The Glass Woman

The body remembers love, as rock remembers the heat and compression that formed it. It waits, buried under the earth, cold and longing, until it is freed. Then that same rock can skim across a river, travel an ocean, be carried across strange lands until it finds its way home.

A chill wind blew across the frozen water. There was no marker to show where the land ended and the sea began, except for the blocks of solid sea, where the water had frosted over, shifted, then frozen again. Tiny slabs of ice squatted, stacked like tombstones. We walked out onto the crusted water. The ice groaned under our feet, the rumble of an Arctic bear, warning as the dark water beneath shifted. We stopped. My heart beat in my throat. I waited for the crack of the ice, the roar of the water. The world held its breath.

The snow grew deeper as we laboured down the hill. The land was a flat white pall, spread out like rumpled wool. Into the distance stretched the solid sea, sullen and murky beneath the ice. The sea will trick a man, seeming frozen and steadfast on the surface, but under the white crust, the black water gulps greedily at the breathing world above. In time, I knew, despite everything that had happened, the sun would rise and the light would glitter off the ice, like shards of glass. The world would glow.

It seems to me that your face needs reshaping. Your mouth is too big, your ears too small. And your nose is so long it is no wonder you stick it into other people's affairs. So I will help you. Shall I shorten your nose? Or perhaps the problem is your eyes? Or does your throat bother you?' He rests the knife edge against a hammering vein in the man's scrawny neck. 'It bothers me, too noisy.

In love, every one of us is a cross, every one of us a Christ.

She is a woman capable of violence. She is a woman who did what was necessary. She is a woman who has survived.

The truth is water, or steam; the truth is ice. The same tale might shift and melt and reshape at any time.

Their words make grey clouds of sound in the cold air...

Love opens us, as an earthquake opens the earth.

Sometimes we woke in the night, huddled against the cold. Then, in the darkness, the world and everything in it became as skinless as water, no boundaries to show where one wave ended and the next began, our bodies like paired oars, each movement driving us further into the unknown. Time and sensation blurred. Tiny moments of golden brilliance, gossamer-thin and stretched to breaking, in a life otherwise steeped in grim shadow. I did not simply hold Pétur in my arms; I embraced him with blood and bone, clasped him with muscle and spirit, everything that I was and hoped to be. God might strike me down, but I felt saved and whole. Afterwards, we fell asleep intertwined. In those last moments of wakefulness, blinking up at the stars, as I sensed Pétur’s sweat cooling on my skin, I felt utterly human and fallen, and utterly content. And in those heat-soaked rags of time, I wished for every mountain in Iceland to shudder down rocks upon us, concealing us for ever from the gaze of the world. If we were ever found, our bodies would be dragged from the rubble together: tangled, knotted – inseparable. But such moments of savage contentment are as fleeting as the reflection of the swelling moon blinking upon the surface of the sea. Only ever minutes old, they dissolve with a passing cloud, or a gust of wind. In every human heart glows a tiny flame of hope that tomorrow will bring a love that might satisfy the smouldering yearning to be known. In some hearts, that fire is greedy and becomes a devouring inferno. It leaves only dead ash and dry dust behind. The wind whirls it into emptiness. But there is such heat while it burns … And the light is infinite.

This land will kill you, if it can. We Icelanders are forged of different metal from the soft foreigners – even the Barbary pirates did not stay long. Have you ever known a Danish trader to winter here from choice?’ I shrugged. How did this concern me, or the people’s morbid curiosity? ‘We seem strong, Jón, all of us, but we are like grass – we bend so the wind will not break us. You are like the sea: you surge forward again and again. See yourself now. Your parents are dead, your croft is falling apart and your boat is riddled with holes, yet you don’t stop.’ I spread my hands. ‘I don’t want to die.’ ‘You want to live. You want a better life than the one you were given.

But the truth isn't solid, like the earth; she knows that now. The truth is water, or steam; the truth is ice. The same tale might shift and melt and reshape at any time.

We were but a step away from the vagrants and exiles who are left to beg by the roads until they were murdered by the cold and buried by the snow.