Chapter 8: Disneyland
Greenland, present day
It doesn't take long before civilization makes way for nature as we drive on bumpy roads, cracked by ice in winter. Nuuk isn't a big town after all.
"Where are we going?" I ask, looking over fields of gray rock adorned with scattered dots of blue.
Bluebells. A forgotten memory from another time flies across my mind. A hand touches a cheek when a bell-shaped flower in the shade of the ocean is perched behind a curl-covered ear. Eyes of forbidden lovers meet during a celebration that is anything but joyous.
"Home," Mikk simply replies. "Didn't I already tell you that?" He gives me a crooked smile that makes my heart flutter. The flutters chase the mysterious memories away for now.
"But..." I look back toward Nuuk. "I thought home was that way?" I point in the direction of his parents' B&B.
Mikk smiles again. Wider. Warmer. More flutter-inducing. "I'm twenty-nine years old, Saga," he notes. "I don't live with my parents."
"Oh," I can only reply, biting my tongue for assuming. Being a year younger myself, I haven't lived with my parents for almost ten years. So why would Mikk?
"This is where I live." He pulls into a smaller dirt road, leading toward a single house on a rocky peninsula. The house is painted as bright blue as the sea that dwells below. A pair of high-tech kayaks are pulled up on the shore, contrasting against the rock in their sunny orange hue.
Like the gentleman he is, Mikk holds the door open once he's parked beside the house. "Welcome home," he says before a subtle red shade falls over his cheeks. "Welcome to my home, I mean..."
Taking his outreached hand, I bounce out of the pickup truck. I understand now why the vehicle is so beaten up if these are the kind of roads Mikk drives daily.
My hand remains in his as we walk toward the house. It feels so natural already. Hand in hand.
Out hands detach as he has to rummage through his pocket for his keys. After some fumbling, the door opens to reveal a hallway piled with coats and boots. I suppose you need a lot of options for warm winter gear in this part of the world. Upon entering, I sit down on a rustic wooden bench to untie my lace-up boots, which aren't quite made for this terrain but have served me well so far.
"Are you hungry?" Mikk asks. He walks past me toward the kitchen, which looks like it comes straight from IKEA. It appears the widely successful franchise of my homelands has made it all the way to Greenland. The room also features a corner couch in leather, which looks old and worn, but also very cozy. I can't help but imagine sinking into those well-worn cushions for a night of movies and cuddles.
I miss those nights with Stefan. I miss the closeness more than I miss him.
"I'm good," I reply since I'm still full from the delicious breakfast Mikk's mother served me this morning. Rising from the bench, I walk into the personal sphere of a man who I find very intriguing.
And attractive. So damn attractive. Like I can't stop looking at the bulging muscles of his upper arms, which have just been revealed since Mikk shed his hoodie on a kitchen chair. The lightheadedness that ensues can probably be accounted to swooning.
"Good." He smiles. I swoon harder. "Because I don't have much to eat anyway. My mom said she's cooking tonight though, so we can go over there to eat later." He looks away into the cupboard, perhaps trying to hide a blush behind the door. "I mean... you already live there and she always loves to feed her guests dinner. She's making Suaasat I believe."
"What is that?"
"Seal stew." Mikk closes the cupboard with a bang, taking a step toward me.
"Oh..." I'm not judging anyone for eating seal, as I guess it's not really any different from eating any other animal, but I do worry the taste of it won't appeal to me. I would feel awfully rude turning down the dinner cooked by the mother of a man I... could care about. Like a lot.
"Seal is difficult to get this time of year though, so she makes it with pork." Mikk smiles cheekily. He's probably aware of how foreigners react to the idea of eating seals. Perhaps he was even testing me. "Pork, barley, and onions with broth. It's quite good. I think you'll like it."
"I'm sure I will," I reply, relieved I appear to have passed the test.
With another step, Mikk closes the gap between us. Muscular arms are so close. Fly-away hairs free from the confines of a hat beg for me to pat them down. "Now, let me show you what you came here for." He takes my hand once again. "Let me show you Greenland, Saga."
From his lips, my name sounds like a magical spell. An enchantment telling me to trust him.
As Mikk leads me up to the stairs, I notice that his breath is shallow. Is he nervous? Gripping his hand closer I sense a light shiver.
The upstairs of Mikk's house takes my breath away in a cacophony of colors. Fiery red sun. Dark ocean blue. Deep granite gray.
The outside has moved inside on painted canvases that hang on every available surface. On high shelves, artifacts of the lands stand as sculptures. Nature has become art and art has become nature.
As if hypnotized I move toward one of the paintings, where wide brush strokes share space with thin lines of pencil. I can't help but touch it, wondering if the depicted water will be as cold as the waves outside.
The paintings aren't realistic, at least not in the way a photograph is. They don't capture every shade or line. But yet they capture the feeling of the island; the melancholic sense of living perched between beauty and danger.
"Did you make these?" I ask, surprised that the surface beneath my fingers isn't icy cold.
Mikk nods, looking down at the floor. "I try..." he mumbles. "I try to capture what the camera can't. I'm not trained in any way and I can't even get decent equipment. I use whatever I can find in the stores, but Greenland isn't well-stocked with anything." He points toward a table filled with colored pencils, crayons, and watercolors.
