Pétur

Ash fell from the wind. She began to take long walks. Before breakfast, after lunch, she walked the weed-pocked path to the lake. White ash turned the lake’s surface to desert and the tops of fjalls invisible.

By the third morning, ash from Eyjafjallajökull coated the porch, the porch rail, the seats of the porch chairs, and the rented station wagon. The hrossagaukur had disappeared, and the cabin’s weathervane creak had stopped. Laura told Adam, again, she was going out. He was her son. She tied a gauze scarf around her nose and mouth.

“I look like a robber,” she said.

“No one will see you.”

He opened the door for her into the otherworldly weather. She was garish in the ash in her flannel green coat. At the cabin window, he watched her diminish, and like a little boric flame a quarter mile out, her back rose on the path, then shrank and went out.

This dale in Iceland had a permanent population of eighty-six. They had seen almost no one … once or twice, until nine or ten at night, they’d heard shouting children. Icebabies, Laura called them. You can’t ever see them, of course. They’re made only of sound.

Adam was a data systems analyst. He was thirty-six. He lived in a onebedroom apartment in Palo Alto. Laura also lived in Palo Alto, in a house she’d once shared with Adam’s father on the other side of town. Iceland for two weeks had been her idea for her birthday. She’d just turned sixty-one, and she’d told Adam she didn’t believe it, and he shouldn’t, either. You look in the mirror and acknowledge you’re as old as you like, she'd said. She felt nineteen, mostly. She looked fifty.

She returned from her walk late enough that Adam had made soup. The cabin had five rooms, floors of dull old wood, a kitchen and dining area adjoining the living room. There was a woodstove, a coffee table with a fan of women’s fashion magazines, an expensive guitar on its stand, a box of black rocks and cockles from the lake and elsewhere, a striped sofa, a cushion ripped, all owned by the family they rented from.

“On the news they’re saying don’t go out at all,” he said.

“But no one’s said anything like that to me.” She untied her scarf.

Bits of ash stuck to the silvering blonde roots of her hair. She was tall, too slim. She wore blue jeans and tall boots.

“On TV, Mother.” He put a roll and a bowl in front of her, soup with halibut and celery from the store in town.

“Well, people are out there,” she said. “I talked to some people.”

“Who’s out there? Rangers?”

“I think it’s coming down most at the lake,” she said. “Right now it’s like the moon. It’s not dangerous on the moon.” She put her scarf on the small dining room table. “Come with me, come to the lake. There isn’t much ash.”

“It’s unhealthy.”

She picked up a chunk of fish in her spoon. “What does anti-matter mean?”

“What?”

“What’s anti-matter?”

“Anti-matter?” Adam wiped his mouth with his napkin. He liked when she asked questions he could answer. “Sure, it’s like a mirror image, a negative image of matter, like matter’s twin. And there are anti-protons. Anti-electrons—”

“What happened to all the fish?” she said.

“In the lake? All dead, from the ash.”

“I don’t think they feel anything.”

She walked in, waking Adam from a Nap in a chair beside the fire in the woodstove. It had been two days. Her scarf was tangled around her neck. Her green coat off, a rip in her shirt at the elbow. She held her arm to her chest: a bright red cut was visible within the rip. She went into the bathroom with a sleepwalker’s involuntary smile and...