by Mark Morris
At the end of those four minutes, though, he was gone. Gone. The core of him, the spirit, the equivalent of the whatever-of-Cindy-that-remained-behind: his went. She never saw him again, neither hide nor ectoplasmic hair. And Lordy, wasn’t that so unfair? That he got to disappear and she had to hang around here like she’d done something bad? Stuck forever in detention after school.
Cindy.
She can’t even remember her own name, but she remembers that one.
It’s as good as any.
They’ll be coming soon. It’s about time. That’s right, she thinks, remembering now, pieces and remnants.
Friday night was always dance night.
They all used to come out here, the kids, drunk and high, brave as crazed ’coons. They didn’t think too much at all, just following primal urges, dark desires and yearnings with no consideration of whether getting what they wanted was a good idea. She’s pretty sure she didn’t get anything good for her, but the memories are still not there, not properly. It’s just flickering screens like a ruined film, a flipbook of figures: her, two boys, a case of beer. She doesn’t want to look, she decides.
The clouds shift and the moon shows her own face, just a sliver, just a hint.
Cindy shakes her head; doesn’t see a lot of folk here nowadays, though. None, really, to be precise. Too far outside of town, there are other places, better places, more comfortable for getting into trouble. Sometimes boys and girls used to come, though − that boy who ran into the tree, and gave her a name, and who she’d have left alone if he’d not behaved so badly, but he’d wandered in that night, that one night, and well... there you go. She didn’t encounter too many girls once upon a time, but behaviours changed, oh yes they did, and for a while young women used to hide out, smoke, drink, what-have-you. Cindy listened a lot when they talked, curious and bemused. Apparently equality meant behaving as badly as men, rather than setting an expectation that they behave better. But she’d never bothered the girls; figured they’d got enough shit to deal with on their own without her adding to matters. Cindy shakes her head; the only true equality they’ve got is death.
Lordy, Lordy, when did she become a philosopher?
About ten years after you died, says a voice in her head, ten years of sitting alone in a bone orchard talking to yourself.
“There’s no one else around,” she says aloud. But even then, she’s not quite sure when it was or how long she’s been around.
The air’s cool on her skin now and Cindy enjoys the sensation. There are no noises in the night, but she’s here so seldom, her memory’s so thin, that it doesn’t really strike her, the lack of owl hoots, possums, foxes, wild cats and the like. Not even an insect, not a katydid singing. Nothing, just her bare feet on dried grass, crunch, crunch, crunch.
So the voices come clear through air that’s uncontaminated by other sound, though they’re low murmurs, that tone boys have before their voices settle proper. Cindy sees them before they see her.
Two boys. Youths. Young men, really, not quite tall and their limbs still gangly like they don’t quite know what to do with their bits and pieces. Slicked back hair, one head black, the other blond, both with cigarettes in overly-large hands. Furtive looks beneath beetle-brows, and confused. Uncertain, as if they don’t know how they got here. Familiar, familiar, familiar.
Then they see her and stare. Cindy keeps her pace steady, dignified; the pace of a girl going to her prom, so the lavender mist of skirt swirls around her. She clasps her hands in front at first, but it feels wrong, so she swings them, slaps them into the small of her back and suddenly looks like a general on parade. She lifts her chin, too, juts it forward and the moon spills from behind the last cloud to show Cindy’s face to the young men.
Whatever they see, they crack.
Cigarettes are tossed to the ground, bounce with tiny red flares on the dry grass, but Cindy walks over the greedy flames, snuffs them before they can get a hold. She feels the burns as a tickle, a lick, and continues on. She doesn’t quicken at all, but somehow they can’t pull away from her. Maybe it’s all the headstones they’re dodging around and between, as if they don’t want to disrespect the dead by thudding over them. Cindy has no such qualms, she puts her feet down where she will.
“Hello, boys,” she calls, but they offer no answer, although she thinks perhaps she hears a whimper. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
They hurdle the rusty iron fence like track stars. They breach a boundary she cannot, no matter how much she’s tried or how often over the years. They slip and slide and tumble down into the dusty ditch by the side of the road that hardly sees any traffic, then scramble up the other incline. Both break onto the asphalt like birds loosed, like they’re hitting the tape at the end of a running track: arms up, chests out, heads tipped back.
