Falkner

This Emptier World

By Jennifer Falkner

Breaking Up

The dogs have already been drowned, rounded up yesterday and tied in sacks weighted with stones. Dropped into the waves from the top of Conachair. Unlike the cows and most of the sheep, collected to sell on the mainland, dogs have no economic value.

Phaedra refuses to stay in the village after that. It has become a cruel place and an empty one without Roger, and Lucky, and Daft. She spends the night, the last night anyone was supposed to spend on Hirta, curled up in one of the abandoned black houses in the medieval village at the foot of Conachair.

She wakes stiff from a night spent on the ground. The sun is well on its way in the sky. The seabirds—fulmars and kittiwakes—are making their usual unlovely squawks as they circle the cliffs. Phaedra runs and tumbles down the slope to the Village just in time to see the Harebell leaving the bay. Every St Kildan is on that boat. Every St Kildan but her.

The ocean’s endless churn against the rocks drowns out her cries—

The morning after the night before, peering at blackheads and wrinkles in the bathroom mirror

—fifty-five million years ago, St Kilda was part of a ring of volcanoes. The remnant outline of the volcano runs from the islet of Soay around the southwestern edges of the archipelago, continues underwater and emerges again at Boreray. The island of Hirta, the only inhabited island of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides, has improbably high sea cliffs, the highest of them being Conachair, the Beacon. From a distance the cliffs can look snow-covered, but the whirling seabirds, the fulmars and gannets and puffins, are responsible for painting the dark rocks white. Below, the wave-smashed rocks are slippery with kelp. Not a single tree grows here, but the slopes and valleys are green and freckled with stone ruins. It is an island showing its age—

No messages, no texts

—four hours gone. Perhaps they are reaching Harris Island now. Phaedra is limp. Screaming at the sea didn’t help. Throwing rocks at the horizon didn’t bring anyone back. Hysterics aren’t an option. She tries to imagine Deirdre’s face. Concern and repentance molding her features. Phaedra’s absence finally noted, her sister demanding a boat—trawler, fishing boat, anything, it doesn’t matter-—be readied to fetch her.

She watches a waddling puffin making its way across the beach. Blue bodies of sand eels dangle from the bird’s ludicrous beak. She wants to wait and watch all day but an obliterating mist creeps up from the bay. Dùn, the sleeping dragon, a rocky arm protecting Village Bay from westerly storms, is enshrouded.

Reluctantly, she turns back. Fewer than twenty stone crofts in one long curved row, bending in echo of the shape of the bay make up the Village. Beyond it are stone walls and scattered cleits on the rising grassy slope. There is no clatter of looms, no children running in and out of the doorways. No smell of damp tweed and wool from the jackets and jumpers of the people gathered round the fire. No voices, no laughter. Just the tumult of the sea—

Redecorating

—from every house, furniture was carefully wrapped and loaded onto the boats. Tables, chairs, bed frames. Looms. Even the timber that had formed part of the cargo for a freighter that went down in 1917 was considered valuable enough to be taken away.

St Kildans harvested from the sky and the sea. Seabirds and fish. And sometimes bounty washed up in the bay after a shipwreck. That’s how they acquired the island’s one church bell. Now Phaedra salvages what she can from the detritus of the empty crofts, the forgotten contents of the dry stone cleits. She finds some old ropes and fishing gear in one, some rotting potatoes in another. One cleit contains nothing but feathers.

In the old days, before the tourists, before the Bible-pounding priests and men who would be prophets, when almost every part of existence was fashioned from what the island alone provided, every dwelling was lit during the long nights by bird-skull lamps. Fuelled by fulmar oil, that necessary ingredient, they gave a feeble glow. But in those long dark days and nights, who needed bright light? Faces blurred, softened, movements slowed, become sleepy and gentle. When waxed and wicked candles came, and later, kerosene lamps, they gave enough light to work by and so the islanders had to work. There was always some mending or knitting or rope-mending. Gospels read over the bowed heads of the industrious and righteous. The brighter the light, the more there was to do, the quicker the tempers. The darker the bruises in the morning—

