Out beyond the edges of the island, the sea is gone.
The blackish-blue horizon, the churning waves that have been our constant view for months, has been replaced by something else.
White.
The ocean has been iced over, solid and endless.
Clay scans the horizon, the rifle at his side. “This is the farthest north I’ve ever been.”
The wind has stopped blowing, and I lift a hand over my eyes, finding it hard to focus. The endless landscape of snow and ice is blinding. Clay leaves the rifle on the porch, and we descend the steps, circling the house. It’s the same in every direction. Past the henhouse, we can justmake out a sliver of black in the distance, several miles behind us, where the sea is still liquid.
But the wind or the tide has blown us into a field of frozen water, icebergs rising up in every direction.
We’re stuck.
A bird wings through the sky.
It looks like a blackbird, but larger. A raven perhaps. “What the hell is that doing way out here?”
“Trying to survive,” Clay answers, and I can’t tell if he’s making a joke.
It’s been a week since the island became lodged against an arctic sheet of ice. The garden is frozen, the chickens are happily housed in the cellar, and we spend our days inside—hoping for wind. For a change in the weather. For the ice to let us go.
“Maybe there’s land somewhere out there,” I suggest, watching the bird rise higher, before wheeling out past the house and across the ice.
“Could be.”
“Maybe—” I begin.
But Clay shoots me a look. He knows what I’m thinking. We’ve already discussed it and decided the risk of leaving the island is too great. We don’t know how safe, how solid, the ice would be. We don’t know how far we might need to walk before we find something. And once we lose sight of the island, the farmhouse, it might be impossible to find it again in a landscape this featureless.
But seeing the bird makes me wonder if there’s something just beyond the horizon. An outpost, a small arctic town, a coffee shop. It’s been decades on the mainland, and in that time, perhaps this remote part of the world is more inhabited. Perhaps a hotel and a town wait for us over the next iceberg. But we stay inside, shivering, using up the last of our firewood to heat the house, and eating what’s left of our preserves from the cellar.
Eventually we’ll need to start burning parts of the farmhouse—window frames and doors and furniture.
We’ll either freeze, or starve.
Clay’s strength has been returning, but now the cold seems to be making him worse. He’s reluctant to rise from bed in the morning, and when he does, he is slow, moving painfully through the house.
“After what happened,” Clay adds, “I prefer to remain away from civilization. The world isn’t what we remember of it, Ellie.”
“If we stay, we might die.”
“I think I prefer death.”
We rarely leave our room.
Our bed is warmth, it’s survival. So we remain beneath the blankets most days, only rising to eat, to pee outside in the cold. Clay’s wound is healing, the stitched hole from the bullet is no longer inflamed, his flesh woven itself back together.
And yet, he still seems weak. The lack of food, the constant cold—it weighs on him. I can survive on fewer calories, but I can tell his body is wasting away, losing muscle each day.
I lie awake at night and think about time. An intangible resource, a thing we lose little by little. The Greeks had two words for time:chronosandkairos. The first represents our measurement of time, the chronological order, like a ticking clock. Linear and predictable. Butkairosis more mercurial—that indescribable moment when all things come together in perfect unison, the right place at the right time, when it feels as if the universe has orchestrated your life into absolute harmony.
But which is correct?
Which truly governs our existence?
Perhaps time is nothing more than a system of beliefs. A perception. A way to make sense of our surroundings—to measure and calculate and create order.
