Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

One morning the sun rose and decided not to set. For a couple of days it sank below the mountain ridge in the evening but never dropped behind the horizon, and soon it stayed high and bright without pause. Within a few days of the midnight sun’s arrival, Augie and Iris lost all sense of time. He had long ago lost track of the days, but he knew it must be mid-April if the midnight sun had risen, the same way he would know late September had arrived when the lake was bathed in twilit days, the sun hovering just beneath the horizon before it set completely and plunged the Arctic into another long, dark night.

Time didn’t matter anymore. The only reason to keep track of time was to stay connected with the outside world, but without any sort of connection it was meaningless. Light and dark had always been the earth’s clock, and Augie saw no reason not to abide by it now, even at this strange latitude. The winter had laid him low—his joints, his immune system, his temper had all been slow and dark—but with the endless light in the sky he felt a kind of buoyancy, a charge of electricity running through his nerves. His life took on a pleasant rhythm: he slept when he was tired, cooked when he was hungry, visited the terns when he felt like a stroll, and set up a little open-air porch at the mouth of their hut, with a lopsided Adirondack chair some previous resident had constructed from spare pieces of plywood, an empty packing crate for an ottoman. Augustine bundled up and sat in his chair, squinting against the bright albedo of the snow on the lake, waiting for the cold air that lingered on the plateau to be stirred by warmer currents.

Iris adapted with ease too. She began to favor short naps instead of longer, uninterrupted sleep. She ate when Augie set a plate in front of her; otherwise, if she found herself hungry, she took a shortbread bar from the cook tent or foraged among the other nonperishables. She spent a lot of time on the ice, skating back and forth, sometimes making the trek out to the island to startle the hares. She looked for more bird nests, which were always on the ground because there were no shrubs or trees, only low-lying vegetation and rock. The snowy owl they’d seen on their first day became a fixture, as did the faraway howls of the wolves in the mountains behind them. One bright night, or day perhaps, it didn’t matter anymore, Augie awoke to the sound of a large furry body brushing up against the side of the tent. He sat straight up to check that Iris was napping also. He realized it was a wolf scratching an itch on the hut, separated from Augustine’s head by mere millimeters of vinyl and insulation. He shuddered a little at the thought but was largely unperturbed and went back to sleep. The other habitants of the lake and the surrounding mountains had become accustomed to the new human presence there. Gradually, Augie grew to accept their neighbors too.

They woke up in the brightness one day to discover the snow had finally vanished. The lake ice began to get louder, to shift and groan against the shore. Meltwater puddles multiplied and the ice’s pale blue color became dull and gray. Eventually the ice sheet broke apart and gentle winds blew the fragments against one another with sounds like glasses being clinked, a toast to summer. One day—Augie guessed it was early July—a gale howled along the surface of the lake and pushed the shards of candled ice out of the water and onto the muddy shore, where they crashed against the earth like solid, splintering waves of white quartz. The water washed over the soft brown earth and the basin of the lake began to warm. Before long, it was mild enough that Augustine sat in his homemade Adirondack chair wearing only his long underwear while Iris walked barefoot along the stony beach.

Soon after the lake cleared, following a long sleep and a slow breakfast, Augie walked out to the upside-down dinghy and flipped it over. He’d noticed an outboard motor, two oars, and some fishing gear in the unused sleeper hut. He gathered up everything but the motor, which he wasn’t sure he could carry, and dragged it out to the edge of the lake. Iris looked on with excitement and began pushing the dinghy toward the shore, inch by inch. Together they pushed it halfway into the water.

“Char for dinner?” he said with a wink, and she made a high-pitched squeal he’d never heard from her, hopping from one foot to the other as if the ground had become too hot and the boat was her only refuge. It had been a long time since they’d eaten anything so fresh. The rod was strung; he had an orange spinner in his pocket, and a sharp hunting knife on his belt. He went inside to grab a container for the fish and scooped up some of the candled ice from the shore to put in the bottom. Iris was already waiting in the boat, alert with excitement. Augie gave the dinghy a good push, then leaped in as it floated away from the shore.

Augustine rowed while Iris sat in the bow, facing the island and running her hands through the water. Had she ever been in a boat before? he wondered. She seemed so small, dwarfed by the scale of the mountains before her, the island, the lake itself. Her shoulders seemed too narrow to hold a human together. When they’d rowed far enough out, he put down the oars and took up the rod. He’d fished before, as a boy, but now he felt clumsy and uncertain. He toyed with the reel for a moment and the mechanics of casting came rushing back to him. His first cast wasn’t very good, but his second went farther and landed with a soft plop. He began to slowly reel it in, just enough to keep the spinner dancing at the end of the line. Iris watched him closely to see how he did it. After he’d reeled it in, he cast again, then handed her the rod. She took it without hesitation and began reeling. They passed the rod back and forth, Augie casting, Iris reeling, but they didn’t have to wait long. There was a jerk on the line and the tip of the rod bent toward the water, softly at first, then sharply, until the rod was inches from the surface of the lake. Iris’s eyes widened and her grip tightened. She looked to him for instruction.

“Hold tight and keep reeling it in. Looks like you hooked a good one.”

The fish fought harder the closer she dragged it to their little boat. At first Augie thought he should take the rod from her and reel it in himself, but she was doing well. Soon the fish was splashing against the side of the boat, churning up white froth. He got out the net and scooped it up, guessing it to be a five-pound Arctic char, longer than one of Iris’s arms and twice as thick. It flopped in the bottom of the dinghy, exhausted but determined to fling itself back into the water. Augustine got out his knife and was about to plunge the tip into the char’s brain in order to sever its spinal cord. He paused and looked up at Iris, remembering her tenderness toward the wolf that night at the hangar.

“You might not want to watch,” he said.

She shook her head gallantly and kept her eyes trained on the fish.

He severed the char’s spine with the knife, slid the hook out of its mouth, then ran his knife through the gills, a short cut on either side. He held the fish over the side of the boat while it bled out, dark, thick streams running down the length of the tail fin and into the clear, cold lake water. He looked up at Iris and caught her wrinkling her nose.

He laughed at her expression. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Can’t eat live fish.”

“I’ll do the next one,” she said in defiance.

Augie laid the char down in the container he’d prepared, a pink stain spreading across the ice. He rinsed his hands and his knife in the lake and folded the blade back into the handle.

“All right,” he said. “How about you cast this time?”

He passed her the rod and showed her how to hold the line with her pointer finger and release it at the last minute.