Chapter 1
Lost
There had always been something extraordinarily odd about Kaisa. Or at least that was how she’d always felt, and the people around her did little to nothing to convince her otherwise. She tried to make it easy on herself at first, tried to blame it on her appearance. Her glistening white hair she always claimed was just a very light blonde, which it very clearly wasn’t. She was also tall for her fourteen years, even for a girl of the north. Her skin was lightly tanned, and her face was sprinkled with wild freckles that looked like the splatters of a wet paintbrush. Perhaps the most striking of it all were her beautifully mismatched eyes. One hazel, the other emerald green.
But then again, nothing about Kaisa’s life was particularly ordinary. Hesteyri, her hometown, was located far up north in the Westfjords of Iceland. In the 1900s there used to be a small fishing community up there, but the town had been completely abandoned by the late fifties. Living conditions were incredibly harsh since you were mostly isolated during the winter and still hard to reach during the summer. So, eventually, people all up and left.
Or so it seemed.
When a place once so full of life is suddenly drained of it, something remarkable happens, because life never fully disappears. A little bit of something is always left behind, and this “something” is called the Spillage. Like a drop of spilled tea on a dark piece of cloth, it’s not visible, but it’s also not truly gone. Hesteyri today cannot truly be found, only stumbled upon in a moment of utter despair. Only the lost can find lost places.
Otherness lingered all around the Spillage, a world that obeyed laws foreign to the world beyond.
Every single morning, Kaisa would get out of bed and walk into the living room to retrieve her snow boots from the small gap between the couch and the floor, where they always went but were never left. She would walk through her front yard, exactly twenty steps, then take a left and greet her best friend Rita and then take another right until she reached the third lamppost on the left-hand side of the road.
And up there it was. All the way up there. Her favorite mug. Each night she would put it in the same spot in the cupboard, and every single morning, for as long as she could remember, it would then end up on this particular lamppost.
Unfortunately for Kaisa, she had never been a particularly talented climber, but she was a clever little fox. She pushed her left leg into the ground and gave the post a good hard kick with the right, which managed to shake it just enough for her cup to topple over and to then very softly sink into the bank of snow right next to the road. Perfect execution, not a single scratch. The heaps of snow made it easier, since in the summer she didn’t only have to kick the mug down but also catch it. Since Kaisa wasn’t the best catch either, she didn’t hesitate to crown another mug her favorite, should the necessity arise.
Never once did she complain. Complaining was one of the simple pleasures reserved for those truly boring days.
As the years passed, Kaisa found herself standing alongside the mountain chain behind her house more and more often, staring at the cold stone wall that stood tall over her town. She imagined closing her eyes and just taking a big step forward, right through the mountain. And once she opened them again, it would all be there. The world. The real world, where other people lived. Where life was unpredictable and vast, full of struggle and full of success. A world in which her mug would stay in her cupboard.
She briskly walked back home, fueled by the need to keep the cold from creeping into her pajamas, her fingers clasping around the handle of the mug. A victorious retrieval, the prize weighing heavy in her cold hand. On crisp winter mornings like these, Kaisa found it all too easy to let her mind wander. Wander along the narrow paved road threading like a lifeline in between the rows of houses of all colors and shapes. She would follow it all the way down to the calm waters of the fjord, surrounded by flat mountain chains, lying still and sheltered from the foaming seas of the North Atlantic. It was beautiful, her little town. Beautiful and so impossibly small. As much as Kaisa’s mind wanted to spread its wings, her feet never truly left the ground.
Her train of thought broke when she spotted Rita, a girl her age and her best friend, who was currently half submerged in Mrs Olafson's snow-covered lavender bed.
“Do you have it, Rita?”
Rita answered in a muffled voice, still fully submerged in the large pile of snow.
“Almost!”
“Good luck, I’m coming over later.”
“Alright, see you!”
Kaisa hopped up the three stone steps to her house, where the door already stood wide open for her.
“I got it mom, it’s still in one piece.”
The woman in the entrance shuddered, pulled the sleeves of her white sweater over her fingers and her shoulders up to her ears. She was slender and tall, her hair almost entirely white and tied in a high ponytail. A few wrinkles, like shallow silver lines, crossed her pink cheeks and spread from the corners of her friendly brown eyes. After giving her daughter a hug, both retreated into the house, quickly closing the door to lock out the cold.
“I’m making breakfast, and then I’ll head out to see Rita if that’s ok?”
Nonni put her hand on Kaisa’s shoulder and gave it a short squeeze, then walked into the kitchen. It was the same as every morning. Kaisa would make coffee and hot chocolate, while her mother would set the table with bread, butter, soft-boiled eggs, jam and some fruits here and there. Those days were always a bit special, because fruit was usually harder to come by.
Kaisa started loading her plate with food while she engaged in a seamless, fast-flowing monologue. Nonni would follow her burst of words with nods, smiles and sometimes even anticipated, but nonetheless silent gasps. And usually after finishing their hot drinks and clearing the table, Kaisa would set out to find Rita. Always.
Except for today.
I had an audiobook generated actually in order to help me edit, but if your heart is dark and evil and you have no moral compass, you can enjoy this very immersive AI voice reading the chapter to you.