Insomnia

—there are few locks on the island, each of them made of wood and all easily broken. They are used more as symbols than an actual defence against thieves. In a community as small and as isolated as this, a thief could not go undiscovered for long. Mrs. Ferguson had lived on her own for as long as Phaedra can remember. Her husband tumbled from the cliff face one spring, harvesting gugas, when Phaedra was still a baby. Her door has no lock and swings open easily when Phaedra presses on it. Superstition made the old woman lay fresh coal and turf in the fireplace, ready to be lit, before she left. On the small table she had left her Bible open. The Book of Exodus. Phaedra takes two furious steps across the small room to slam the book shut.

She wraps a discarded burlap sack over her shoulders—all the old woman’s warm blankets and tweed are packed and gone—and lights a fire. She will have to scramble for a cooking pot eventually, a bowl and a mug, but for now, with the rain suddenly pelting down, it’s enough to have shelter and warmth. The fire pipes up here and there with a shifting log and a flare of opinionated sparks, keeping the silence at bay.

The dirt floor is hard. Though Phaedra’s nose is blocked from crying and it seems as if her tears will never stop, she finally—brokenly—sleeps—

The university library offers an online form to request books from its collection. No one needs to learn the arcane system of call numbers and classification or climb the stairs to the floors above and wander through the quiet stacks anymore. A librarian can retrieve the book for you and have it ready at the circulation desk the next day.

I could easily have done this. Filled in the form. Waited for the confirmation email. Dropped by Circulation on my way to the car after class.

Instead I pull out my scribbled notes and trudge up the shabby stairs with a half-full to-go cup of coffee placed carefully on a top step and balled-up paper and potato chips bags in the corners, past the signs forbidding food or talking on even-numbered floors. I need six books and I will take my time finding them, drifting down empty stacks, softening my gaze to allow other covers, titles, words to snag my attention. You have to make room for serendipity. There are limitations to the online form.

The navy and brown patterned carpets smell freshly vacuumed, but it doesn’t overpower the pervasive scent of paper and ink and glue and time. I can stay for hours if I want to, on this Friday afternoon, in the second week of term.

By the time I get home, the house is still empty. But I have these books to shelter in. I eat up the details, each one a necessary crumb, to stave off starvation.

Staying at your brother’s, you said. You don’t say when you’re coming back. I have a feeling if I call your brother, he won’t have a clue where you are. Or worse, he will know exactly but refuse to tell me. So I don’t call.

This fight was different than the others. You never left before. Sulked, yes, and refused to talk to me, while I would pretend that nothing was wrong and you haven’t hurt me. Sometimes apologies followed. Sometimes we just grew so exhausted of our anger, we decided to pretend there had been apologies and forgiveness and move on.

The house is a stranger at night. It creaks and cracks. The high whine made by the bathroom faucet at three in the morning when I need the distraction of a cold drink sounds like tormented soul.

A man shouts drunkenly in the street. I peek out the curtains but it isn’t you. Just a stranger. I don’t know why I thought it would be you. You don’t even drink. He is angry and stumbling, lurching from the mailbox to the streetlight and back. Not an unusual sight on our street but still I’m afraid. This house isn’t a fortification anymore. Anything can get in. Anyone can leave.

Eating ice cream directly from the carton, watching tv

—two days ago she sat in the corner by the fireplace of their small croft and watched Deirdre pack their china, what little there was of it, in burlap and straw in the one wooden crate they were allotted. Each household received just one. It wasn’t large but it was enough for what they had. Now the house is stripped of its meagre furniture, blankets and bedding, cookware and cutlery and dishes. The pantry has been emptied. Their father’s loom disassembled, taken down to the dock and loaded onto the boat. Only the embroidered mottoes in their plain wooden frames remain, tucked into a corner by the hearth. No Cross, No Crowns, one reads. The Lord Will Provide, says another. She’s not betting on it.

Phaedra didn’t want to go, thought it was wrong to evacuate when that would mean leaving their mother, five years in the ground, behind. She sulked while her sister worked. Deirdre, who wanted to marry, to have children, who knew the island could give her neither, ignored her.

