Each had a sublime surprise for the other on Christmas morning. Rory brought Fern breakfast and coffee in bed. Under the improvised cloche, she found french toast adorned with a sapphire ring. Wide-eyed and delighted, she beamed at him kneeling beside the bed. “It was my mother’s…” She drew a deep breath and threw up over the beautiful service.

  “I’m pregnant…”

  ***

  Fern was never a Christmas person, but winter solstice always makes her pause for ritual and tradition. In the half-lit days before the sun makes its final bow, she carefully stacks fallen branches where she plans to dig new garden beds. The longest night bonfire will enkindle her spirits and warm the ground. Dragging downed wood into her clearing, she’s struck by how unusually warm it is; it doesn’t burn to inhale.

  Fire symbolizes destruction and renewal. Every year she makes offerings to its hungry tongues: a tuft of gathered qiviut, salmon bones, a handful of moss, an eagle feather, three pairs of knitted baby booties, and a poem. This year she has written:

  The weighted grains fell—between

  us heavy, expectant-edged, charged

  with need and electricity.

  Sands ticking slickened time—click

  a rattle of finite formed a solid stopped

  the curved edges of a universe.

  Folding back upon us—comfort or

  suffocation depending how we split

  our temporal Möbius strip.

  Prayers for safe returns, balance, and letting go. Every year, she expects grief to wane, its grip to slacken; every year she is shaken by its persistent intensity and the world’s growing disquiet. The blended intoxicants of wood smoke, dancing flames, and a few nips of kirsch yields the most vivid night visions.

  In the morning, she wakes cold and stiff, fingers itching to form what she has dreamt. Endless plans for hook and needle.

  Spring curls its way into the valley with a shuffle of hooves returning from windswept ridgelines. Fern greets her musk oxen friends with alacrity and plentiful hay, checking carefully for injury or illness. Months worth of spinning and knitting are piled in neat boxes in her truck to exchange for the staples she’s exhausted. At the trading post, Nenana Ice Classic winner announcements scrabble above the fold, but since the second winter without Rory, it makes Fern laugh bitterly. An annual gut kick. The brutal irony of a life bookended by the overpowering need to change the river’s mind: once to make it flow, once to stop it in its tracks.

  Yet she diligently notes when the waterway opens every year. Adds a single point to the graph she started plotting 30 years ago when complex systems percolated into her high school consciousness. She doesn’t need to consult official databases or read the thinly veiled commentary buried beneath the contest fanfare to see the clear trend: the rivers are breaking up earlier.

  Summer blazes to life. The tundra is unnervingly dry. She notes that the sponge-like active layer of berries and bracken perched upon permanently frozen ground is draining and sinking everywhere she wanders, plucking qiviut from bush and branch. The absence of mosquitoes is a welcome respite, but the permafrost is melting. Permafrost, nature’s Pandora’s box. The lid is off. Planet-kindling beasts released in unspeakable quantities. And the fires rage to life.

  She retreats to her cabin. Comb. Clean. Card. Spin. Knit. Comb, clean, card, spin, knit. Combcleancardspinknit. The rhythm overcomes the dancer. The mantra moves the monk. She is a whirling dervish. The wool demands her hands. She loses the edges of days as the sun forgets to set; forgets when to feed the animals, when to feed herself. She starts to make a blanket and forgets to stop. Repetition and patterns soothe her, give her control, steady her breathing; seem to stabilize the world outside.

  The fires sweep around the valley, but everywhere is smoke choked. She wraps wet fabric over her mouth, tries to tend her garden, and weeps when she follows the musk oxen down to the river. They are trying to breathe the cleanest air they can find and nearly drowning. Ashton swims through the dense air and she wails, haunted by the specter of a collapsing embankment. She runs toward him, outstretched arms exposing her face to the burning atmosphere. Yet again, she is out of breath and cannot reach him in time. She clutches her belly, drops to her knees, buries her face in the lichen and moss, and cries herself to sleep.

  Gladys wakes her with a wet snuffling nuzzle. The other mothers loom protectively; Fern is one of them. She has no idea how long she’s slept, but the smoke has thinned and she feels coherent. Hollow. The herd follows her back to the hay loft. Their insistence signals she’s had a long slumber. A hunch corroborated by clutches of ungathered eggs.

