Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Danglish

Four men travel north to test their limits. Exhausted after countless days of tempestuous winds, braving the ice, and the cold temperaments of unwelcoming shut-ins that fix selves in make-shift homes in remote areas of a barren tundra, they have found sanctuary- but one especially more than the rest. they find their way to a settlement that seems fit to trust. Across the bay there is an island with only one house and within it a solitary woman.

She had offered him her home.

On this night they are grateful. It is on this night they sleep and at the dead of night under the steadiness of their breath you can hear the sound of four men thinking; all four of their freedom, then three of their luck, then two of their courage.

It is on this night after the others lost their will to reflect; under clumsy sleeping breaths and the sound of muffled wind, there is the unmistakable sound of consonance of one man still thinking.

A mind haunted by the time he was less free, and luck was not an essence necessary to survive, nor was courage ever used to fend away fiends. Away from his beloved winds, into the places in between bed sheets pure white and expansive as the tundra; in a room whose walls like these had reverberated the softly spoken mantras of lovers tangled together, speaking in two foreign tongues combined into one.

(Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. August 2009.)

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