"They're beautiful," I marvel, unable to take my eyes off the colorful depictions of nature. Sunsets, cliffs, and raging water take shape on the walls, with humans sometimes being spotted in the distance. There are also animals lurking on a few of them. Chubby seals, impressive walruses, and majestic reindeer. Not detailed hair by hair but rather essentialized by shape and features. Ferocious, free, and wild, not cuddly and sweet.
"I've never really shown them to anyone before," Mikk admits, sitting down on the bed in the middle of the room. A quilt in an intricate pattern lays over the mattress. I wonder if his mother has created it with her own hands, sitting by the fireplace during cold polar winters.
"I'm glad you showed them to me," I reply, feeling honored to have been chosen. I want to ask him why he decided to show me--a lost girl who almost got eaten by a bear--these expressions of his inner world. But I also don't want to stop looking at the landscapes on the walls. It's the world of the saga in my dreams: the saga of Björn and Gudrun. Harsh and inhospitable, but also warm and alluring.
"I told you I would show you Greenland," he says. "This is the real Greenland to me. Not the magical frosty Disneyland that most of the tourists I bus around daily expect to see, but a place born out of the dreams and pain of real people. My people. Because we shaped these lands just like the lands shaped us. These lands both nourished us and starved us while we both sacred and cursed them. We are these lands and they are us: harsh, frozen, and complicated. That's what I try to capture, I guess. The emotion of living in a place that is so remote, so beautiful, and so difficult. It's not easy, but it's worth the effort."
I can see it in the images. The mix of love and spite. The struggle to keep going when there is no tomorrow because the whole world is night. The adoration of the first rays of sunshine when winter finally breaks. It's a world that hurts, in the same way that getting your heart broken does. It hurts because it matters.
A tear escapes my eye. I blink it away before Mikk notices. I'm not quite ready to reveal how foolishly I allowed myself to trust a man with the state of my heart. It would be too real. For now, I prefer to live in a saga of endless sunshine and forlorn looks.
To distract from my influx of emotions, I turn my attention toward the shelves on the wall, which are filled with treasures from the people of these lands. As my eyes travel over figurines carved from walrus tusks, worn snow shoes made of leather straps, and fur parkas adorn with embroidery, I hear Mikk walk up behind me. Without even looking, I reach out my hand to catch his. Bringing our entangled limbs up to the sunbeam from the window, I recognize faint paint splotches on frost-bitten skin.
I'm afraid to meet his eyes, as I fear it would shatter the saga. Perhaps it's all in my mind, but I want to live there a little longer. Because once the saga starts, it can also fall apart. I know that all too well.
"These are all things my grandmother collected," Mikk tells me, voice low and gravelly. "Some are very old, having passed from generation to generation. Some may even belong in that museum, but I would never give them away."
"You were close to your grandmother?" I ask, noticing the vibration in his voice as he speaks of her.
He nods. "This was her house originally. I spent a lot of time here as a kid as my parents both worked long hours in the fishing industry when I grew up. They bought the B&B later when their bodies were tired of the grueling work and they had saved up enough money. But I still went out here to see my nana all the time, and to help her around the house. I moved in after she passed away." He looks around the room, as if he sees his home in a new light, through my eyes. "I really haven't changed much in here, I guess... The paintings are new, and the bed I brought with me, but the rest is all hers."
The melancholy in his voice when speaking of his passed relative makes me squeeze his hand harder. No words are needed to express the immense loss of such an important figure in your life. I've been through it as well. Most people our age have. We grow up and our older relatives fade away.
My eyes travel over the collected items on the shelves. Treasures that this woman, that I will never know, left behind. Perhaps her grandparents, and their grandparents before them, let their descendants inherit them as a reminder that while life goes on the past is always present.
My attention is piqued by a dagger with a blade covered in rust and a handle in bone or tooth that has been yellowed with time. "Your ancestors forged iron tools?" I ask, examining the item with my eyes. Just like in a museum, the items seem too precious to touch.
"No, I think that one might have been snatched from an unlucky explorer or sailor," Mikk replies. "The story is lost in the generations before me, but, well... my ancestors weren't always kind to strangers."
"From what I've heard, the strangers weren't usually kind to them either."
"That's true..." he mumbles, tightening his grip on my hand.
I'm a stranger in these lands too. And Mikk and I are strangers to each other still. But I know he's kind. I can sense it.
I hope he trusts me to be kind as well, even if I don't quite trust myself with such graces yet. The urge to run still lingers in my bones, despite me trying to suppress it.
If he trusts me, maybe I can trust myself.
"I want to show you something too," I say, feeling the weight of the mysterious artifact in my pocket lighten at the mere words. I need Mikk to know I wasn't ignoring the history of his people on purpose, but rather was chasing a ghost that has chosen to tell me their saga. "I need to tell you a... weird story."
I finally dare to look over at Mikk. Dark eyes twinkle in amber as the burning light from the descending sun outside hit them. I can trust those eyes.
"Anything you have to tell me, I will listen," he replies. "There's a lot of weird stories on this island. Stories that may seem unbelievable. Stories of shapeshifters, strange creatures, and holes through space and time."
"I thought you didn't believe in magic," I tease, but his words are assuring.
"I don't, but I believe in this island. It's not magical. It's real. But reality takes a lot of different forms."
Author's Note: I struggled so bad with this chapter, so I hope it doesn't suck too much :)
And yes, there will now be a few chapters in a row of Saga, followed by a few chapters of Björn as I felt that a longer sequence needed to play out before I switched POV.
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