  Strict routines ground her. Clear objectives, subtasks, record keeping, and routine, routine, routine. Structure is the key to keeping your head when chaos and madness threaten. Fern visits the trading post, assesses the extent of fire damage from local gossip and papers. She buys a calendar and shortwave radio. Winces as the word “widow” follows her out the door.

  Patterns emerge in the data: ocean temperatures rising, pH falling, glaciers and sea ice retreating, forest fires burning earlier/longer/bigger. A north slope village is swallowed by the Arctic Ocean. Unprecedented tropical cyclones batter the western reaches of the Pacific and Atlantic. She furiously knits global threats into background noise. She plots everything.

  Bidding the herd farewell as they head to the windblown uplands for winter, she is gripped with an ominous sensation. Her foreboding intensifies as she lightly touches each one passing through the gate. This is the last place she saw Rory, shadowed by Teekon, when they were too bereaved to speak. When she needed too much closeness, and he needed the furthest reaches of space. She is overcome with an unshakable feeling she will never again see the only family she has left.

  She cleans, she cards, she spins, she knits, she plots. Correlations she can’t unsee. She stopped knitting during her first pregnancy and lost it. She stopped knitting before the river took Ashton, when she was too heavily burdened with his sister to run downstream, to jump, to save him. She couldn’t lift her needles with the weight of so much loss dragging her under. And then Rory slipped away too. Lost to the wilderness he knew better than his heart, lost because his choosing not to return is agony, lost because his dying is unthinkable. Knitting is the only way to forestall calamity. Data do not lie.

  Every night she falls asleep to the steady click of needles. Whatever else she must do each day to survive, her hands always return to the needles at night. Clean, card, spin, knit, plot; the world goes quiet. Winter grants her stasis.

  Q doesn’t return with the herd and Gladys spooks too easily. Fern can only speculate what might have befallen him. She loads her pack with a few days’ food, knitting, and her shotgun. The forest beyond her valley is a graveyard of blackened skeletons haunting a ghostly gray landscape. She follows the herd’s trail back to where they came from, looking for Q.

  She is a scientist, but she’s still human and nature’s brutality still has the power to unhinge her. There is not much left of Q. Hungry wolves are incredibly efficient. She sinks to her knees in the bloody snow and screams curses to the impassive wind. Thankfully, the wolves are gone. Not because she’s afraid of them, but because her rage is volcanic, ready to indiscriminately destroy everything in its path. It is the natural cycle of life, but it is a personal affront. Now she has nothing left of Rory.

  In the long spring gloaming, she knits a pair of baby booties, ties one to each graceful curve of Q’s horns. This is the shape of her grief. Every loss is different, but every loss echoes in the hollows of her heart and womb. She curls up next to Q’s skull and dreams the dreams of wolves. Her teeth are sharp, her legs are fast; she works in unison with her pack, picks out the weakest, most defenseless, lunges. She wakes with the taste of blood in her mouth; her tongue aches.

  The summer is besieged by visions. Rory floats in a strange fog. Wolves glide through the shadows. Ashton and his sister skitter up a tree. Fern trembles with the aspen leaves and knits. She forgets how to sleep, but there are no more climate calamities in the news cementing her resolve to control it all.

  People warily eye her rare appearances at the trading post. Speaking in low tones and sidling away. Dimly aware of the apprehension, she projects her own anxiety about how to keep the world in check. She is oblivious to the schism yawning wider between reason and belief. Dissolves into the sugar, mixes into a bag of flour, condenses into canned goods. Phrases like “bereaved mother” only register as commentary on a dying planet.

  Fern can scarcely bear to watch her oxen leave at autumn’s frigid end. She feeds them extra hay and treats knowing it’s folly to fight the unwavering current of their instincts. No new calves came after Baby and she weeps for never bestowing a proper name. Cedar has ascended to dominant bull, but the herd is unbalanced and insecure under his novice leadership. Fern has to fight her own hands not to blockade their exit route.

