rummaged in the drawer under the register until she found the spare keys to the village’s one motor vehicle: an ancient pick-up truck, olive green, technically owned by the fishing cooperative but free for all town business. She stepped outside into the drowsy dusk of mid-afternoon and walked down towards the steeple of the church and Aron Bjartursson’s house, where they kept the trunk, since Aron knew a little bit about machinery. To her right lay the slate fjord, which cut into the sere grasses, with the flat town on the slight slope behind her, and then, on the other side of the fjord, the low, jagged mountains. The wind buffeted against her, catching her in the middle so she had to double over, whisking strands of hair out of her ponytail.

  She reached the pickup, swung inside, started the raspy engine, crawled out of town. She had learned to drive when she was sixteen, one of the few in Fiskurfjörður who had ever been behind the wheel; her father had asked her to learn so she could transport traps and nets and tools around the village. She had discovered that she liked driving: sometimes, on the straight stretches along the fjord, she pressed the gas pedal, hard, and shifted into a higher gear, and watched the scrubbed hillside speed up until she could barely tell rock from tree from sky.

  At the farmer’s house she climbed out of the truck, rubbing her hands together. She knocked on his door and waited, watching three birds lifting off his roof. The air was too cold for her to smell the sea a hundred meters away. The farmer’s yard was messy, tires stacked in the corner, a single ram, loosed from the barn, staring at her with doleful eyes.

  Her father had kept sheep for a few years when she was young, before he’d joined the fishing cooperative. One year, an ewe grew pregnant in February. Its belly swelled, and Birta remembered running her fingers through its fur, which was matted with frozen clumps of dirt that she and her mother trimmed out every Saturday. But in April, when the lambs should have arrived, the ewe began to stink. The stink crept through the stables, through the farm yard, through the metal walls of their house. It sank into Birta’s sheets, which were faded and patterned with sprigs of lavender; she smelled it when she fell asleep, and when she woke in the morning.

  It turned out that the lambs were rotting inside the ewe, poisoning her. Her father shot it one night in the sleet, but Birta remembered a few hours before that, in the stable, when she watched a leg, topped by a perfect dark hoof, jut out from inside the ewe. Her father snapped the leg off in his hand.

  The farmer answered the door. She remembered him: his name was Kristjan, and he had been a year above them in school. Magret had had a hopeless crush on him for about three years. “You’re Birta Einarsdottir, right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Kristjan handed her a bulky tarpaulin. “This one fought,” he told Birta, as he handed it to her. “My wife and I had to hold it down together.”

  Another memory of her family’s sheep-keeping days: holding down sheep while her father held a gun to their heads and their eyes roiled, showing the crescent whites. She used to cry out “I’m sorry” right before her father pulled the trigger. Her parents always looked at each other, knowingly, as though they were both sure she would outgrow this pity, as though the day would come when she realized that this was just a part of life, like so many things were just a part of life. She wondered, now, if that day would come soon, if, for example, she would wake up on her next birthday transformed, the things she still cared about, the things she hadn’t give up on, suddenly all stripped away, like turpentine stripping away the gummed-up paint on a badly winterized boat.

  She handed Kristjan five kroner for the sheep skull and carried it back to the truck.

  There was one night, more than half her life ago, now, when Birta had showed herself too baldly. People had forgotten, or if they remembered, they waved their hands, dismissive (teenage girls), but Birta remembered, and so, she suspected, did Magret. It happened the December they were fifteen, when the spoons spun and the fish came up dead and for the second time in their lives Fiskurfjörður began to prepare for the ghost.

  “I think we should go see it,” Birta said to Magret, and to Ingrid and Emma, another classmate. Emma was smoking a cigarette; her father had let her smoke ever since she was thirteen. She offered one to Birta, and Birta took it, clicked the lighter three times before it ignited, and inhaled. She knew cigarettes were supposed to make you feel a certain way, but they didn’t work on her. She had discovered that plenty of activities that other people used to satiate the wild dark parts inside themselves didn’t work on her. Last week, she had officially become the first of her friends to lose her virginity, to Ólafur Jonsson in his bedroom. He was two years ahead of them in school, and had flirted with Birta for six months, bringing her drinks at the parties along the fjord in summer, waiting for her and Magret when they came out of the changing rooms at the public pool, pulling off her shirt and unhooking her bra in the narrow twin bed in her bedroom at her parents’ house. The day they had sex was the first time she saw his house. In the kitchen, he poured her a mug of coffee, which was brewed from special beans his father had received as a gift from cousins in Bergen. She thought it was too sweet, but she decided that she enjoyed it anyway; she had never had coffee from Norway before. In the bedroom, she studied the unadorned walls, painted the color of old eggshells; the square bureau, indistinguishable from her own; the stack of worn schoolbooks in the corner, battered and used by generations of students. The one decoration in the room was an Air France poster, showing a plane circling a lit-up monument in Paris. It was a fold-out from a magazine that Birta knew her mother was selling down at the store; they put those posters in all the magazines, now that the war had ended and Europe wanted visitors again. The creases in the poster were still visible.