Evacuation was discussed for years before it actually happened. In the daily morning meetings of the men, with the warmth of the houses at their backs, gazing out at the semi-circular shore to sea, it floated in and out of consideration. In small groups of women, as they knitted and spun, while porridge steamed over the fire. There was a new reliance on the tourists that came to St Kilda, since the market for their oil and feathers grew smaller every year. Groups of men and women in city clothes, nothing homespun, arrived in boats all through the spring and summer, seemingly only to gaze at them with undisguised curiosity. But no one could deny the usefulness of the money they brought to the island. The St Kildans took the tourists to the cliffs, demonstrated their skills in dancing down them. Or brought out small things they had knitted, socks and purses, getting a few pennies for each. The visitors who took photographs and, later, moving pictures of the islanders tipped generously.

Leaving felt so impossible to Phaedra, such an unlikely fantasy. Her people had lived on the island for a thousand years or more.

But last winter was bad. Food supplies ran low and no trawlers came with relief or news of the outside world, as they usually did. The daydream became a necessity. Arrangements were made. The government was appealed to for help, which they were only too happy to provide, since the existence of the St Kildans had been a bureaucratic headache for many years. For the most part, there was resignation. Evacuation was inevitable. The island couldn’t support them any longer. Only one crofter sowed crops in April, though it was said he only did it out of habit and not from any plan to stay.

But what should Phaedra do in Glasgow, the place her sister was so keen to go? Noisy, dirty, crowded Glasgow. She has heard enough stories from the Harris Island people and from the main-landers who came to their island as tourists to marvel at their Stone Age way of living. The Bird People of St Kilda, they called them. Well, she has no desire to join the City Slaves of Scotland. They may be taller. Their skin less tanned, less roughened by the wind. But they are not happier. They call her home desolate, bare, Godless. But that is their ignorance. There are gods all over this island. Not just in the kirks. Every megalith is an altar. Every bird is a god. Monsters swim through the ocean. The island itself breathes the pagan prayers and sacrifices of her ancestors.

As the sun comes up, the lichen glows gold and bronze against the grey rock—

Nothing but rain

—the kirk roof leaks. Possibly the leak has been there for months, untended, since the plan was to evacuate anyway and many jobs of upkeep and repair had gone undone. But this last storm only widened it. Now the trickle down the wall is unmistakable. On Sundays she would spend at least part of the morning in the small chapel. Muttering a liturgy, running her mouth over the words like a stream smooths over a pebble. Humming snatches of a hymn. The echoes of her community were stronger then. She could even sense her father in the pew beside her, in his tobacco-smelling tweed, a whiff of toothpaste and whisky more holy than incense. Her mother’s treble during the hymns. Now the spell of the church is broken—

Meal planning for one

—it rains for two days straight. On the third day, Phaedra takes what fuel she can, a broken spinning wheel, a couple of Bibles up to the top of Conachair. It is possible on a clear day for a bonfire to be visible from its summit as far away as Uist or Harris. But the flames don’t leap as high as they did in her imagination. Her fuel is too wet.

No one is coming. There are storms from September to March, no boats are coming and no outside work can be done in the great winds that buffet the island. If she’s going to survive for any length of time, she will have to hurry to provision herself. She is used to eating bird meat, eggs, and porridge. She can manage on her own, without imports from the mainland, without flour or whisky, just as her ancestors did—

Moving to a smaller, cheaper apartment

—storms coat the windows white with sea spray. The incessant pounding of the waves, the howling wind, the bone-rattling clatter of rain against the zinc roof lasting all night and most of the morning, leave Phaedra unable to hear anything properly for hours. Her head feels like a shell, the ocean continues to roar inside its walls.

When the gale gives way to a gentle breeze and the sky is a sharpened blue, she emerges. The houses of the Village, empty of family and neighbours, offer no protection anymore. Not against the season to come, all on her own. While puffins wheel over the muscular waves, she moves her few things to the old medieval village near the foot of Conachair. A ramshackle collection of stone ruins. A place used only by sheep and children. But there is one building, older than the rest, with an underground passage with two small chambers. She used to hide her treasures here when she was little, things she didn’t want Deirdre to touch. Under the earth and away from the sea, she will curl up like a mouse, snug for winter. Here she can shelter not just from the cold but from the deafening wind. And the ghostly voices riding on it.