The car comes out of nowhere.
There’s no sound, at least not until the last moment, when the engine roars just before it hits. And it hits them both at the same time. She thinks neither of them have their feet on the ground, they’re still in flight, still in motion, still flying through the air with the greatest of ease.
Cindy’s hands go to her throat, delighted shock, gleeful awe, awful glee.
Boys and vehicle − a turquoise and white Chevrolet Bel Air with its top up − burst.
One moment, they are themselves. The next they’re stardust and particles, strangely wet-looking, a red fleck beneath the moon as the confetti of them drifts down to the road’s surface.
“Happy anniversary. Same time next year, assholes,” she says, and as soon as the words are out she begins to forget they were ever there. She loses her weight, her density. The dress turns to the consistency of candy floss once again. She can’t see the jacket anymore, but maybe she’s wandered too far from it. She feels lighter, lighter, lighter, she is moonlight and dust and a bitter breath on the night breeze.
Damn but there was something she wishes she could remember...
Mine Seven
Elana Gomel
Black sky, white snow, yellow light.
Lena felt that her vision was being starved of some essential nutrient. She longed for fire-engine red, viridian green, shocking purple. But the electric glow in the Funken Lodge leached brightness out of everything, slashing the entire spectrum down to the uncompromising contrast of arctic winter: darkness and light. It repelled and attracted her in equal measure. She spent most of her time staring out of the curving floor-to-ceiling windows of the lounge, seeing the pale blob of her face surrounded by reflections of the chandeliers like jellyfish swimming in a sea of tar.
Bill, on the other hand, happily mined the darkness for Instagram posts. He would go out with his cameras and come back hours later, stomping his chain-wreathed boots to shake off the snow, removing his multi-layered parka, fur hat and face protector in the side-room the hotel provided for its guests’ winter equipment. Then he would bound up the stairs into the lounge to show her his latest pictures. The black sky at midday; the sparkle of fairy lights in downtown Longyearbyen; clumps of ice crystals growing where no plants ever grew. He was gleeful about having caught the Northern Lights on camera. Lena found the greenish smears against the pitch background less than impressive. Tomorrow, though, the Aurora forecast predicted a better display.
Tomorrow was a relative term. In mid-January in Svalbard the sun never rose above the horizon. Darkness was the same whether one was asleep or awake; in the middle of breakfast or having a nightcap. It was like being in a fever dream. The sluggishness of time thickened Lena’s blood. She was perpetually cold, her body repelling the generous warmth of the hotel’s blazing radiator heaters.
Bill made fun of her. After all, he said, she should feel at home here. Spitsbergen, though a Norwegian territory, had a Russian mining settlement, Barentsburg, and an abandoned Soviet-era ghost town, Pyramiden. Chukchi people were not Russians, she would remin
d him, but such distinctions were lost on Americans. Most of the time they were lost on Lena herself.
This arctic vacation had been Bill’s idea, with Lena tagging along, partly out of curiosity about her heritage but mostly based on the simple ‘why not?’ They had the money: Bill’s startup dividends. Her social-media post about their plans had elicited a flurry of envious likes. But now she felt like a prisoner in the bright lodge surrounded by the encroaching dark, held at bay only by the incandescence of the electric lights that never went out in Longyearbyen.
Until they did.
* * *
They were as unlike as two women could possibly be: the waitress blonde and thin, with washed-out blue eyes; Lena dark and round-cheeked. But when the waitress, whose name was Irina, took her orders, Lena heard an echo of her mother’s liquid vowels and hard consonants in her speech. Irina was overjoyed when addressed in Russian.
They chatted about the hardships and pleasures of living in the northernmost town in the world. One got used to the cold, Irina said. And it was getting warmer too.
“Adventfjorden used to be frozen in winter,” Irina continued. “Now it’s ice-free all year round. Whales come. Fish too, lots of cod. People go fishing in January.”
“Why would they?” Lena asked. “Isn’t it too cold?”
