Ocean
The morning after Anna’s death, the women go swimming. The midnight sun and the blazing insides of their bodies come to meet at their skin, so as they dance in the waves they shine like mythical creatures.
Home
Sigriður’s friend is dead so she refuses to join them. The intention is there. At seven she wakes and, as usual, pulls on her bathing suit, slacks and fleece, then pours coffee into a flask. But, when she comes to go, the front door is many miles away. She leaves the light off and sits at the kitchen table in the dark. In this shadowed state, she remains for days.
Black Sand
This is what she sees, sitting at the dim kitchen table: the back of her own head and the fall of stretchy trousers grazing her ankles as she walks down the black sand. The drop of her shoulders. The tepid smiles of the swimmers about to brace the icy shallows. She approaches and they have nothing to say because she was not Anna’s family but they feel like they should treat her so.
Ocean
They met there. In the waters that sing. In the wind which bites and makes you screech with laughter. It was thirty years ago when she first joined that group of women who do something most would deem extraordinary every single morning. It is, extraordinary. The way Anna went from a strange silhouette against the ice sky to someone she couldn’t live without.
Home
This is what she hears, sitting in the shadows at home: silence, and the bottom of the ocean, and the rain forming in the clouds. She listens to it all as she cleans, sorts, dusts and scrambles to store every memory in a dependable part of her brain.
Inside and outside are one in the same in Iceland. You are always aware of the thinness of walls and the precariousness of your form compared to the vast outdoors. But inside is far from anything like outside in Iceland. It is foolish to think the wind you hear in here is the same as the wind you feel out there.
Black Sand
Swim time again. She does not go but thinks, the forever light will be guiding the swimmers down the sharp sand path they could draw from memory. They will be stripping the clothes from their tingling bodies. Fitting swimming caps over grey wispy hair. Readjusting costume straps. Redesigning the new space because there are two missing bodies.
Ocean
Anna wore her swimming cap in the most infuriating way. It got pulled down over coarse hair like a beanie. The long ends were left untucked and splayed out in the cold waves when she lay on her back. It was so like her, to not conform. The outrageous artist who made sculptures of genitalia and refused to put her swimming cap on properly.
Home
Days pass. Frequently, she shuts her eyes and listens to the wind beat down on the mountains around her home. The doorbell keeps ringing in the annoying way a neighbour’s car alarm goes off. She doesn’t feel like eating. She only feels like turning the heating up as high as it will go and clearing out her house like she is the one to be leaving. Her tongue is a swelling creature hell-bent on making it agony to even swallow saliva. It tastes sour and infected. Anna’s kind, beautiful husband Magnus will be sorting through her things. Choosing what most captures her personhood. What things, if you touch, can lead you farthest down the path to her.
Black Sand
The arctic terns will be screaming. The voices of the swimmers will be humming below. Their five bodies the only ones around. The backdrop of mountains peaks, never-ending sky, black water depths, will make even their fleshy figures look unnatural. Piled on a hostile-looking rock will be their bags, full of warmth and belongings that dead people no longer need.
Ocean
They swim every day of the year, even in the unending darkness of winter and in any weather that kissed or raged against their bodies. Their skin is pale, pocked and sagging. In different types of weather, their bodies tell different stories. On a black wind day they can send a beached whale home. On a quiet sunlit morning they shine translucent, fading fleeting lives surrounded by immortal rock, saltwater, sky.
Katrín always keeps her glasses on, the lenses get covered in splashes of salt water. You couldn’t see her eyes clearly the day she told them her son’s treatment hadn’t worked.
Home
Sigriður uses the mirror in the hall to confront herself. Her face is discoloured as if putrid water runs through her veins. The skin around her eyes is coarse. She pulls at the flesh of her cheeks in the mirror, searching in her pores, for what she does not know. She sticks her tongue out. It is fat and thick with globs of yellow. Standing back, a spiteful grimace meets her in the glass. She forgets how many days it has been. If it has even been more than one.
Black Sand
They are now only a group of five. The wind will have grown confused by the new shape of the group, tumbling through the spaces two women used to stand. Cragged imperishable mountains will be rising up either side of the dark water saying tread carefully, to enter here is a matter of life of death. The shrinking pale bodies will be taking them on. Mothers and grandmothers and farmers and teachers. When you have lived so long nature demands respect, but nothing is feared.
Ocean
Glódís swore by the water’s healing powers. One July afternoon, she tripped on her grandson’s toy truck and broke her arm. The women added wrapping her cast in bin bags to their onshore ritual. The plastic thumped on a windy day, as she held her bad arm above the ocean surface.
Anna sculpted her bust in that position. Her suspended plastic arm and swimming costume pressed breasts moulded out of clay and fired in teal. The glint in her eye when she presented it to her. The group of swimmers fell about laughing, splashing. Still, Glódís insists it was the water that healed her arm so quickly, despite it never being submerged.
Home
There is one thing she is certain of – her son hasn’t called. By the time she met Anna she had made enough mistakes to know how to do it right. Bad mother, lacklustre wife, never-the-favourite teacher. Everyone had come and gone. Egill hit eighteen and fled to Antwerp. He paints and is successful. Has she told him he’s successful? She keeps thinking about this. Must tell him. As though he risks death now too. She must tell him; she was good to Anna. She promises she was good to her.
Black Sand
Jóhanna will have brought a flask since Sigriður isn’t there. The women will have dried and dressed and be sitting in a circle cradling tin mugs of black coffee. They will be finding things to talk about which sound normal. The mountains and the waves will have calmed since they left the water, bowing down to them; the swimmers have, again, proved their strength.
Ocean
It was in the water Anna told them she was sick. It is impossible to hug someone sincerely whilst floating. There was no denial. The salt air held peace.
Home
I’ll fly home for the funeral on Thursday, he said.
Can I stay with you? he said.
Black Sand
The swimmers wait for her on the sand. She sees their silhouettes flickering in the light. When she lumbers down the slope into view they cheer.
Thank god you’re back, Glódís shouts up to her. Jóhanna buys the cheapest, nastiest coffee.
She sees Jóhanna reach out and slap Glódís. She slips down the rest of the sand to them. They stand silent, still for a moment. Then they start to undress.
Ocean
Katrín raises her arms, like a seabird set for flight. Sigriður copies, feeling the chill of the wind on her bare skin. She steps forward, getting her toes wet. Ice water thrill shoots up her back. Walking further into the sunlight, away from the dark sand and the grassy bank behind it, she lets the waves lap around her torso and fill her bathing suit. The wind carries Anna across the Atlantic and down from the skies; she encircles them.
The heat from Sigriđur’s heart and stomach blazes hot against the wind and the freezing droplets stuck to her skin. She shivers and dunks her whole body under, her legs flailing to find their rhythm in the water. She licks the saltiness from her top lip and starts to swim out with ease, keeping her focus on the group in front of the mighty fjord. They are sharing stories.
She flips onto her back next to her friends. The movement of the waves take charge of her body. Back and forth she sways staring into the cloudless sky, suspended in nature’s hand. She can feel everything in the world.
by Eve Newstead
Eve Newstead is a writer from Newcastle living in London. She is currently studying on the Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway. Her favourite country is Iceland, where she lived for one year, and its remarkable nature and culture frequently inspires her writing.
Photo credit: Stein Egil Liland
Aayo Magazine 