Furniture

Rescuing things from a house was a man's job. Gunnar knew exactly how to be a man. His boyhood had been spent quietly shadowing his father, and watching his busy, careful hands was the only worthwhile education he had. Women created, and men saved. Busied their hands to make everything alright.

But when the earth started to grumble beneath the foundations of their carefully built and cautiously mortgaged home, Gunnar could not build his way out of what was approaching. And Elín, leaving their home with the small, gem-blue suitcase that she had bought specially for their honeymoon, and in her other hand a birdcage, swinging back and forth like a silent warning bell, covered in a yellow candlewick blanket stolen from the spare bed. Even as the land was tearing itself into fiery pieces under them, Elín moved lightly, gracefully, like a little bird.

Gunnar was the one who returned to the island with the other men - a rescue mission following the smell of smoke, going to see what was salvageable in their homes. The whitewashed house was now black, a kind of impossible, velvety black, like a raven's wing. He'd almost walked past his own home, searching for somewhere that looked familiar. Under torchlight, he explored his house, looking for the things that Elín treasured most - the record player, the silk dresses she had worn when she'd lived in a brighter place than this. Photographs from their wedding, and a tidy pile of old love letters, tied together with a yellow ribbon.

He was aboard a boat on his way back to the mainland when he remembered the things that he would like to have saved from the house. Had he thought to consider his own wishes as well as those of his wife - the tools in the garage, the five books he kept on his bedside table. And his father's chair. He realised that he would never see the chair again - the one made by his father, wordlessly teaching Gunnar as he turned and whittled the pale wood and varnished it in carefully. The chair that stood, silent and strong as his father, in the lounge of his childhood home, the chair that came with him to his new home when he married Elín. The piece of furniture was as solid and strong as she was fine-boned and delicate

The Raven

There was a bird. She swoops into my memory sometimes, unexpectedly. When I'm trying to remember things from that time, important things, she comes to me with such clarity, such colour, that it almost frightens me. I try and remember the name of a neighbour - You know - Jóhan's wife, the one that always wore an apron - or when I try to remember the exact pattern that was on the bathroom tiles, the ones with the flowers... Were they blue or green? And the bird, the raven, comes to me through the open window of my memory, alive and darting as a fire in my mind.

I had two birds in a cage by the window in the living room - lovebirds, of all things, - soft-coloured birds, somehow both kind-seeming and stupid. They were a wedding gift from Gunnar, an awkward attempt at romance, the kind of thing a woman - some generic woman - would like. I adored them for a fortnight, before I realised that the awkward romance was, in truth, an awkward irony - two birds caged together forever, their right to flight forever taken from them. The symbolism was obvious enough that it was almost, almost funny.

But the bird outside was a raven, her black feathers somehow darker in contrast to the ice cream colours of my caged birds. Her eyes were shining beads, the same colour as a disappointing sunset, a blue-grey that could see more than other eyes.

My raven begun to stalk me. I enjoyed her attention.

Sitting on the fence in the garden, her eyes turned to the windows, watching me ironing or reading or cooking or crying. Watching my occasional laziness. Once, from the bathroom windowsill, seeing my nakedness as I stepped out of the bath, tilting her head as I swore at her.

Go away! I yelled at her a few times, tired of her constant voyeurism - but I left crusts of bread out for her too, and apple peel, and I'd look for her when I opened the curtains in the morning, searching the square view from the window for the way her blackness seemed to dim all the lightness around her. And she brought me stones, leaving me ugly, misshapen black lumps on the windowsill - the small, rough stones that used to be lava, a long time ago.

But when the eruption came, I was told to take the caged birds with me to the mainland. But not the raven. Not my friend in the window, with her cloudy eyes. That is, perhaps, the way of things - the wild birds are never saved, but at least they know the feeling of stretching their wings open wide.