  Life is a blur of needles. Pine, spruce, metal, plastic, bamboo, ice. Needles up her spine, the cabin cold because she’s forgotten to stir the fire. Pins and needles in her feet when she sits stone still except for flying fingers, working the wool for hours on end. Stabbing needles in her eyes after straining by lantern through endless Arctic winter nights.

  Without Q, the qiviut haul is pounds lighter than usual. Her supply quickly dwindles working at this frantic pace. No crafting her usual assortment of high-demand items: scarves, gloves, toques, sweaters. Instead, an immense blanket spills over her lap, lumps across the floor, twists into a memory of Teekon’s curled shape by the stove, Ashton’s peaceful bump beside him. She weaves in the patterns of heady nights making love, her swelling belly and bosom, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and wolf jaws. A story unfolds at her feet.

  When the last strands of qiviut wend their way from her skeins, she ravages her cupboards for means to save the world. Never-worn baby clothes unravel first, bleeding her heart dry. She moves quickly onto Rory’s untouched drawers, all the beautiful things she made, her desiccated heart crumbles to dust and blows away. Worse than grave robbery. A thought lies still and unchallenged in her anechoic chamber, igniting a spark of inspiration.

  Fortified with the edge of madness that slices through everything when honed by a certain idea, Fern bundles up, straps on her snowshoes, and pushes out into the razor sharp world. Does a heart still break in the woods if there is no one there to hear it? She scarcely registers the icy crust over the snow, which should signal the terrible tightrope she’s treading. Freezing rain should not fall this time of year in the interior. She forges her way blindly up the river to the buried treasure she seeks, unearths Russian Orthodox hair, bones and teeth. With these macabre mementos, she continues to knit.

  The March sun shouldn’t be sufficient to melt snow from the trees, but soon branches are bare and icicles threaten from the eves. Still, she knits and pearls frantically, scavenges for more material to weave. Every scrap of fabric shredded to strips, she shivers in her last slivers and slips. Wires, fork tines, the furniture next. She raids chicken feathers, hay from the loft, prays to the moon that the oxen aren’t lost.

  She steals needles from the trees, grass from their roots, mycelium mats, fiddlehead shoots. The oxen are late, wolves howl on the zephyr, she spins it all in as the madness will let her. In come the wildflowers, willows like angora, she knits up the stars, the moon, the aurora. She winds in her loss, her sorrow, her pain, then blends in the meadows, the clouds, and the rain. Finally, she starts on her toes and her legs, turning the last page of her story. As she reels the weft in up over her face, at long last she again holds her Rory.

  Acknowledgments

  This story was kicked up to the top shelf via ceaseless brain banter and stomach sharing with Deb Ewing. I can’t thank her properly without profanities and weird animal phallus jokes, so I’ll just have to leave it here.

  About the Author

  After decades of journalism, science writing, poetry and editorial work under other names, this is Layne Adamsson’s debut fiction publication. Layne’s work is a testament to her deep passion for physical sciences and literature, which she deftly weaves together. She is a tiny package of stone and soul, known to her writerly friends as “Blue”, an interloper of Venn diagram intersections, a mad word connoisseur, and spawner of things that grow rapidly beyond her control. She is a collection of contradictions most commonly found tripping through the forest or hiding under a book when not spouting random fascinating facts.

  Her poetry can be heard along the Ridge Walk, an immersive outdoor experience in the stunning Dandenong ranges of Victoria, Australia. Her letters to the trees are also incorporated into the Big Anxiety Festival and the Wind exhibition in the Climarte Gallery.

  Her words are painted upon guitars, scrawled across unexpected surfaces in slime moulds, and occasionally beginning to appear in collections like this where others can actually read them (including the poetry anthologies From One Line, Vol. 2; and Entangled). Some day she hopes to put on her big-girl pants and get her novels and children’s books published too. You can encourage such malarkey by yelling at her on Twitter @AspienBlue

  All that Glitters

  S.J. Lomas

  I never thought Lennox would convince me to come along to one of his paranormal investigations. Watching the occasional ghost show on TV together was one thing, but personally communing with spirits wasn’t something I wanted to get involved with.

  My parents had raised me to believe that ghosts aren’t real, but that was often followed up with a “don’t mess around with that stuff anyway.”