Bedding and crockery she scavenges from the other houses, as well as a hurricane lamp and a tiny supply of paraffin oil. She leaves the stretched and framed mottoes at her own home. Her father prized them, believing they were marks of both elegance and piety. His own mother had embroidered them. No small feat on an island where coloured floss was a luxury. She and Deirdre hated them. Florid things, with their uneven letters and weirdly corpuscular roses. Granny worked, not very skilfully, from a pattern. There are no roses on Hirta. No wonder Deirdre contrived to leave them behind—

Meal planning for one II

—the echoes of those who left fade. The days are too short for all that needs to be done. Too broken up by stormy weather. There is peat to cut and lay up for winter, birds to harvest and process. She only started laying up stores in September. How many birds are enough? How much fuel? She is only one person. She has never made these kinds of calculations completely on her own before. She never stops feeling hungry—

Grocery shopping for one

—the birds, their constant motion and their cries carried on the wind, keep Phaedra’s thoughts aloft. Even as she creeps down the cliff face, wearing the thick climbing socks she found in one of the cleits, she will only look up, never down. She hasn’t bothered tying one of the ropes around her waist as the fowlers usually do since there is no one at the top to use it to haul her up if she should fall. She is lucky, at this end of the season, that there are so many birds still unfledged.

Fulmars mate in April, each laying their single egg in May. By the end of summer, the gugas, still not yet independent, have grown fat. Both parents are often at sea, finding food for their offspring. Fish or squid, plankton or jellyfish. Traveling for weeks on end without needing to land. Soaring or swooping according to the thermals over the North Atlantic.

Phaedra has never killed anything before. She knows it takes a solid grasp around the head and neck and a firm wrench. There’s a crunch of bone and a soft exhalation of air. She feels sick.

Now she has to steel herself to do it again. Worse, she has to make herself do it over and over, quickly, with enough stealth and enough confidence not to frighten the other birds from their roosts. She needs at least a hundred of the small birds to see her through the winter. Guga meat may be oily and chewy and acrid, but anything can be delicious when there’s nothing else to eat.

She creeps slowly downwards, trying to keep from startling the birds. The fulmar has a particular reflex, where the contents of its stomach, including the noxious oil that can be used for almost anything from fuelling lamps to soothing chilblains, can be immediately vomited up, ejected up to three feet away. She would lose the bird, the oil, and probably be drenched in the vile-smelling substance to boot. The parents never leave their chicks completely defenceless—

Survival

—her hands are raw from clutching the rock. Her wrists and ankles ache. Her first nest. She has to grab, hold, twist, crack, move on. And not think. It’s the thinking, the doubting, that birds can sense. Grab, hold, twist. Grab, hold, twist. She reaches out, almost there--grab, hold—her fingers brush its feathers--grab, hold—but she’s still too far away and only tickles the bird with the tips of her fingers. The guga bursts upwards, with a croak and a retch. She gags from the sharp stink. A dozen other birds, alerted, fly up and circle the cliff. They pound at the air with their staccato scolding.

Cursing, she sits on the little ledge where she had crouched. Her eyes prick with tears. Is it better to give up for now, to crawl back up to surer land empty-handed and try again another day or to wait the birds out? The days are already so short.

The water below her dangling feet churns against the black rocks. The rocks around Hirta, impervious to the demands of the sea, are sharp as teeth.

But looking down is bad. It makes her light-headed and nauseous. So she looks up again. Up into the sky and the fulmars’ graceful arcs and swoops. Each bird is so attuned to the movements of the others that there is never any danger of collision. She decides to wait, to watch as the fulmars knit their dances into the sky, and try again when they settle.

