The Dark Issue 59, page 7
Birta was quiet. What could she say? Magret already knew that Birta thought that there was something about her smooth life that begged to be cracked open like an egg. Magret wanted Birta to repudiate those parts of herself, to admit that she was wrong. Why? Why did Magret care so much?
“You know,” Birta said, fast, before she could regret it, “you know, maybe I won’t do it. Maybe I won’t put the shard under my house. What do you think would happen? Do you think the ghost would get us?”
“Unbelievable,” Magret said.
“What?” Birta said. “You can honestly tell me that you don’t want to know? I know you wondered about it when we were teenagers. You came with me up the mountain. You mean to tell me you’ve never wondered about it again, not once, since we were kids?”
Magret seized her hand. “It’s winter, Birta. There are children in Fiskurfjörður.” She dropped Birta’s hand. “It’s time for you to stop acting like one of them.”
A crash, and a cheer. The skulls were shattered, and Birta watched the crowd surging forward, saw people bend, rumps in the air, to retrieve the white shards gleaming on the pavement. Talía Dittósdottir nearly tipped over and had to be caught, set back on her feet, to laughter and applause.
Birta stood up, pushed through the crowd, and picked up a shard, a small one. She didn’t bother to see which animal it had come from. She stormed past Magret and headed up through the village, past the silent houses and the store and the community center. The mountain hulked against the starry sky, silent, unknowable.
Back at her house, she scrabbled at her foundation, jammed the shard into the frozen dirt, and used her boot-toe to cover it back up. She fed her ponies and forked hay over the boards, which had grown messy again. She ran her hands over their cold noses. Then her tasks were done and the longest night lay ahead of her.
She imagined going inside to her drowsy heat, her Advent calendar, her sliced bread and cheese in the fridge. She regarded her front door. The Christmas wreath, adorned with little plastic black cats, shivered in the wind.
She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and set out towards the iced-over road to the mountain. She was already wearing her crampons, after all.
It didn’t take her long to cross the pasture, and before she knew it, she was climbing the road where it cut steeply upwards. She tromped up the ice-slicked dirt, towards the stars, towards the moor, and she realized that she had made it further than they ever had as teenagers. No one had stopped her. No one could stop her. She had gotten away with it, she thought, childishly, and glad to be childish again.
And yet, all in a rush, she wished Magret were with her, wished they had climbed up here together, giggling. She wished Magret still wanted to do secret, wild things, or that Birta could still convince her to do them. She wished they were side-by-side.
But that was impossible. Birta walked faster, her crampons clenching on ice. Where was the ghost? Would she see it lurking on the moor once she crossed the pass? As she climbed higher on the road, snow scuttled across her path, sticking to the front of her coat. She wouldn’t climb much longer. Soon, she would return to her village and her house, slip inside to her scalding coffee, her scratchy radio, the preserves she had made in autumn. Just a little longer. Just a little longer. She turned to face the wind.
Magret knew what Birta was about. She saw her friend pick up her fragment, fast, and practically run away from the village center. Magret lurked on the edge of the crowd, the smoke from the candles stinging her eyes and sticking in her hair, watching as Birta disappeared behind the houses. She accepted a skull-fragment, handed to her by Gunnar’s cousin, Jon, and studied it in the single streetlight: she thought, from its thin, delicate shape, that it had shattered off the reindeer skull.
Magret slipped the shard into the interior pocket of her coat, the secret pocket that you were supposed to use to hide money or your passport if you ever went to Reykjavik or abroad, which you never did. Then she struck out away from the square where the roads crossed in the heart of town and headed towards her house. She stopped to bury the shard—she cared about the village, after all, not like some people. One of her fingernails broke inside her glove as she scrabbled in the frozen dirt, and the pain made her bite her tongue. She flung dirt over the shard, thinking about Birta, her oldest friend, who had turned out so selfish, Birta, who, it seemed, had never really grown up. Birta, who Magret had had to look after, all their lives. She remembered the first ritual, how Birta had shoved her hand into the skull, how Magret herself had wanted to be the one to sprint forward and yank Birta’s hand to safety.
Magret finished burying the shard, stopped inside for her warmer sweater, and then walked out into the pasture. There was a lull in the wind as she drew away from the fjord, but once she reached the flat stretch of road leading towards the mountain, the wind ripped at her, furious. She looked up and the sky was brilliant with stars, and on the horizon curled the beginning of the Aurora. But then she almost slipped on the iced-over road, and so she watched her feet, and when she looked up again, the wind had scuttled clouds across the sky, and she smelled snow up ahead.
Birta thought she was the only one who had ever imagined trailing the ghost over the mountain and onto the moor. This was partly Birta’s fault, but partly Magret’s own. When Magret caught her friend, she would grab her, shake her by the shoulders, and shout at her: do you really think anybody ever stops chafing against pettiness or cruelty or plain boredom? That anybody is able to relinquish their secret dreams, their occasional murderous thoughts? Who leaves behind the child’s wickedness, the teenager’s rebellion, forever?
