Awayland
Page 14
The maid rolled herself back down to the water and left Halvar, blood-patterned, tortured by his own stripes.
* * *
—
ESA HAD WAITED for a salve to spread on the everyday wounds, those scrapes on his heartskin from being alive and from wanting. On that big ship, surrounded by marrieds, he had hoped for an alone-with-me person. Two and no more. He had imagined cupping the girl’s face in his hands, feeling the bones beneath, knowing the shape so well he would have recognized even her sun-dried skeleton, a thousand years later. Esa thought a love like that deserved its own lands, a brighter tundra. When he was young, he had begun to gather gifts for his beloved. Whalebone coins and reindeer combs, necklaces with locks of horse-mane at the end. Esa put a ring around his ankle, promising before anyone had asked him to. Its twin was sewn into his undershirt, circling his heart like a target.
Esa thought of going to visit his mer, but he had to think this out first. He wanted to ask for her forever. He wanted to tell her that he felt her scales in his bloodstream, that he was swum full of her. It began to snow. Esa dragged a piece of cloth outside and sat on it, his back against a pine, watching the sky fill with flakes. The mer was ankleless, so Esa planned to click the ring around her wrist. He kept saying, “I know it always happens this way, a wrecked sailor, a mermaid. How do I make you believe me?” Even in his mind, she knew better.
* * *
—
THE MER WAS OLD, hundreds of years of swimming behind her. Love worked differently in that kind of time. More chances to lose something and more chances to gain it back. Her loves had been in the thousands. Red-haired ships’ captains, boys just old enough to want to use their bodies, whales, others of her own kind. She was too tired now, too worn through to love anyone back. But here she was, a little alive still, and why not let her good body go to use. Why not let her skin and scales mean something miraculous to these lost boys, the poor land-bound humans, outposted at the shore between one nothing and another.
The clouds came apart. Snow and snow and snow and the earth was gone. It fell silent and heavy. A new, white sea was born. The snow melted when it hit the water but it covered the mer. She was whitened, only strong enough to clean her face. This storm might finally be the thing to bury her.
* * *
—
ESA STOOD ON high ground and searched for Halvar in the tunnels. He thought about going in, turning the turns of Halvar’s high-walled maze, but the sky did not look like it would clear by nightfall, and Esa imagined the whiteness and the darkness, and he knew that he would not find his way out again. Halvar, he hoped, had some dried meat in his leathers. Halvar, he hoped, had made a den in the ice for burrowing. Esa thought of the big man lying still, trying to keep his own heat.
* * *
—
PAER SQUATTED AT THE FIRE, keeping it alive a moment longer. The wood was wet and whiny. He would bring broth to his finned wife, and when she was warm and ready, he would drag her down to the water’s edge. He had considered dragging her across the white earth to his whaleship where they could live, tending and waiting until they died weeks or months or years from now.
He could have dragged her, but he would not. His love was not a carcass. She had grown a tail to be with him again, and now it was his turn. Paer would remove his animal skins until only his own pink leather remained, and he would wade into the water, which would burn him with cold, and he would tie one end of a rope around each of their waists and one-arm swim her, slowly, through the ice-thick sea. He would fight for air, and he knew that his heart would pound for dry land and dry cloth, but if he would keep swimming, if he stayed submerged, his legs would begin to freeze. Paer did not know how the next steps went, how a man turned into a fish. Yet knowing rarely made the journey easier. It was up to the gods now. Man and wife would swim for a long time and turn over onto their backs when the swimming became too difficult, and the snow falling on their faces would feel soft and warm and generous, the sky offering itself to them, both legless now, waiting for the leagues to take them home.
* * *
—
HALVAR, BLEEDING, could not make himself move. He could not forgive the trillions of white-hot flakes or the pink-black sky or the sound of the sea or his own body, reckless and stupidly alive. He should have gone down with his ship. He should have been more ferocious, or less. He stopped wiping the snow from his face. The snow dressed his wounds, covered his weeping skin. Halvar could hear the thrum of his heart change. He lost his edges first: toes and fingers. By nightfall, he was a small white hill, no bigger than any other drift. His body would not matter again until snowmelt, when a pair of bears, sleepish and starving, came to dig around his skeleton for mushrooms sprouted from the richer soil.
* * *
—
ESA WENT to his mer. He would stay all night, brush the snow off. He worried that she was cold, though he knew the deep water must be just as chilly. He said, “I can’t live in water and you can’t live on land, but we can stay here at the edges. I’ll build a house on stilts, over the sea with a hole in the floor and a ladder. The place where air and water meet—that’s our home together.” Sometimes it takes a shipwreck, he thought. Sometimes it takes a tragedy. The mer washed back and forth with the waves. She looked into Esa’s puddle-brown eyes. It was good, a service, to let someone believe.
“I was worried about the same thing.” Paer was standing above them, holding a broom he had made from pine needles. He knelt down to kiss her. “She found me,” he said. He brushed his hand over her frozen hair.
Esa knew that this was not Paer’s wife. This love was his love. He imagined wrestling Paer to the water, holding his head under. The snow would still be falling when he was done. He looked at the man beside him brushing their sea-beauty with gathered needles. How tended-to the mer looked. She smiled up at the boys. Esa was heartswollen. It would be a service to let Paer believe. Maybe, he thought, they would all set off in Paer’s boat, the mer trailing behind at the end of a long rope handspun from their hair. The snow would eventually stop and the black sky would grow delirious with stars. They would sail to her kingdom and some of them would survive, or none of them would.
Esa had enough blood to love the mer but not enough to be the only one. He wanted to kiss her but Paer was already there, his beard frozen and his mouth warm. Esa was freezing, every living thing was, and the world had slowed down so much that Esa was not sure it moved at all. The water had turned to ice, stopped lapping. The air was hardly breathable. Time had quit on them. Esa lay down in the snow and put his head on the mer’s belly. Her skin had no discernible temperature. Esa felt Paer’s glove on his hair. His father? Home had found him, he thought. The differences were no longer the point: warm and cold, home and away. There was only this hour to move around in, and what it contained: bodies, ice, water, earth.
On the horizon, the frozen edge, green light spit across the sky. The whole endlessness split open and bled.
Acknowledgments
All the thanks in the world to:
Sarah McGrath, Katie Freeman, Claire McGinnis, Jynne Martin, Geoff Kloske, Kate Stark, Danya Kukafka, Lindsay Means, Helen Yentus, Grace Han and every single person at Riverhead: it’s a little bit absurd how brilliant this team is.
PJ Mark, Ian Bonaparte and Marya Spence.
The editors and journals where these stories first appeared: Cressida Leyshon & The New Yorker; Lorin Stein & The Paris Review Daily; Michelle Wildgen & Tin House; Lauren Groff & Ploughshares; Jamie Quatro & Oxford American; Nick Haramis & Bullett.
Matt Sumell, Michael Andreason and Marisa Matarazzo, who often saw these stories before anyone else.
Michelle Latiolais, Ron Carlson and Christine Schutt: still not done thanking you and never will be.
My ever-supportive family and friends.
About the Author
© Teo Grossman
; Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novels Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us, winner of the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She is also the author of the story collection A Guide to Being Born, and has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, and Best American Fantasy.
ramonaausubel.com
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