  It was completely different to Len’s approach, which was to run headlong into anything that made people uncomfortable. In this case, I agreed with my upbringing, but I’d also known Len long enough that I couldn’t let him down.

  “Come on, Amy. You know I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Besides, it’s a public event. The team’s been here dozens of times. There’s no bad energy there. You can do this.”

  I knew he was telling the truth. To be honest, I only half believed this stuff wasn’t a bunch of theatrics just for entertainment. If Len was anything, dramatic was certainly it. But Len had told me a lot of stories since he joined the paranormal group. He was so earnest, and some of the experiences he shared gave me goosebumps. I couldn’t help but wonder…what if?

  He’d invited me along as a guest so many times, and I’d always had a valid reason not to go. Eventually, it became a joke between us. Amy the scaredy-cat who needs to wear adult diapers and carry a box of tissues to soak up her fear of ghosts.

  It was comfortable to stay home. Besides, I wasn’t going to get any bad energy attached to me if I just stayed away. So I stayed away.

  Then Len asked Brad, the head of the group, if he could start leading public tours too. It took some training, but this was the first time Len would be in charge of a group. If ever there was a time to support my best friend and leave my comfort zone, this was it.

  Another Michigan winter was in full swing. Piles of nasty gray snow lined the sides of the road, pock-marked from salt and road spray. Although it was only nine o’clock at night, the darkness made it feel like it was two in the morning. The forecast for the night was calm although we’d reached that sad, restless part of winter when everyone was just sick of being cold and in the dark.

  Brad always ran his public hunts in October, when spooky season was in full form and ghosts and paranormal experiences were on everyone’s minds. Len had insisted on doing his in early February and he’d explained his reasons to me months ago.

  “First,” he’d said, “Everyone expects October, but spirits are all year long. Second, it’s colder, darker, and more depressing in February. People have abandoned their shiny New Year’s resolutions and they’re ready to sit in the truth. That’s the perfect combination for opening up to the realm of the spirits.” He’d waggled his eyebrow piercings at me for added emphasis. I, as usual, had shaken my head and smiled.

  “Whatever you say, Captain. Just don’t expect me to be there. It’s too creepy.”

  Len had grinned. “You’ll be there.” There wasn’t even a hint of doubt in his voice, even though I’d never gone. Hell, I hadn’t so much as watched a scary movie with Len because I just found them too disturbing. Even the ones everyone thought were campy and stupid.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  Len had sat back and gazed down his nose at me.

  “I am sure.”

  I’d crossed my arms, all mock-authority with him. “And what makes you so sure I’ll finally break down and come this time?”

  “Cuz you love me.”

  He was my best friend, of course I loved him. A sparkle of possibility lit in the back of my mind. I wanted to do it for Len, I really did, but I just didn’t know if I could.

  Fast forward five months and I was pulling into the parking lot of the historic theater where the ghost hunt was going to be. I guess what they say is true, love does conquer all, although I don’t think fear of real or imaginary ghosts was on their mind. Whoever “they” are.

  The marquee glowed yellowy bright in the desolate blackness of night. This was a unique type of darkness. Subtly oppressive, it seeped into your mind and stole your joy. It stirred a primal desire to hibernate, which could never be achieved. Even though the cold void of winter fought to steal my energy, it couldn’t touch the excitement and dread growing with each footfall toward the entrance. For just a moment, I considered turning back to the safety of my car and telling Lennox something else had come up. At nine o’clock at night. On Saturday. Yeah. He’d know I was lying. Although he would laugh it off, I’d see that shade of disappointment draw over his eyes. He thought he hid stuff like that from me, but I always knew. It was why we’d become friends in the first place. Where everyone else saw a smart-mouthed weirdo talking about Edgar Allan Poe, slasher films, and ghosts, I saw a nice guy who desperately wanted everyone to think he was a badass. He’d been a new kid in eighth grade and I was drawn to him like the buttered side of bread to the floor. Most of the kids teased or ignored him altogether. I guess he appealed to my rule-following heart. Just enough bad boy to be thrilling, except that he wasn’t bad at all. He wasn’t negative or creepy, just open to other possibilities and confident enough to show it. I wanted to be like that. I still do.