Winter at your doorstep

Erik shuffled to the stone fireplace. Their power went out two nights ago when the storm began, plunging their quaint mountain-side home in the village of Sjursnes into darkness. With an aching back and creaking knees, Erik managed to dig out the box containing candles and lamps from the cellar. The soft flames scattered throughout their home felt different from when they were lit for the festive season; they felt sacred, like those in church. Erik had himself said a prayer looking out the window.

The fire struggled, with dying whips and cracks. There wasn’t much dry wood left, and Erik hoped what was there would outlast the raging blizzard.

“Is there enough, darling?” Erik’s wife, Maja, called out from the bedroom. Her voice still raspy from the cold that lingered in her chest.

“Yes, don’t worry love,” he tried not to let doubt一his rough mental calculation of the remaining deep brown logs一seep into his voice.

Leaning against the cold mantle with one arm, he grasped the end of one of the logs. His fingers, worn and hardened by years of labour and age, struggled to get a grip on the non-uniform shape. Aalf would have cut these beautifully, he thought while bracing himself. And he would have cut down more than enough for the winter. When he was finally ready, he swung the firewood in one fluid motion into the fire, which accepted its feed readily. He would only need two or three more to last the night; there would be just enough for him to head out into the forest and collect some more when the frenzied wind had settled.

The fire rumbled, finally satiated. Its citrine glow offered more than warmth amidst the empty howls that tried to find their way through the frosted windows. In the corner of his eye, another small light came into view, preceding Maja’s frail frame. She entered the living room from the short corridor with a candle in her hands. Her long silver hair was in a neat plait, which laid gently over a thick wool robe.

Erik was about to chastise her for being out of her bed in her state when she proclaimed, “I think I would like to sit near the fire awhile. Perhaps with a cup of tea and some biscuits.”

“It’s a bit late for a snack,” Erik teased. He was certain it was past midnight, but he couldn’t deny her a small treat. In fact, Erik was relieved to see her up and active. There were moments in the past few days where he had racked his brain about how he would be able to rush her into the village’s only clinic if her condition declined.

Erik helped Maja settle into her favourite rocking chair at the foot of the fireplace and slowly made his way to the kitchen. He had just begun searching the cupboards, which held a portion of their supplies, when something tapped against the door. At first he ignored it. It’s just the storm he told himself. Loose branches that lost their battle against the storm’s cavalry. Even Maja seemed not to notice, curled up by the fire. But before he could reach for the packet of biscuits, the soft rapping at the door resumed, and this time with a cadence that couldn’t be chalked up to the chance patterns of nature.

“What was that?” Maja clutched her robe close to her, her thin hands trembling.

“It’s alright, my love. There couldn’t be anyone outside at this time, in this weather. It must be the wind.” In appeasing Maja’s fear, he was convincing himself that there was no cause for concern. If it was the wind it would be gone soon. But if it was someone else, maybe they would soon depart themselves. But at that moment, Erik wondered. What if it was the one person they’d been waiting for all these years?

He started toward the door with a lamp that illuminated the kitchen, his curiosity and eagerness carrying his limping gait forward with a speed it hadn’t gained in a very long time.

“Erik, what are you doing?” Maja tried to crane her neck to see any shadows or shapes past the window, but to no avail.

“I just want to check一”

The knocks returned. This time with more force.

“I don’t think there could be anyone reasonable at this hour, Erik!”Maja tried to warn her husband against opening the door.

Erik’s hand hesitated over the worn brass handle, before he cracked the door open, just a sliver to catch sight of the visitor on the other side. The cold did its best to barge in past this small opening.

“Who’s there?” Erik squinted into the white flurry.

Only the roaring wind responded, and for a moment Erik considered closing the door and locking it shut, to put this madness behind him, when the flakes of snow seemed to be still, held in place like sugar crystals slowly descending in a glass of water before they dissolved. A figure appeared, barely illuminated by the kerosene lamp.

Erik’s hands trembled, wanting to retreat and take the light away from whatever approached him and plunge it back into the darkness that it emerged from. But he remained, his eyes fixed on the haggard, snow-covered silhouette that stood on the other side of the door.

“Wh-who is it?” Erik called out, as though the visitor would offer a name he would recognize. Maja shifted in her chair. Erik waved an arm behind his back, urging her to stay put.