Magret kept walking, and the road started to rise beneath her boots. This was an old road, not like the proud new one along the fjord. It was unpaved, and completely frozen: the rainstorms earlier this month had dumped water onto the dirt and it had turned to ice, inches thick. She could only find traction in the spots where snow had blown onto the ice and stuck in bumps and crenelations. More snow was falling now, dotting the shoulders of her blue wool coat—she had ordered it, last year, and she remembered the rush of pride she had felt when she lifted it from the box, and she had shrugged into it in her lonely bedroom and twirled around, once, as though she were thirteen years old.
Her boot slipped out from beneath her, and she fell, hard, onto the ice. Her palms smarted, even through her gloves, but then the cold took over and she could no longer feel them. She glanced around, on all fours, then remembered that a shallow ditch ran alongside this road, between dirt and mountain. She climbed towards the ditch on all fours, and started climbing up again, securing her hands and knees on the patches of dirt and grass sticking up through the ice. Her knee crashed through a thin-iced puddle, soaking her pants and smarting her skin, but she kept going. The falling woolly flakes stuck to the ice and blew onto her arms as she climbed.
Was she any different from Birta? She wasn’t sure anymore. Wouldn’t it have been wise to go to the other people in town, to tell them where her friend had gone? To find someone who knew how to drive that sturdy truck with the chains on its tires? To at least put on crampons? They should have gone for Birta together, a proper search party, villagers with torches to drive the ghost back.
And yet here she was, crawling up the ice alone, against the snow, against the wind. She thought about her husband, Gunnar, and how people in town said that fishermen were heroes of the land and soldiers of the sea. How impressive, how brave, that they chose to risk their lives.
She remembered how capable she had been in the pool when she was young, how she had held Birta’s rubbery shoulders, buoying her from shallow end to deep and back again. When she was a girl, she had always imagined that she would save Birta from drowning someday, emerge from the fjord with her friend’s salt-and-water-logged body cradled in her arms. But she had lost her strength before she could do anything like that. Until tonight. She heaved herself up, and she imagined herself a heroine.
That night, while Birta walked onto the snow-whipped moor, and Magret pulled herself up the road, the ghost crept into Fiskurfjörður. It slipped past the two women searching in the dark. It brushed their shoulders, but they didn’t see it in the snow. It crawled across the pastures, past the sere grasses and the frozen marshes, towards the village with its candles glowing in every window. It had visited here every winter, no matter whether the spoons spun or the fish died, no matter whether these jolly, frightened, secretive people smashed animal skulls or not.
The ghost floated down the village’s main street, past mailboxes and cottages, trailing on the road behind itself. It slipped into the community center, floated over the empty, unlit pool, brushed against the photograph of the townsfolk gathered at the groundbreaking ceremony twenty years ago. It headed towards the fjord, slipped into the closed-up general store, touched the cans and boxes and empty tables with their chairs just slightly askew, passed over the tablecloth, which was still marred by a half-circle of coffee stain.
It crept under Birta’s lintel, ruffling her troll banner, slinking through her furry slippers, touching the TV she’d left on. It passed to Birta’s parents’ house, touched the cheek of Birta’s mother, asleep in the dark, and of her father, lying awake next to her, the vodka wearing off, wondering whether his daughter would ever be happy. It passed Haddur Jonnisson and Kai Baldursson playing cards in Jonnisson’s kitchen, each heartily proposing another game, and then another. Neither of them wanted to keep playing, but neither wanted Baldursson to have to venture out into the dark alone, tonight of all nights. It passed Ingrid, sitting with her twins, sucking on a piece of licorice, even though she had always hated the flavor. It passed Talía Dittósdottir flipping through the book catalog, hoping she’d be able to order some next year. It pressed a finger against a shard of skull sticking out from a frozen foundation, and it slipped into Magret’s house, passed a hand over the chipped mugs she had left in the sink.
It stroked the sleeping cheeks of fishermen and children and pastors and fathers, as it always did when the sun fled south. It felt their skin grow colder at its touch, and sadness clutched at it, while outside, the wind blew and blew and blew.
Originally published in Black Static, Issue 72, November-December 2019.
Emily B. Cataneo is a writer and journalist from New Hampshire and currently based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Nightmare, SmokeLong Quarterly, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Interzone, and her debut collection was released in May 2017. She is the co-founder of the Redbud Writing Project, an adult education creative writing school in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches classes on fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and more. In addition to writing, reading, and teaching, she likes history, crafts, plants, and dogs. Visit her website at emilycataneo.com.
Cover Art: “Carrie (Second Cover)”
Tomislav Tikulin lives in Zagreb, Croatia, and has worked for various magazine and book publishers all over the world, including Analog, Asimov’s, Cemetery Dance, F&SF, PS Publishing, Solaris Books, Subterranean Press, and many others. More of his art can be found at tomtikulin-art.com.
Octavia Cade, The Dark Issue 59
