Photo by Fabian Mardi on Unsplash
It’s been bone dark for hours, though it’s only 6 pm. Snow piles thick on the windowsill, coating it in fur, smoothing out the sharp edges of the pane. He is restless, peering out the window. Stretching his calves. Leaning side to side. Pacing. An animal in a cage. He rolls his head, then runs his hand under his hair, leaving it sticking out, unwashed and poky.
His sighs are snow heavy.
She sits on the couch, one eye on the book in her lap, the other on the curve of his back, the angle of his arms on his neck. The words are a trickle across the page, each losing its connection to the one marching before it: a lizard with its head lopped off still skittering across a tiled floor.
She waits.
She knows what is coming, and shivers and imagines the snow greeting her neck in a passive-aggressive embrace.
The flakes out the window grow to the size of nickels. They collect and press on the roof of their HUD house, making the air inside denser, harder to extract a breath from. They live on the edge of the village; the school district rents it to them in exchange for teaching third grade and high school history in western Alaska. The house has a toilet and a shower, but no running water, so the bathtub is full of five-gallon buckets hauled from the school’s showers and the toilet might as well be a planter.
Their front door faces away from the cluster of homes that is village life. The people whose families have lived here for centuries, surviving with and off the land. Those houses huddle together, looking inward, seeking comfort from each other while understanding all that holds them in place. Paths link those houses, well-worn over years of visiting and loving and needing and fighting and making up.
There are no signs of comfort or connection outside their house. No snowmachine pulled up to visit. No tracks of a neighbor who stopped by. No lights from someone’s nearby TV. Just blackness and tundra, and the rush of the invisible river, muffled under a foot or more of ice. Stunted willows reach jointed fingers out of the snow, slowly becoming buried just the same.
When the six-seater airplane dropped them off in August, the house had looked cute surrounded by only alders and blueberry bushes. Now its aloneness was a reminder of her place in this world.
“We should go out,” he finally says to the window. She’s sure he’s been waiting for her to suggest it. He tries to hide the annoyance lapping in his voice, but it’s clear: he wanted her to know what he wants, and suggest it first. To save him the heavy lifting of asking. To dodge the humiliation of having an unmet expectation.
It’s clear he feels more trapped here than she does. He’s the one who’s spent most of his life outside, running trails across mountains and down steep valleys. Clocking miles like other people clock commute time. It’s half the reason he’s a teacher; it leaves him the long summer months to pound miles into his heart and legs. Here the flat expanse feels like something that can’t be conquered. There’s no end to the trail. No elevation gain. No finish line. No one to marvel at him.
He doesn’t like it.
She was willing to wait for a job in Anchorage. Or even Fairbanks, though she hated the way her tires froze flat to the ground in the winter there and the sting of 40 below on her thighs through her school clothes. But here they are, in a silent house in western Alaska. She will have to go into the storm with him. God knows he won’t go without her, and God knows she can’t be the one who says no to an experience. If that happened, there would really be no breathable air left in their house.
She studies the snow and the dark through the hazy window. This need to fight the elements; she doesn’t have it. It doesn’t tug at her, whisper that her realness depends on pushing back on nature, engaging in an unending pissing match she’s destined to lose every time.
The silence has stretched, she senses, for a beat too long. She shivers again and sets down her book. She marks her page with an envelope from an old Visa bill. He’s already in the closet, pulling out snow pants and red and blue Patagonia fleeces and shells. Hats. Gloves. Gaiters.
“How about headlamps?” It’s the first thing she’s said since he suggested going outside.
“Won’t need them. Your eyes will adjust.” He pulls out a pair of thick running tights with a reflective stripe down the leg.
She remembers driving a car, back when roads were real, in a snowstorm, and how turning on the brights dropped her into a swirl of dizziness, lights reflecting off even the tiniest snowflake as they flung themselves into the windshield, trying to break in and warm themselves to melted.
When he is not looking, she slips a headlamp into her pocket anyway.
They step out. She is stiff limbed. The silence is a damp down blanket. No dogs barking, no roars of snowmachines crossing the village. The stairs from the deck are already gone, leaving only a vague slope. The ghosts of the things left on out hide in the shadows. Jerry cans. Rubbermaid totes. Firewood. A folding camp chair sits in the corner, the throne of an arctic king.