Irina shrugged.
“People need jobs,” she said. “Mines are gone.”
Longyearbyen used to be a mining town. Spitsbergen’s greasy coal, dug out of the permafrost, had, once upon a time, been the best in the world. Americans, Norwegians and Russians had competed for the black gold. Lena and Bill had gone to see one of the decommissioned mines, now trying to pass itself off as a tourist attraction. Lena could not imagine anything less attractive than the narrow tunnels flooded with thick darkness and festooned with ice spears, broken machinery frozen into the unyielding ground like sinners in Dante’s hell. But men had crawled through these wormholes, hacked blackness out of coal-seams, and coughed their lungs out in the meagre air.
Five of the six mines were closed now. The remaining one provided the electricity that kept Longyearbyen lit and netted the miners a million kroner a year.
“Do you miss Russia?” Lena asked.
A faraway look on Irina’s face reminded Lena of her mother’s expression on the rare occasions when she spoke of her childhood in the Siberian town of Anadyr. Her mother swore she had nothing to be nostalgic about. But Lena had seen her on more than one occasion furtively go through yellowed pictures of unsmiling men and women in front of deerskin yurts.
Before she could answer, Bill showed up, his face ruddy from his morning photo-excursion. They switched back to English. Lena regretted it, even though her Russian was rusty. As for Chukchi, a native Siberian language spoken by a few thousand in the world, she only knew a hypnotic litany that her Nana had made her learn by heart, telling her it was a powerful spell made up by her shaman grandfather. Lena understood not a word of it but cherished it as a memory of Nana, whose wrinkled-apple face and kind hands presided over her childhood.
Lena picked up Bill’s phone, scrolling through the pictures. She paused, staring at a close-up of garishly lit snow piled up against the Falun-red wall of an apartment building. Sharp shadows drew a cartoon sketch of a snarling face on the powdery surface.
Irina refilled their coffee cups.
“My Northern Lights app says we’ll have a great display today,” Bill declared. “I have arranged for a dogsled ride!”
They had visited a dogs’ compound, where big huskies bedded placidly in snowdrifts and puppies who had never been indoors played in the frozen glare of spotlights. Lena looked longingly at the overstuffed armchairs of the library nook.
“All right,” she said.
“I went to Svald-bar for coffee,” Bill continued (Svald-bar being the cute name of his favourite downtown hangout). “I saw that guy drinking aquavit. I thought I would have some but then I realised it was only 8:00 a.m. Darkness really messes up your biological clock.”
He laughed raucously.
“It is Old Sven,” Irina said. “He used to be a miner. At Mine Seven.”
“What’s Mine Seven?” Bill asked. “I thought there were six mines on Spitsbergen.”
“It’s locked.”
“You mean closed,” Bill corrected. Irina smiled, tight-lipped, and flitted to the next table. The Funken Lodge had few guests, mostly from Norway and the UK. Svalbard winter tourism was still a niche industry.
Lena reluctantly followed Bill down the stairway that looked magical in the soft glow of the hanging clusters of pearly lights. She would be happy to stay in the Lodge, poring over the old volumes of the history of Spitsbergen and nibbling on a cloudberry jam toast. A dogsled ride would take them outside the perimeter of lights, into the unrelieved darkness of the rest of the island. It felt final.
She took her time, putting on her outer trousers, her padded parka, and fixing the chains to her fur-lined boots, dreading the slap of the frozen air. But when they finally stepped outside, she realised she must have become inured to the brutal cold. She felt numb rather than frozen. Hypothermia setting in? Lena told Bill she wanted a cup of hot chocolate before heading out on the dogsled.
They walked downtown, following the thin setting moon, which was surrounded by a hazy halo. The streets shone like a handful of jewels set in dull black velvet. Longyearbyen had a shopping centre, a library and a museum, all limned in garish electric garlands. The town was positively profligate in its use of lighting. Tall pylons that lined its streets were topped with blinding spotlights, each shedding enough illumination for an average American block. Apartment houses had large windows, defiantly kept un-curtained, that dripped pools of multi-coloured radiance onto the snow. There were fairy lights and bright shop signs everywhere. Electricity was not a problem. The coal was still there.
