What the Ice Kept

You walk. The aurora unspools above you like a banner pulled from some older, kinder world, and the horizon never quite arrives. Your bootprints fill behind you almost as fast as you make them, as though the glacier is patient, and tidy, and certain of its inheritance.

At some point you stop feeling the cold. You sit down beside the sledge to write — only a line, because the pencil is heavy and the light on the horizon is so close now. I saw the light. I went toward it. It was warm.

In 2031, a Norwegian survey team chips a sledge from the blue ice. They photograph the journal under lamplight, puzzle over the steady handwriting, and never find Dr. Mara Solberg. The glacier keeps what the glacier keeps.