  Ólafur closed the door; Birta had already climbed onto the bed. Before that afternoon, she had wondered if this was how adults tamped down their sense that life was unfair, cruel and boring, stove off their restlessness, their dreams of storms at sea, and gale-winds down the mountain, and snows so heavy that the winds couldn’t whip them away. But afterwards, she turned her eyes to the window, and had to hold her shirt over her mouth to hide the fact that she was laughing.

  “Come on,” Birta said to her friends. She dropped her cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with the heel of one of her galoshes. “Nobody’s seen the ghost before—”

  “—because we’ve always done the ritual.”

  “Please.” Birta couldn’t put into words why she wanted to go so badly. She didn’t understand it herself. It was more of a feeling than a thought. But if Emma, Magret and Ingrid said no, she would lie down on the pavement right now and let her body, already exhausted with the cold, grow numb. She wanted them to say yes more than she had ever wanted anything.

  At that age, Birta was the most persuasive of the four of them, and her obsessive nature and blunt brashness were considered charming, rather than annoying, as they were now. She charmed her friends into agreeing, even Magret, for this was the time in their lives when Magret had swung the farthest towards Birta’s curiosity and dissatisfaction, if only because Magret at that age was so pliable that Birta could usually badger her into anything.

  That night they snuck out of the village, their pale hair hidden by over-large hats knitted by their mothers, their hands snug in mittens, the wind tossing up their coat-hems and showing their woolen pants. Halfway along the pasture road towards the mountain, Magret slipped and nearly fell, but Birta and Emma caught her, and they all skidded for a moment on the ice, and one of them shrieked and the others shouted at her to be quiet. They had stolen sips of vodka for warmth, and it made them silly and loud. Birta wondered whether it was right to drink it, whether it made their pilgrimage to see the ghost less sacred. As they walked, she imagined them crossing the mountain, reaching the high moor on the other side, with its cairns of gray rock, the snow scuttling across its dead grasses, the reindeer with their eyes lurid in the dark. She imagined—

  The headlights of the truck, newly acquired the previous year, arced on the road behind them. It turned out that Magret’s mother had noticed her absence, and had hurried to Birta’s house, where her father was chiseling ice out of the pathway. They caught the four girls before they even reached the mountain and brought them back. It was for the best, Magret and Emma and Ingrid decided. They might have gotten lost up there. They might have seen the ghost, and what then? Yes, it was definitely for the best.

  “Do you really think so?” Birta said. Probably, they answered. Which, as the years went by, became definitely, and then, why are you still asking us about this, Birta? She stopped asking. That youthful night was smoothed over by seasons of fishing and farming, by ponies born and ancient horses sent off to the factory down in Vik. The clothes that had fit them as teenagers were given away to friends to give to their children as those children aged into their second decades and Birta and her friends aged into their fourths. But Birta still knew, and Magret still knew, that if Magret could travel back to that night, she would stop the girls from ever leaving their houses, while Birta would cut the engine in the truck, ice up the road, stop the adults from following them out of Fiskurfjörður, urge her friends up the mountain, tell them to go, go, go.

  Now, the twenty-first of December, only two hours and thirty-three minutes of daylight, and just in time, Fiskurfjörður was prepared. The three skulls, stripped of flesh and fur, were laid out on sheepskin, surrounded by the fishers and the shopkeepers and cashiers, the teachers and everyone who worked at the community center, the pastor and the farmers from just outside town.

  Birta sat back from the crowd on the single step leading up to the shuttered general store, leaning her elbows on her knees. She was sitting behind her parents, and watched her mother holding her father’s elbow, while he held a bottle of vodka, his cheeks round and affable and heavy-veined. She watched their mouths moving, her mother’s quick, her father’s slow and considered, watched the wind whip their words away. Someone in the center of the crowd announced something and in response came hard applause, like rain.

  Magret tapped her on the shoulder. She must have just come down from her house, because her cheeks were ruddy, and she was wheezing, slightly, her breath catching in her chest as it always did when she walked too fast.

  “Don’t forget to get your fragment,” Magret said, sitting on the step next to Birta.

  “I’ll get it in a little bit,” Birta said. “Do you have yours?”

  “Not yet. But . . . ” Magret muttered something under her breath.

  “What? Couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said,” Magret cleared her throat, a phlegmy scrape. “I said I’m not worried about myself forgetting, so-called forgetting, I should say, to get it.”

 

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