“I’m tired,” the now clear form of a man spoke with the deep hollowness of glaciers drifting quietly down the fjords. He wore a tattered grey coat, something you’d see a man wear in the fall, not the dead of winter. He had nothing to cover his head, which was coated in a thick layer of frost. His eyelashes were clumped together and white. Erik couldn’t even tell the colour of his hair, but there was something about his eyes, the sharp, crystalline blue that glinted in the dim light. Erik had seen those eyes every day until one day…they disappeared. He’d been searching for them ever since, but never thought he’d see them in a stranger’s face.

“Is it someone we know?” Maja called out, wondering why Erik hadn’t either invited the visitor in or sent them away yet.

Erik couldn’t answer. He wasn’t sure what to say to the visitor.

“Would you let me in? I just need to rest a while.” The man spoke again through cracked lips.

“I don’t一how did you find your way, all the way out here?” Erik was certain now that this wasn’t his Aalf. He would have greeted his parents more knowingly, if it had been him.

“I don’t have much to offer you”, Erik added.

The man shook his head. “I won’t ask for much or take. Only a few moments of shelter and I will be gone before the morning.”

Erik sighed, “Just a moment.”

Finally, Erik closed the door and turned to Maja, who was nearly out of her chair trying to catch fragments of the conversation that was shrouded by the raucous winds.

“Who was it? Did you send them away? What did they want?”

Erik motioned both of his hands down, to calm Maja’s barrage of questions.

“It isn’t anyone we know.” He said, still thinking about the man’s eyes. “But he says he’s lost and that he needs a place to stay.”

“For the night?”

“I suspect so. The man says he’ll be gone by the morning.”

Maja chewed on her bottom lip, just as she’d always done, while considering her options.

“It’s an awful condition to be stuck in. Without warmth or food.”

“It is.”

“But we don’t know this stranger.”

“No. We don’t.”

“Is he young, Erik?”

“From what I could see. Yes. About our Aalf’s age, now.”

Maja tutted as she turned away from Erik to look into the fire. She fiddled with the top of her robe, before looking back.

“Let him stay.”

“But, Maja.”

“We’ll be careful and we can rest properly once he leaves. Why don’t we tend to the lost man, until he is better enough to be on his way.”

Erik reluctantly turned back to the door, and carefully pulled the door open again. The man didn’t look up, perhaps expecting Erik to turn him away.

“Come in, son. Quick, before the wind carries away what warmth we have managed to gather here.”

Those icy blue eyes up at Erik in confusion, and quickly back down as the man nodded a quiet thank you. He stepped up to the door, his height finally fully dawning on the old man.

“Come sit by the fire, child,” Maja called softly to the man, who carefully glanced around the furniture, paintings and knick-knacks that were cast in dancing shadows.

The frost and snow on the man’s body slowly melted near the fire’s warmth, but the man continued to shiver and shift uncomfortably. His sharp features sat eerily on his pale face, which hadn’t looked up since he entered their home.

“What’s your name, son? Are you from the village?” Maja motioned to Erik to retrieve the treats that she’d come out for in the first place.

“Name? I haven’t been called by one for a very long time.” The man looked toward Maja, who finally took in the eyes that had taken Erik by surprise.

“Aalf?” Maja asked, the name escaping her mouth before she’d even realized it.

“No, darling, it’s not him”, Erik nervously corrected, reaching out to his wife as he got up out of his recliner.

“You一 they’re just so much like him.” She brought up a hand to cover her mouth. Tears welled in her eyes, glimmering in the fire’s dance.

Erik stroked Maja’s back in an attempt to soothe her.

“Was that your son?” The man spoke suddenly. His voice flowed through his mouth like the gales that threaded the mountains of Tromsø. Erik thought he could see the thin white plumes of his breath as you would in the cold.

Both Erik and Maja fell silent, unsure of how to react. How did the man know to ask this?

“Yes. Yes he is our son. How did you一”

“I guessed. Where is he now?”

“We don’t know. He went missing a few years ago, when he was out fishing on the ice…but then a storm, just like this one一” Erik nodded out the window. “We never saw him again.”

“What about your family, son? Where do you belong now?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t have a family. I’ve always been alone as long as I could remember.” He looked down at his hands which were purple and blue from the cold.

“Don’t you have a mother or father waiting for you somewhere? Siblings? An aunt or uncle?” Maja was worked up by the thought of a lost child, kept away from his family. By the thought of Aalf wandering somewhere alone.

“I’m sorry I can’t say that I’ve ever known those things.”

Maja sniffled.

Erik, eager to change the subject, for Maja’s and his own sake, asked, “Would you like some tea? I think it would do you some good to get some nourishment in you.”

“That would be fine, thank you.”

As Erik boiled the water on the gas stove, he peeked out occasionally into the living room, at an unchanged scene of the man draped in the blanket still watching the fire, as Maja observed him with pain on her face.