Is there a contradiction in feeling both soothed and uplifted by the lives of her prey? The awe they inspire should not be repaid by slaughter. But she knows her appetite won’t outstrip their abundance. In their way, they have made room for her. As long as she remains alone—

Skimming the titles of the Self-Help section of the bookstore

—the St Kildans had a reputation for insouciance when it came to dancing down the cliffs, dangling above the rocks and waves and smashed bones of the unlucky. That was an act for the cameras. For the tourists who came to gawk at the curious, backwards people. They had skill and balance beyond ordinary measure, yes, but they were never careless. The difference between life and death is a misjudged foothold, a rock shelf slippery with birdlime, a handhold that crumbled when any weight was put on it. A partner holding the rope from above, suddenly distracted by an itch or an idea. They made it look easy but it never was—

Self-care

—her hands ache from twisting so many necks. Her shoulders and back are sore from climbing, from hauling the carcasses up the cliff, their broken necks hooked through her leather harness.

She soaks her hands in warm water and massages them with oil. She remembers her father rubbing oil into his own hands when she was little. Memory lives in action. Loneliness sharp as the stacks stabs at her—

Meal planning again

—after many attempts over many days, she is eventually able to complete a decent harvest. She chops off their wings, plucks, singes and sears the meat. She splits them open and yanks out their innards. Normally, the birds are cut lengthwise down the back and filled with salt. Too valuable a commodity to leave behind, all the island’s salt is on the mainland now. Phaedra has to preserve the meat the old-fashioned way, in stone cleits. The cold and the wind will dry them out and preserve them all winter.

The pile is so much smaller than what she’s used to seeing after harvest, when all Hirta’s men would heap together their spoils and divide them among the families. But there’s no more to be had. The gugas are leaving their nests.

Phaedra does it all. Men’s work, women’s work. The wind is loud and lonely and she tried to block it out with the songs the women used to sing as they worked together, but her voice is thin and no match for the wind. And plucking birds is so much harder when her hands are already sore from wringing their necks.

For dinner she fries up several tiny bird livers. The rest of the entrails she puts aside, useful later as fish bait perhaps—

You empty out your pockets every night onto the bedside table. Wallet, change. A rogue button that came off your shirt. Your watch gets dropped next to the little pile. Like a hoard for a tiny domestic dragon. Pants and shirt get draped over the chair and you wander into the en suite in your boxers.

One night, there is something that shouldn’t be there. It tinkles as it falls, and flashes in the light the way dull coins don’t. I wait until the bathroom door closes and then reach over to pick it out. I hold it up by the hook and the hoop of hammered silver catches the bedside light. The earring is delicate and lovely and definitely not mine.

Quickly, before you finish brushing your teeth, I slip it into my jewellery box. You would never look for it there.

Ten years ago we were solid. Ten years into the marriage and congratulating ourselves on how easy it all was. Our jobs, if not exactly fulfilling, held the promise of later fulfillment and in the meantime paid the bills. The children were still young and their crises were still ones we could resolve, or at least they seemed to be. A grazed knee requiring a kiss, a nightmare to be soothed and cuddled away.

You still sought me out in the early grey dawn. Your hand gently pulling my legs apart. Lips on my neck. Whispers. Quiet sighs as the furnace ticked on.

I still sought you out, in the evenings after the kids had gone to bed. Curled up into your side as we watched Law & Order. Your chest under my ear, the steady thump-thump of your heart.

Our bodies were familiar. Perhaps less exciting than they had been but there were still little explosions to be found.

We told each other we loved each other. It felt true for a long time. And then it didn’t. But we kept saying it, as if repetition could make it true, like a prayer or a spell to keep disaster at bay.

Marking mid-terms

—eventually the productive days of September and early October fade and the season of storms bears down in earnest. Rain and snow and vicious winds that whip the sea and make the water lash out at the land. Phaedra has no choice but stay inside, in her little underground burrow. She has stores of food in one of the antechambers and in two cleits nearby. She sews together pieces from burlap sacks and other fabric scraps into makeshift blankets and stuffs them with feathers.

