Berit Ellingsen - Not Dark Yet

The branches were covered in a fine layer of dried mud and were humid to the touch, but he stacked them in the hearth and held the flame of his camping lighter close to them until they finally caught fire. The light flickered over the night-dark walls and exhaled small breaths of heat which only emphasized the chill in the rest of the room. When the fire had consumed the wood he didn’t go outside to replace it, but undressed to his t-shirt and boxer briefs, pushed the mattress to the hearth, rolled his thin sleeping bag out on it, and fell asleep, even though it was barely six o’clock in the evening.

The next morning he put on running pants and trainers and went out on the deck. The air was sharp and fresh, easily bypassing his single layer of fabric, stealing the heat from his body, but the sensation only made him more alert. Far to the southwest and northwest were the neighboring farms: wooden houses, barns, courtyards, gardens. Except for them the moor held only heather and wild grass. He drank in the bright autumn light, the cold wind, the smell of vegetation and soil, and it felt like something sublimated and left him. He leapt from the unpainted deck and into the flowering heather, the ground firm and dry, not soft and sodden like he had expected, and began to run.

He continued west down the slope of the plain, feeling like he could run all the way to the summits in the distance. It made him think of a story he had read, about a dead man and a blackbird who traveled through a decaying, atrophied world to reduce the heat from the sun. Because the man was dead he needed no rest, and the two crossed a wide moor for days before they ascended into the mountains. Now he wanted to do the same, continue without stop until he reached the round blue peaks that bordered the moor. It looked like it would take at least two days of running. He wasn’t back to that level yet, so it would provide him with a nice goal for the future. He tried to remember which town or county lay on the other side of the peaks, but failed to recall a mental map of the region, his mind unwilling to hold onto anything but the mountains and the heather and the fragrance of the heath.

When the sun glimmered above the peaks, the slanting rays stung his eyes and warmed his skin. The silvery morning light made him feel transparent, clear as glass. He squinted and grinned and ran on in the bright morning until the cabin and its small outhouse were dark spots behind him, and he seemed to be equally distant from it and the peaks. Then he continued back through the vegetation for a long while and arrived at the cabin just as the sun completed its brief autumnal arc in the sky and started falling behind the mountains.

HE THOUGHT HIS ARRIVAL ON THE MOOR HAD gone unseen, but the next day people appeared. From the mattress by the hearth he saw shadows moving behind the curtains in the kitchen window. He let the visitors do whatever they wished and pretended not to notice. He wasn’t doing anything that was interesting to watch anyway.

“I see a ghost in there,” a child commented through the door. Someone shushed her and retreated from the deck, their steps shivering the old planks.

“The natives are restless,” he texted Michael.

“Be careful,” Michael wrote back.

“Always,” he replied.

“When are you coming back home?”

“I just got here.”

“What does the cabin look like?”

“Not bad. As in the photos.”

“I miss you,” Michael wrote.

“I’ll be home again soon,” he replied, with no other reassurance than that.

The next day there were even more people, three middle-aged men and a woman, who knocked quietly on his door and introduced themselves as Eric, Pieter, Mark, and Eloise, neighbors. He shook their hands and returned their smiles and let them inside. They filed into the cabin, cluttering the entrance with their shoes, spreading the smell of sweaty feet and the sound of steps on the blood-red hardwood floor. Then they squeezed together on the dusty sofa with pained looks on their faces, while he apologized for the lack of additional seating.

He took out some mugs from the cupboard and asked the guests if they wanted tea. At first they declined, but then they said yes, that would be lovely, so he had to turn on the gas and light the stove and rinse the dusty cups in the sink and heat water in the dimpled kettle and take out some tea bags from his backpack and talk.

“Who are you, where are you from, what are you doing here?” they asked, but in more roundabout terms. He told them that he was from a city south along the coast and that he had recently bought the cabin and its plot. The visitors were from the neighboring farms and after a while he gathered that they wished to lease his land for an agricultural project. They must already have decided that he was no farmer and unlikely to attempt to grow anything on his own.

“You really want to rent the heath?” he nearly blurted out, but stopped himself in time and just said, “Yes, yes, yes.”

They smiled and said, “We’ll come over again soon and tell you more about our plans.”

When they left, he crawled to the panorama window to remain out of sight.

“That wasn’t so difficult,” one of the men said as they sauntered down toward the farms in the southwest.

“Mind your chatter,” came the reply.

He huffed and crept back to the fading fire in the hearth. The moor was only heather and low shrubs. Wasn’t it too cold, the soil too barren to grow anything here?

THE CONTINENT’S SPACE ORGANIZATION WAS seeking new recruits for their manned exploration program. It was mentioned in the news only briefly, one story among dozens of others, soon drowned out by subsequent news cycles, but to him it stood out. Those selected as astronauts might be among the first humans to land on Mars. Since most space projects took decades to advance from the first concept to the final launch, the space organization must be well underway in developing the technology and experience needed for the trip.

He sat on the fake ship floor with the laptop plugged into the single outlet from the solar panels on the roof. He had yearned to go to Mars since he was old enough to understand the concept of other worlds. It didn’t matter if the place was inhospitable and remote, had too little air and was too cold and dry. The desire to travel there remained the same. He did wonder if the challenges of cosmic radiation, lack of nutrition, loss of bone and muscle mass, and weakening of the immune system that would happen during the long journey to Mars and back had been solved, and searched for information on the space organization’s web pages. He found few answers, but nevertheless returned to the application page and filled out the information the space organization wanted, storing the form online to send later.

Lastly, he took a visual and spatial perception test necessary for the application; he predicted the next geometric shape in a sequence, rotated variously colored blocks in his mind until he could almost reach out and turn them with his hands, and read the numbers off black and white square and round gauges while a timer in the corner rushed the seconds away. When he was done it had grown dark and the log from the wood he had bought in the town center earlier in the day had died out in the hearth. He switched the laptop off, texted Michael goodnight, undressed, and curled up inside the sleeping bag.

“I’ll let you leave on one condition,” Michael had said the last night before he left for the cabin.

He turned on the pillow toward Michael. “I will come back. I promise.”