The man sipped on the hot tea, wincing as the liquid seared the broken skin on his lips. Erik wasn’t sure if he enjoyed it, but the man still finished it. He thought it was peculiar that the warmth had yet to return to his face. The healthy blush that would swiftly form on one’s face after even a few moments at the fire was absent.

The storm outside continued on its rampage and the house shuddered, just as the man did.

“Where will you be headed in the morning, after you’ve rested a while?”

“My journey won’t end for another few weeks.” The man counted his long, trembling fingers. “I have a long way to travel. Through the thick forests. Past the mountains. Along the shores and finally”, he paused, closing his eyes. “Finally, when everything is still, and has settled, I will be able to truly rest.” The man offered a soft smile. One of relief, but it disappeared just as quickly as it came.

Maja looked at the man with pity. For what she could only assume were delusions. This poor soul must have frozen his sense out there with him. If Erik was correct, he imagined she was probably considering asking the lost man to stay a while longer. She had so much more love and caring to offer, with nowhere for it to go.

The tea and biscuits soon disappeared, and Maja began to yawn.

“My love, you need your rest. Go in and get some sleep, the chair is no good for your back. I can tend to our visitor until he is ready to depart.” Erik was hoping she wouldn’t resist. He truly wanted her to get the rest she needed. But more importantly he wanted to have some words with the visitor… alone.

Maja’s drooping eyes betrayed her and she eventually agreed to go lie down, just for a bit. Erik tucked her in with a bed warmer, and put out the small candle by the bedside.

As he kissed her goodnight, Maja whispered, “I really wished that was our boy. My sweet Aalf.”

“I know…I know, darling.”

“Please. Don’t let this one get lost like ours. I’m sure his family misses him. If he wants to stay. Let him. Okay?”

“Yes, my love.”

When Erik returned to the living room, the man was drifting away into a shallow sleep. What Erik thought was a draft, was the man speaking in his sleep. He couldn’t make out the words . They seemed to be formless like the disembodied whispers of the forest.

The man stirred, despite Erik’s efforts to let him rest. Though he took his awake state as an opportunity to ask about the things that had been swirling in his mind, from the moment this visitor showed up at their doorstep.

“Forgive me, if this is too personal a question or one that you cannot offer an answer to, but I have to know…are you human?”

His question felt absurd coming out of his mouth. Erik wished he could retract it from the air, even if it had come from a place in his mind where he held the memories of his childhood stories. Of Höðr and his dominion over winter and darkness.

The man responded, after carefully considering Erik’s question, “I am just as much a creation of this world as you are, my friend. Though my purpose may differ, I live and die and am brought back by nature’s call.”

Erik was grateful, in some ways, for his indirect response, which neither confirmed or denied his being. He didn’t quite prepare himself for a response other than, ‘of course I’m human, you old man’. There was only one way forward in this conversation, and Erik decided to not hold back the questions he had until he could arrive at the one thing he wanted to know.

“Have you been out in these winters before?”

“Ever since I came into being, winter is all I’ve known.”

“So the snow, and the winds…the sharp, cracking ice, you know how to live in all of this?”

“They are my kin. I call upon them when I find myself alone in my travels and I let them stay a while to keep me comfort. ”

“Why did you come here tonight一to seek refuge in our home?”

The man fell silent for a while as though the truth was buried deep within him and would not come loose so easily. After a while he returned with a response that confirmed Erik’s doubts.

“I was told of this place by another traveller who had come to the end of their journey. They spoke of their memories of this home and their family. Not many offer their voices so readily to the cold, but this traveller was willing to share his with me.”

“So you knew my Aalf! And was it you then that called upon your family, the wretched ice and snow, to take him away from me all those years ago?” Erik felt his face warm, and it wasn’t from the fire. He trembled in his seat.

“I see many in these frigid months carrying out their duties, as do I. But I do not meddle in their business.”

“So you did not save him?”

“I could not.”

The man looked out the window. The snow and wind had begun to settle.

“I must depart now.” The man rose from the foot of the fireplace, leaving the blanket on the floor.

“I still see this traveller, though his form has changed, I see him appear with my kin. He travels far, even to this village on the backs of the gales that travel through the forests and mountains. I hope this gives your soul some rest my friend.”

Erik stood there, unable to process what the man had just told him. He watched the man open the door and step out into the sea of crisp white snow that covered the ground. He wasn’t sure if this stranger would appear at his doorstep again, at least in this form, but he was certain that the next time he heard the winter’s breath or knock or tremble, he would think of his son, Aalf.