For four whole days she can’t light a fire because her tinder got damp. She huddles in a stiff little ball, staring at the stone walls. Long empty hours. Every muscle is tense against the cold. She eats cold meat and congealed porridge without milk and dreams of the summer world. Snow falls evenly on the vacant crofts in the Village, on cleits, on stones that last shifted in the Ice Age—

Insomnia II

—Phaedra has to be careful of the stories she tells herself. For instance, the one about Saint Brenhilda, the sister of Ronan of Iona, who rivaled her brother in the pursuit of an ascetic life and removed herself to the remote island of Sula Sgeir. Almost as remote as Hirta, and so small that waves break over the entire island during the fierce Atlantic storms. Brenhilda was discovered near her small stone bothy, bones picked clean by the wind. Her rib cage, stuffed with twigs and feathers, was home to a cormorant nest.

Nor the one about her sister. This one some demon in Phaedra’s head tells her while she tosses and heaves on the edge of sleep. That her sister knew she was still on the island as the boat was loaded up, as the islanders filed on, and said nothing. That her sister was capable of inflicting that much cruelty.

All this is nonsense, of course. No one would condemn another human to this level of isolation. Not knowingly. They couldn’t—

Digging through the jewellery box

—on the edge of the hearth, nestled between two rocks, something glints. Phaedra scrapes at the rock a little to persuade it out, for it’s firmly wedged into a chunk of hardened ash. A small circular object, metal, with a small pin attached to one side. She scrubs at it with the edge of her sweater until the design reveals itself. A brooch. One of those old-fashioned brooches, like the one her grandmother used to pin her shawl closed. Made from a large old coin and a nail from a shipwreck. She can make out a few letters and the outline of a head in profile. Tricky to tell if it’s a man or woman. A king or a queen. The date is clearer. 1763. King then. Impossible to know who was the last to wear it or how long it lay forgotten in this abandoned dwelling. After cleaning it up a bit more, she could pin it on her own shawl in the old style. It’s hers now. Instead she climbs to the top of Conachair and hurls it into the sea—

Maybe she needs a dog

—Phaedra escaped to Glen Bay, on the far side of the island, when the close quarters with her silent father and resentful sister became unbearable. There she could scream at the sea and the wind would obliterate the sound of her fury. Now that there’s been a break in the weather, she decides to visit again, if only to give her eyes a different view to look at.

The rocky strip is streaked with tentacles of green seaweed. She keeps her eyes down, in case treasure lies among the sharp stones, broken shells and splintered bones of birds. Once, when she was very little, she found a gold chain with a broken clasp. At least half of it lay curled inside a mussel shell, a gift from the water, just for her. She gave it to her mother as a gift.

A high-pitched bark makes her head snap up. A whine follows, and more barking. She hasn’t heard barking since the last day, when the islanders drowned all the dogs and sailed away from the evidence. Phaedra has found more than one sodden burlap sack washed up in the bay since then, moving with the action of the water but containing no life. She can’t bear to open them but hauls each one out of the water anyway. Another morning digging a deep enough hole. The graveyard is nearly full.

She slides down the rocky slope and the barking grows louder. A half-grown, half-starved mongrel leaps up excitedly as she approaches. When she is close enough, it throws itself on her, whining and licking and whipping its tail so furiously its whole body shudders with its force.

The dog must have been stuck in this small hollow, sheltered from the worst of the wind and the ocean spray by large boulders but unable to scramble up their sheer surface, for weeks. Its claws are worn and bloody from trying.

He—for she has determined it’s a male—trots behind her all the way home, occasionally nosing her hand and licking it. He eats what she gives him, looks for more and eats that too. They curl up together before the fire and it is almost heaven to sleep with another warm, breathing body pressed against her own.

She wakes alone. Cold. Her dreams are getting out of hand—

New Year’s Eve

—the bitter east wind drops away. The skies clear. Blades of green grass poke through the thin layer of snow in patches, like the stubble on a young man’s chin. Phaedra, sick of her burrow, the cramped space, the damp fug of it, emerges into the sharp world. The night is moonless but the stars are flinty and bright. Her hungry eyes feast on them.

Undulating curtains of colour arrive from the north. Now green-blue, now yellow and red. They ripple silently across the sky. Phaedra expects to hear the snap and shake of fabric, like tweed released from the loom, but all she hears is the clattering sea.

