The Marrviðr

They call it Marrviðr, the Sea’s Wood, a word spoken sideways, like you don’t want it to hear you. In the harbors it’s a joke told with dry mouths, a fisherman’s fable meant to scare children away from night tides. I meet Erik in Istanbul, where the water is all commerce and promises. He smells of salt and old nets. He tells me there is money waiting at the edge of the map, and a kind of fame that doesn’t wash off. He smiles as if he’s already been paid. Though, his eyes don’t join in. Iceland’s black sands swallow sound. The beach looks burned, as if the earth tried to cauterize itself and failed. Erik’s certainty thins out there. He stares at the surf as if counting breaths. Something crouches behind his confidence, something that keeps touching the back of his throat. Guilt has weight. You can see it pulling him forward. The night splits open with aurora. Erik stiffens. He lifts a hand and points toward a pale sway near the tide, a lantern’s ghost bobbing where no boat should be. “There,” he says. We walk and the light wobbles closer. Erik stops. The apology comes small, like something he practiced until it lost meaning. “I’m sorry.” His skin gives first, it balloons and sags, sloughing down his arms in sheets, exposing muscle that twitches like hooked bait. His face collapses inward. The man pours out of himself. He hits the sand and moves the way a thing with no spine moves, contracting and releasing, dragging what’s left of him toward the surf. He makes a sound like air leaking from a tire and the sea answers.
A hum crawls up through my boots, it is a deep and timbered noise, the sound of a ship breaking. The water parts and Marrviðr rises. Enormous antlers lift out of the water. The body follows, a cathedral of wreckage: knotted timbers fused with rusted chain and clotted barnacles. Kelp ropes swell and tighten as it loops around its limbs. Its belly is a cage. Rot-soft beams glow faintly from within, lantern glass trapped between ribs of wood and bone. Faces press against that light, men flattened by water. The head is a reef, coral layered on coral and water seeps constantly from its pores. Its eyes are holes full of moving sea, and its glare pins me in place. Marrviðr bends. The beach slopes up into it like an offering. It draws Erik in with a wet, patient pull. What’s left of him slides across the sand and disappears into that glowing hollow. The gaze finds me. For a breath I am certain I will follow, that the beach will tip and I’ll be fed forward like everything else. Instead, the great head tilts. It considers. Pain lances my back. My skin opens along my ribs in neat, decisive seams, and something new pushes out; gills. I choke, then breathe. The air tastes of metal and rain and depth. My lungs learn a different way. Marrviðr looks past me, toward the cliffs and the world beyond them, where lights still promise safety. I understand the bargain as clearly as if it’s been carved into my bones. I turn inland, the tide whispering approval behind me, and begin the walk home, carrying the sea’s hunger where my breath used to be.