Read Online Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown - Free Book Online Page B

wrecked from just two washings with lye soap. I wrapped my arms tight and allowed myself to sob, just once. Gods, how had this happened? Why wasn’t I sucked back into the twenty-second century, as randomly I’d been forced here?
    I wasn’t going to be. I could tell.
    I rocked myself and drew a few hitching breaths.
    I cleared a small space in the dirt, and with my finger I drew Iceland. I’d done this before, a few times since I came, trying to piece together where I was. Whether I sat, right now, where my gleaming apartment would stand, or whether I’d gotten lost far across the island as well as through time. I remembered Betta’s words, about how the men had to sleep outside three nights to reach the althing. I drew lines emanating from Thingvellir. How far could that be, if it took four days? My finger was too big, the lines too fat. I brushed the map away. I had no idea.
    I could see people far off down the hill, heading toward the edge of the silver forest a mile away. They were tiny, and the forest was a living mass of twisting, swaying green. I closed my eyes and thought of salad tossing in a giant bowl. I would hold it in my lap and eat it with my hands—all of it—like an animal.
    Something wet and cold touched my temple, and I yelped and whipped my head up. The dog beside me yelped too, and sprang up facing me. My heart raced, and I looked around wildly for help. I’d never been this close to a dog. He stretched his paws out toward me and pushed his tail up high, wagging it, ready to wrestle.
    “Nei,” I laughed. His tongue hung out and his ears were two triangles standing in the air. He looked at me a moment longer, as if I might change my mind about wrestling. “I am not a puppy,” I told him, offering him some grass to eat. He looked at it, and then at me as though I were dim. He seemed to adjust his expectations, and turned himself around to sit beside me, facing the sea. He smelled like sun and bare feet, and waves of stink came rapidly as he panted, but I liked his presence. My loneliness wasn’t the dire, choking stone it had been a moment ago.
    I picked little yellow flowers from around my feet and tucked them into the braid that went across the top of my forehead, making myself a crown. The dog yawned thoroughly, forming an amazing curl with his tongue, and then lay down with his paws pointing straight forward. I touched his back, and it seemed his whole body vibrated with his breath. Soon I was petting him, telling him nonsense words and how he was a good dog.
    The chief and his uncle Har came from the house and stood down the hill to talk, about what I couldn’t hear.
    The chief was not easy with people. Most often demanding, matter of fact and seldom warm. But something subtle hid in his voice, so dark brown and lush, the way his tongue curled around the old words. I might wake each morning thinking I would be home, that this was just a bad dream, and when I found I was still here I would panic. Then I’d hear him say something. It didn’t matter what. It was like waking from a childhood nap, someone big and safe nearby.
    From where I sat he and Har were silhouetted against the late summer sky, and I was stunned once again by Har’s size. He was the man who’d held me all the way here from the coast, his arms bigger around than I could grasp. His body had shielded me like a blanket. He’d kept me alive.
    I’d been watching him with interest all week, and he was the only person who was not at all scared of the chief. He had led the family before Heirik was old enough, and he raised the boy like a son when Heirik’s parents died. If possible, he was even more of a revered and mythic creature than the chief himself.
    Most often grim, when his face and voice broke into joy it was overwhelming. His laughter rolled like thunder. The little children—almost all of them his own grandkids—were in turns awed by his imposing silence and charmed by his messy eyebrows and funny faces.
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