Nobody was supposed to venture outside the lit zone alone and unarmed. Polar bears lurked there in increasing numbers, spurred on to migration by the melting ice-fields and warming seas. A polar bear had killed a child in the schoolyard a year ago. Since then, more and more people carried guns everywhere. Lena looked at the giant whitish ghosts surrounding the town, leaning into its bright core, and shivered. What good would bullets do against these somnolent monsters?
These were mountains, of course, not enormous beasts. Just mountains where the coal slept.
A man staggered toward them. At first Lena thought he was slipping on the iced pavement, even though most inhabitants of Longyearbyen were surprisingly sure-footed. But then she realised the man was drunk. He swayed and mumbled to himself as he passed by.
“That’s the guy I saw in the bar!” Bill said.
The man folded into the snow. They tried to lift him up but he was surprisingly heavy, his parka too tight on his swollen body, bursting at the seams.
Bill frowned.
“He looked smaller in the bar,” he muttered. “But it’s him.”
Two figures materialised out of the gloom, pulled the fallen man up and hustled him away, their wrapped-up heads giving them the appearance of strange insects.
Lena and Bill walked on toward the local bakery. Childishly, she hoped that if she procrastinated enough, the dark day would seamlessly melt into the night and the dogsled ride would be cancelled.
Her hope was realised, though not in the way she had intended.
* * *
The owner of the Fruene café, a stocky Norwegian named Bjorn, poured two steaming cups of what was advertised as the only gourmet chocolate made beyond the Arctic Circle. Lena swirled the thick liquid in her cup, staring at the stuffed polar bear mounted with its paws waving in the air as if about to slap down a customer. The sign at the entrance said in English: “This bear is already dead. Please leave your gun at the counter.”
“Who is Old Sven?” she asked Bjorn.
“O
ld Sven? A miner. A former miner. He has been in Longyearbyen forever. One of our oldest residents.”
“Doesn’t he have a family on the mainland? To go somewhere warmer?”
“It’s getting warmer here.”
“Really?” Bill interjected sceptically.
“Ja. Permafrost is melting.”
“Did he work in Mine Seven?” Lena asked.
She caught a grimace of distaste on Bjorn’s face as he pondered how to fob her off. But he never had the chance. The lights went out.
* * *
Lena pushed a rolled-up map into the purple maw of the fire and coughed when acrid smoke stung her sinuses. It was fortunate that the Funken Lodge had an actual fireplace in its lounge, even though previously it had been used for decoration only. Now the survivors huddled in front of it, watching the sputtering flame. They had burned all the books and greetings cards in the small hotel shop and started on the fat volumes in the library. The Scandinavian décor had promised a plentiful supply of wood, but it turned out that the glossy blond tables and armchairs were plastic. Somebody tried to burn bedclothes and almost choked the fire.
She was not sure how she had made it back to the hotel. At some point, she had found herself crawling on the frigid pavement without a parka or gloves. Her fingers refused to bend and she thought, distantly, that she might lose them to frostbite. But this did not feel real or urgent enough. She was humming Nana’s chant as if it could make the lurkers in the dark acknowledge her as one of their own and let her pass. It was an insane thought and she embraced it because sanity no longer had any place here.
The snow had turned anthracite-black, the town dissolving in the night as thick as treacle. The Funken Lodge was an indistinct smear. Lena’s eyelashes hung in broken clumps, the frozen tear-tracks on her cheeks burned like acid. The gaping hole of the entrance was veiled by a swarm of tiny snowflakes, stinging like angry bees. She stumbled over a body on the floor in the changing room. The man was not dead as she had first assumed but in shock, gasping and mumbling. She dragged him into the lounge where Nigel, a British skier who never skied, managed to get a fire going. The man, another tourist, was thawing out while Lena stood on top of the staircase, waiting for more people to come in. ‘More people’ was a euphemism for Bill, even though she knew he was not coming back. Eventually she gave up and helped the handful of other survivors to barricade the entrance door that was stuck halfway because its electrical mechanism had shorted out.