Perhaps spring has arrived, the temperatures warming just enough to set us free. Or maybe the current has shifted, the ice breaking apart only to knit itself back together again.
But we can feel the house, and the island, settling back into the water—floating. No longer locked in place.
And by the end of the next day, we’re moving steadily through the swath of fractured icebergs.
The following morning, we can see the edge. The end of the trapped ice.
And we drift out into the open black sea.
Clay leaves the cane beside the bed.
He uses it less and less, and one morning, he places it against the wall and never touches it again. The limp remains, though, and sometimes he winces when walking up the stairs, reaching for the wall for balance.
He thinks I don’t see.
It’s been three weeks since we left the ice. The days grow milder, and then the rain comes. Light and drizzly at first, a few drops against the soil, but it soon turns into a daily downpour.
“We could replant the garden, start again,” I say, bringing the spoon to my mouth to sip the seaweed stew I made for breakfast. The only edible thing we’ve had in days.
Clay shakes his head. “We planted all the seeds we had, then lost the crop in the cold, without a harvest.”
“There’s nothing left?”
He looks at me, and I can see the regret, the guilt—as if this is all somehow his fault. The men who raided our island, the winds that pushed us north into the ice. He feels responsible.
“We still have the chickens,” I remind him, tucked safely away in the warmth of the cellar. “We can move them back outside, maybe they’ll start laying eggs again.”
He nods, then stands, moving slowly to the sink with his empty bowl, his leg hitching with each step.
It hurts to see him like this.
The afternoons grow warmer, rain sheeting over the island each evening. Along the shore, grass pokes above the soil, bright and green, returning. I watch the garden, hoping a cabbage or potato sprout will push to the surface, seeking sunlight, but it remains a muddy wasteland. Where nothing grows.
Clay perches himself on a smooth rock at the shore, casting his fishing line out into the sea. For two days he catches nothing. We return the chickens to their coop, and each morning we let them out to wander the island, pecking at the soil for insects and stray seeds. But still, they refuse to lay eggs.
Too traumatized, perhaps. Too stubborn.
“Please,” I beg them, my hand feeling along their coop boxes for a tiny precious egg, but finding them empty for the third day in a row. I can feel myself growing hollow and frail, my movements slow, my mind clouded. We can’t survive on seaweed alone.
But if we take the life of our chickens, it will be our final dinner. They are more valuable to us alive, in the long run. But if they don’t lay eggs, if Clay doesn’t haul in a fish from the shore, then we will have to decide.
We have escaped the ice. But we are slowly starving.
At night, I feel the delicate pressure of Clay’s fingers tracing the valleys of my tired body, brushing his lips along my freckled skin. Reassuring me. He whispers against my flesh that we’ll be okay. And I believe him. I need to.
But there’s something in the air.
The wind across the sea feels strained, tensed, like it’s bracing for something—a certainty I can’t pinpoint.
A scent maybe, like smoke. Faraway and diluted.
“Ye’ve been watching the sea—” Clay says to me, coming up behind me to fold his hands around my waist. I’m standing on the pebbled shore, my pants rolled up, letting the cold waves slide over my ankles.
“I don’t know what it is—” I tell him. “It’s just a feeling. The air smells odd—unnatural.”
He releases his hands from my waist. “The wind knows things before we do.”
“It feels like it’s always out there, waiting for us…”
