Burial Rites

I hope you see this novel as the dark love letter to Iceland I intend it to be.

‘Drink it all, Agnes,’ the blond-haired man said. ‘I brought it for you.’

Agnes swivelled in her saddle to try and see the man who spoke. She pushed her long, dark hair out of her face to regard him better.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured.

Those who are not being dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp, until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it. I am barren; nothing will grow from me any more. I am the dead fish drying in the cold air. I am the dead bird on the shore. I am dry, I am not certain I will bleed when they drag me out to meet the axe.

The soul asylum.

To think of how I slid my hand in through the folds of my skirt to find and press the bruises he left there, feeling the start of pain across my skin. Bruises as echoes of his touch, proof of his hands on mine, his hips against mine: the exultant exhalation, the clamber of our limbs in the dark. Throughout a dull-eyed cycle of work, nights slept alone, waking to nothing but chores, chores, those hidden bruises suggested something more – an end to the stifling ordinariness of existence.

We had agreed that I would come live with him. He would haul me out of the valley, out of the husk of my miserable, loveless life, and everything would be new. He would give me springtime.

No point looking over one’s shoulder when the task at hand was before you.

How can I truly recall the first moment of meeting him, when the hand I felt press my own was merely a hand? It is impossible to think of Natan as the stranger he was, once, to me. I can picture the way he looked, and recall the weather, and the play of light across his stubbled face, but that virgin moment is impossible to recapture. I cannot remember not knowing Natan. I cannot think of what it was not to love him. To look at him and realise I had found what I had not known I was hungering for. A hunger so deep, so capable of driving me into the night, that it terrified me.

Even Natan believed that everything comes in threes.

It seems everyone I love is taken from me and buried in the ground, while I remain alone.
Good thing, then, that there is no one left to love. No one left to bury.