If her family were here, if the evacuation had never happened, she would be home at this time of night, tucked up in bed beside her sister, in their little stone croft, secure in the arm of the Village. She would have slept through all this wonder.

Hirta should be a lonely place. On paper, it is. But it teems with energy. The shifting winds, the graphite sea and its white stippled waves. The low-burning fires of orange lichen spread over the glowing rocks. Life is fuller here than anywhere else. It is only Phaedra who is lonely. And it is a simple fact, not a condition, not a handicap. One quality among many. There are other things to be getting on with.

The auroras dance away. A line of gold rips along the horizon. The new day spills over across the sea and sky—

Every winter, our neighbour clears only a narrow path down his stairs, leaving more than half under snow. Every year this irritates the hell out of you. You always clear not just the stairs and the path, but the sidewalk in front of our house which the city plows clear anyway. Not quickly enough, you claim. And they don’t always clear right down to the level of the sidewalk. That night you came inside enraged.

I was on the couch, cross-legged, grading papers. You marched into the kitchen, yanked open the fridge, pulled out this and that to reheat for dinner. Dropping each plate and Tupperware container heavily onto the counter.

“Why does it matter? He can still get out of his house.” I raised my voice to be heard in the kitchen.

“What if there’s an emergency? You couldn’t get a stretcher up there.”

“Is it likely he’ll need a stretcher?”

This was the wrong thing to say. You glared.

“That’s not the point, Fay.”

“So what is the point?”

You slammed the microwave door. I refused to flinch. I was used to the slamming. I hated it but I was used to it. You complained I was “picking on you.” Your favourite complaint. As if we were five. You didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night.

I couldn’t fix this by myself. And you refused to talk about broken things. Ignore a problem long enough and it goes away.

You went away.

Spring

—St Kilda is fundamentally unreachable. Like a fairy tale island, it recedes even as you approach it. The waves drag you backwards. The only way to find it, this distant archipelago, is to become completely adrift. Lose sight of the land you came from, drift into mist. When you are lost and all normal compasses have failed you, humbled, you learn to navigate by the birds. You can follow them home.

She has learned to be alone on this island. She was untried at first and unwilling. Over winter it became her refuge. Now, in the greening of spring, it is her delight.

If the day is clear, sometimes she can see steamships on the horizon. Or trawlers. She can climb to the top of the Conachair and build a fire to signal them, if she wants to.

She doesn’t want to yet.

She looks down toward the bay, to the curved line of the Village. The protective black arm of Dùn, the sleeping dragon. Seals playing along the headland. Further out, the cheery crest and plunge of the dolphins is just visible. And above, seabirds are always circling. Kittiwakes and fulmars play on the currents. On a lower strata, thousands of puffins and gannets criss-cross the sky, filling it with their noisy chirrups, their unending gossip and bickering. The yellow-necked gannets overhead are a sure sign the sea is thick again with herring.

Sometimes when the air currents drop and the birds swoop low over the island, Phaedra can lift her hand and their feathers will brush her fingers. She closes her eyes, listens to the beat and pulse of their wings—

An email pops up in my notifications. A notice from the university library. The following items are now due.

I’m in the middle of packing the books up anyway. One by one, they go in my canvas bag, these library-bound covers in greens and browns. St Kilda : An Illustrated Account of the Geology. Seabirds of the Outer Hebrides. The Life and Death of St Kilda. I am mostly ready to part with them.

If they are not returned by April 30, they will be renewed automatically, says the email.

I pick up Birds of St Kilda, flip through the pages one more time, breathing in the smell of old paper and ink, of binding glue and library dust, of salt air and bird grease and the tang of peat smoke.

Yes. Mostly ready to return—

Jennifer Falkner (she/her) is a short story writer living in Ottawa, Canada, on the traditional, unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg First Nation. She is the author of the novella Susanna Hall, Her Book, a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award, and Above Discovery, a short story collection. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including Timeworn Literary Journal, Agnes and True, and The Stonecoast Review. www.jenniferfalkner.ca