She shivers again, the clothes not yet warmed all the way through. Her boots are tall and red, made of wool in some Scandinavian country. The soles are blue and ribbed. The toes curl up like she is an elf. Every time she wears the boots, he scorns their impracticality.
She wears them anyway.
Her layers of jackets are thick and structured, the clothes of a child too bundled to move. His are thin and flexible. Easier to run in. Each is another layer of skin, designed to be shed when threatened or used up.
It is a message to her: he will not be slowing down. In this weather, with his clothes, slowing down would equal hypothermia. He will be moving fast enough to stay warm without armor.
His breath congeals in frost on his close-cropped beard and he wipes it free with the back of his thin glove. He bounces on his toes, though the snow eats most of the movement. He’s eager to get moving.
Without speaking, he turns and they leave, him in front, her in back. He doesn’t run; the snow is too deep, and she can feel disappointment gusting off him. She tries to stay out of its wake, but it is impossible. They walk through the village, past the school. Based on the lights, the teacher whose family still lives in Anchorage is in her classroom. She is always in her classroom. She tries to never be at school at the same time as that teacher; her anger and frustration sweats out of her, especially on weekends, and it’s the last thing she wants to smell at work.
She wonders if the washing machine in the nurse’s office will be free in the morning; technically Sunday morning is her laundry slot, but someone has been sneaking in early to beat her to it. She doesn’t want to know which of her coworkers would steal something so precious, so she just closes her classroom door. Sometimes there is still time for her to do her own laundry. Sometimes it is stolen altogether, and she spends the next week in dirty sweatshirts and jeans, her underwear stretched out and loose around her hips.
No one ever sneaks in on his laundry time. His clothes are always clean.
The village is still. Snow piles up on sleds and toys and the scene looks like the beginning of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, with soft mounds undulating over the ground. Tiny living room windows illuminate patches of snow to a soft blue. The noise of tv and video games slither toward her, but only for snatches. No real voices. Just accents and sounds that don’t live here. Traffic. Jets taking off. Laugh tracks. Not the sounds of the real village. Four-wheelers. Laughter. Yupik words. Crying babies. Barking dogs.
His strides are too long for her to match. She stretches and slides trying to reach his imprints. In each step she comes up short, so she is breaking trail of her own. Snow tops her boots, and her socks crawl toward her toes, leaving her heel bare to the rub of the insole. The wool gets wet, but stays warm, and she smirks to herself. She pulls the beaver hat tight over her ears, trying to keep the wind off her face. The long hairs tickle her forehead and irritate her eyes. Tears from the fur and wind run down her face. She reaches the edge of the village and drops down to the river bank.
He is ahead.
He is always ahead.
His pace is brisk. Snow doesn’t breach his gaiters even though he is breaking trail too. His red jacket fades to grey the further he gets from her. His strides lengthen as he hits his pace. Since there is no light, the reflective pant leg disappears even before the red jacket. She wishes she could clear the snow from her eyes, but the flakes are engorged giants sticking to her lashes.
Once on the lakeshore, past outflow of the river, he is only movement, a dark shape pulling away, away, away.
She stumbles over something buried in the snow. Her arms cartwheel in the air, but she stays on her feet.
His left behind footprints fill with snow faster than she can keep up, and her heart races. She wishes he would hear the sound and slow down, but it is not possible. It’s never possible, even in the quietest of spaces, for him to hear her heartbeat.
Something up ahead is waiting for her. A dark shape. Maybe too big to be him? Maybe too small? She staggers toward it, ready to call his name, but she arrives, and it's only a tree stump washed on the shore. Its empty, ancient branches reach out for more snow, more snow, more snow.
She swallows his name along with the bile in her throat.
Past the stump she sees nothing but dark and snow and her feet red slashes in the white. Snow crawls up her calf. His footprints are an echo of a step in another time. If she were an animal, a sled dog maybe, could she find him with just his smell? If he were a tern, would he have long flown away? She turns to look for the village, but she’s below the cutbank and can’t see anything beyond. Sweat sticks the beaver fur to her forehead, and each hair digs against her skin.
Ahead on the ground is a shape. A crater. A gaping hole in the earth, her eyes tell her. Her brain says no. You’ve been here before. There is no crater. But her eyes only become more insistent as she gets closer, the darkness thicker, the snow now kicked up by the wind with its goal to wrap her up in a cocoon.
