JADE&C     MPASS 

WAITING FOR THE SUN TO RISE​

Timed start:
Sabina fled to the ends of the Earth on a grey-streaked Tuesday evening as the sun set like treacle. It was the first day she could get a flight to Tromso, the place she found with a broken fingernail stabbed into Nana’s faded book of maps. She tried to pack light but brought the book with her along with her favourite bangla CD and her comfortable brown chappals. She carried other baggage she didn’t know she bore. The memory of the gold-edged cream-coloured invitation to her sister’s wedding to the man they grew up living next to, and who they both loved.  Her mother’s voice in her ear, telling her she had no direction, telling her she always ran. The look on her father’s face when he offered to let her work for his delivery company and she refused. Their words overwhelmed her, choked her attempts to explain while they were still puffs of air. She needed a place to exhale.

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First leg:
Tromso had wooden houses and mountain views and thousands of tourists gearing up to be drunk for 24 hours in the midnight sun. Sabina needed a more uncluttered experience.  A poster in the tourist office drew her onto a plane to Kittila. She sat next to a friendly skier, headed for the Levi resort, its challenging slopes and leisurely apres-ski. He talked about how he wanted to be an accountant when he was five years old and pretended to be collecting invoices at play time. Sabina didn’t tell him she’d dropped out of her third college course: bookmaking; French literature and now business studies.  She passed a snaky queue for excess baggage, picked up her battered tan suitcase with the red ribbon tied on the handle and got on the first bus she saw. 

 

Checkpoint:
Enontekio was velvet soft snowflakes, mossy trees and gleaming stars. A beautifully ordered wilderness with the edge of the untamed. Every morning, Sabina breathed in the

impressiveness of winter, the resiny scent of pine and the clean smell of freshly fallen snow. She revelled in the weight of being alone. She sipped warm glogg, sucked on fragments of cinnamon stick and star anise and catalogued her marketability: she could read a map even upside down; people took third helpings of her keema mince; she still remembered the five words of Spanish she learnt when she was sixteen, she didn’t feel the need to fill other people’s silences. 

She drained her cup, poured out more sweetly disguised alcohol, tried to plot her potential like points on a chart.

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Second leg:
The husky farm was an accident, she’d been looking for work but dogs were too friendly and non-judgmental for her to understand. As she approached the only log cabin amongst the sloping birch and bushy pine trees, the barking was rhymical and ear-splitting.  A heavy hammer striking on train tracks.
A bundled-up woman came out onto the porch, carrying a paper package. She stomped over to large wire cages, tumbled meat from the package into metal dishes bolted to the front. Chomping and snuffling started, the barking stopped. Sabina missed it, the void she always carried with her aching a little more.
The woman stopped on the way back to the cabin, waited, one hand raised. A greeting or to ward off the watery sun. Sabina practised her Finnish for hello, found her mouth turned up by itself.

 

Finish line:
Her dogs stood calm in their harness, they knew they’d be off soon.  They all knew each so well, Sabina could guide them with twitches of her hands or nods of her head. A hawk circled overhead as they set off, enjoying invisible currents. The sun was warm as new honey, the air still and endless, broken only by the gentle rhythmic panting of the dogs, the swish of the sled-runners. A startled ptarmigan whirled away as Sabina glided past its hidden nest. The dogs yearn to pull, pull, pull across swatches of unbroken snow and there was nothing to hold her back.
 

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