She peels the hat off her head, pushes it down her back. The wind bites her cheeks and ears. Her hair is wrapped around her neck and she shrugs to loosen it. Instead it whips her, and hangs heavy and damp on her shoulders.
She looks at the void. Tells her legs to step over it. Tells her legs her eyes are playing tricks on her. It’s an easy step. But the space is so dark and so sharp and so deep she cannot.
She could turn around. She could go back. But at some point, he’ll stop and look for her, and if he waits, he’ll freeze in his thin layers. How long could he wait? How long would he wait?
Instead, she veers left around the chasm.
One step left, away from the bank.
Another.
Another.
Another.
The bottoms of her feet tell her she is not on sand anymore. Below her is slick lake ice. Black. Drinking in all color and light. She could come back to the bank, but the snow is tricky, and the wind laughs in her ears. It builds on her shoulders so thickly she needs to brush off every few steps. Back is now an idea she can’t understand.
She pulls her hat back on; it’s full of snow, and water runs down her back. She is breaking trail on the ice. The chasm remains, and she takes a few more steps to find its end. The end is nowhere in sight. He is nowhere in sight.
She calls his name, but it is hollow in her mouth, an empty promise, and the snow eats the sound with greedy glee.
Her words, devoured by the great land.
Her words, devoured.
She runs. Toward? Away? She’s not sure. She’s only sure of movement, the heavy drop of her boot, of ice grinding beneath her feet. When she falls, she is aware that her hands are wetter than they should be because they have landed in water.
It’s overflow from the shifting ice sheets. A thin layer of water not yet frozen, floating on top of the ice. It seeps in her clothes at exactly the same rate it seeps into her brain. It’s only a matter of time before she is too cold. Too wet.
A shot sounds out across the lake. Hunting? No one who really lives here goes out in this weather. They know the margins are too slim on any day of the year. No sense in tempting fate. No sense in being the next one lost.
It’s the ice talking. Her words are gone, but the ice has found its voice, sharp and deafening. It’s in charge. It’s making the decisions now. The dark spot has followed her from the shore, spilling her way, and she realizes it was a creek, draining into the lake, and not a crater, but that means the ice below her is compromised and unpredictable.
She finds her feet, snowpants dripping and freezing as she scans for shore, when she feels the lump in her pocket.
The headlamp.
She pulls it out. She can’t turn it on with her ice caked mitts, so she drops one, then the other at her feet. Snow is already burying their moosehide palms when she clicks on the light. It is bright, and for a moment she can’t see anything. She is looking into the sun. She is looking into a million swirling suns as the flakes reflect the beam. But she can’t be on the sun because cold air is pouring into her jacket. She is no longer sure if she is standing up or sitting down, walking or falling in the blizzard that is the edge of the world.
She is sure he will see her now. See the flash of her light. If only he will turn around and look for her it will be enough to catch his eye, and he’ll call out to her.
But only the ice calls. It makes one giant snap, and the expanse in front of her opens up, this time a real chasm, not one that’s a trick. And in the water, a shape rises. Grey. sleek. Torpedo-like. A fin slices through the air.
She tells herself it’s like the chasm. The fish is fake. It’s a taunt.
Even before the tail breaks the surface and splashes her, she knows it is real. A smell of something ancient and muddy presses through the snow. The scales on its back reflect the headlamp, like his pant legs would have.
She’s heard stories about it. A monster. A fish. Something both hidden and on the surface. Kids told her it would follow a skiff out in the lake. Parents hushed them, telling them not to speak of it, not to call it in.
Did her footsteps on the ice call it?
Another splash and it’s breaking the thin ice in front of her, cruising and grinding against its scaly side.
Her mitts are gone, sinking in the water, and she’s on her knees again. She tries to slide back from the widening gap, but her clothes are frozen and stiff and won’t break free.
The huge back circles once more in the water. The back could be the bottom of an upturned boat, but it is not. The ice gives way beneath her. The fall is slow. The water grabs hold of her. She knows she is below before she feels it, because her hair is swirling and there is no more wind and the monster is gone too. Its fin slips below the ice; it swims into the murky green. It never even turns around to look at her. It is indifferent to her.
And then stillness.
Above her, the headlamp sits on the ice, its beam pointed toward the shore.
Marie Ryan McMillan lives in Juneau, Alaska. She finds Alaska to be the perfect place to marry the mundane and the magical in writing.