After Skim-Reading Jack London on the Plane by Elissa Field
From the first words of Elissa Field’s “After Skim-Reading Jack London on the Plane”—an uttered question replete with the expletive “fuck”—we are immersed in the tale of the grief of two brothers, Davis and Donovan. Two years after their mother’s death, they find themselves grappling not only with her absence and their regret, but also an environment that punishes those who do not recognize and respect their own limitations.
Field’s command of language and form elevates profanity from the vulgar to the vital and transforms images of despair and violence into revelations of existential connection. She employs dropped articles, clipped dialogue, and the unceasing use of the word fuck in every possible permutation—frustration, fear, affection, and survival—to convey the complexity of grief and create a narrative pace that ushers us further into the story. Quickly, we realize that despite the brothers’ active search to witness the northern lights, an experience that eluded their mother, they are ineffective and passive in acknowledging their grief. Field shares in her author’s note that she borrowed “the story arc from Jack London’s much longer story, of a failed attempt to survive the stark, frozen Yukon. My two brothers are just as futile in mastering grief as London’s character was in building a fire.”
Each sentence lures us further into this Alaskan setting—a deceptively silent place teeming with unseen life—that amplifies the fragility of these two brothers, misunderstood by the world around them, by each other, and even by themselves. Eventually, in “the glaring spectral white of a vast, flat, snow-covered valley, working our way down to the frozen Yukon, a heartless thread below,” the brothers encounter an image that they ponder with wonder and fear, and in turn, this image asks us to consider if we are any better equipped for the grief that inevitably awaits us all.
Through this expert use of language, form, and setting, Elissa Field constructs a chilling reflection on the complexity of family, identity, and grief: the inevitable lack of preparation for loss and the harsh, relentless movement beyond it. —CRAFT
“The fuck you take your gloves off again?” you growled, never letting up, the oldest. Brother trip, our third in two years, anywhere there’d be northern lights.
We hiked out of the frozen Alaskan woods—the black-dark, wraith rider intimidation of swaying tamarack and western hemlock and feathermoss pine rocking close and away, close and away, the backdrop of some punk rock bass nightmare. Came out into the glaring spectral white of a vast, flat, snow-covered valley, working our way down to the frozen Yukon, a heartless thread below. For hours I’d twitched at every possible animal sighting—wolf? doe? mink? squirrel? Not a living soul in sight. Not a heartbeat we’d passed, the whole two hours we’d been walking, four more to go. Whole world gone dead.
Had begun to itch with me: what was the point of that, if we weren’t out here to see something alive? something to remember, story to tell?
I’d asked you, maybe half a mile back, if you’d ever read Jack London. I was trying to remember the numbers in “To Build a Fire”: how cold it had been. If it might’ve provided some lick of advice. If you remembered whether the dog had stayed, or if it had wandered off. If anyone had survived. That was the thing, wasn’t it, ultimately? Who survived?
But it had been our mother who gave us books at birthdays and holidays, and when I’d asked, you cut me off: “Don’t start.”
Now, when you asked why the fuck I took off my gloves, like I was still too young to wipe my own arse, the need to crack open the frozen spittle of my beard in order to answer you left me sounding supplicant when I wanted badass.
“I want to take a picture.”
“The fuck you what?”
Jack London spent pages explaining the need to open and close your mouth often enough so the fog of your own breath in a forty-below-zero chill didn’t freeze you into silence. The fuck in every line you spoke was tabasco-tinder to keep yours primed.
“Down there,” I said. “Stag.”
I wasn’t wrong. It was north and east of us, in the place where snow shadowed blue with the angle of what eked out as sun. A spectral thicket of leafless alders, like devil’s claws. Then one thicket moved. Threw itself about. Stopped, grazed, threw itself about again. Something alive.
“The fuck!” you said. At this point, it was just assumed.
I was fumbling, numb fingered, with the slick meteor-blue case on my new iPhone. (The fuck.) Predictably dropped it. (The fuck.) You heaved out a diva’s sigh, your air its own cyclone of white, dissipating. Heavy weight back in your heels, making yourself as much the profile of a rising grizzly brought to your haunches in disbelief as possible (the fuck!), your red hair and beard grown into a near-perfect imitation of a bear’s ruff, paws opening and closing ready to throw hands. You turned back to glare at me, the kid brother you’d done everything in your power to not fuck up.
Me, kneeling, head bowed. Fishing (absolutefuckingfuckofitall) bare fingered down through the slicing gash this expensive Apple had cut through the Yukon snow, swimming its way through glassy slashing ice to a downy pillow of unpacked snow to wedge in that last glacial layer before I might have felt the brittle bristling vegetation of the world’s precious tundra.
Our mother had given me the Jack London collection, I wanted to say this to you. A birthday. A year after you’d gone off to do your thing. She thought that of me: that I’d read it, that I’d get it. As if she thought I’d be the type to run off to Seward one summer between semesters, work a fishing boat, write stories about it. Hadn’t. Wasn’t. Not sure you’d get the point, if I could find the words for what that seemed to say.
But just now—finger bleeding—I’m hit instead with vague memory of a year she’d disappeared nights, came home late. A dress of velvet and something silky, a jeweled trim. Her, bent over the glow of her machine in the basement, sewing it. Me, bitter she was always locked away. A golden coronet—thin band of crown.
“Was Mom in a play?” I was still bent, knees disappearing dangerously through that top layer of ice.
“Fuck off.”
“She was.” Lion in Winter. Some bastard of a steely-haired man who came home with her, a band of loud laughing actors. Someone sat at our father’s piano. We were told to climb back up the stairs. Whiskey. A broken glass in the morning.
I’d found that golden crownlet. She’d made it out of a headband and the heads of our plastic animals, all glued and wired and spray-painted gold. The heads of stags interspersed with stars. In the box of things beneath her bed when we’d cleaned out her house.
“The fuck you doing?”
Standing up. Surviving. Not freezing to death. Taking a fucking picture of that fucking stag. Spending fucking time with you. With you. That’s the fuck I was doing.
Your hand pulled me up, automatic. You stared at my stag. “Black tail,” you said.
“Caribou,” I mumbled.
I was right. I was right, too, the previous year when you’d called reindeer “elk” when we’d hiked Lapland. Rolled my eyes behind your back in apology at your dick-swinging contest with the Sámi whose herd you’d bullshitted over. His eyes had fixed on me. Read me in one look: the weaker brother. Looked away (the fuck). The Sámi and his herd had been a tourist detour. Nothing that told us anything about how to find the village on the Finnish-Swedish border our mother’s family was from.
Now, my fingers shone red, raw, the joints not bending, but I chopsticked my phone out of the divot in the snow. Smiled, almost showed you how cool it was my new case had kept it safe.
“Davis,” you said. I knew you were turned away, the way you always did when you said something kind. “Put your gloves on, now.”
I started to argue. Breathed on my fingers to warm them—that worked in the colds of Kalamazoo. Death here. I almost thought to say it to you: pretty sure the guy died in that Jack London story, all the wrong advice ignored. Some bit about dropped matches and melting snow.
But I could not remember about the dog, the wolf he’d had with him. It would be better if at least he’d not been alone. All day, I’d wanted to see a wolf. Even a bunch of them. Even if they ran at us. Even if they were terrifying. The honesty of that face, staring you down. The spare efficiency of their racing body. The way they could eat you or lick you. Could say, seventy thousand years into an ice age: If you give me that bone, I’ll help you hunt. Can you imagine what that would be? A partner you could trust, absolutely, never let you down, never run you down.
I’d begun fumbling with the phone. The stag: the one living thing on this vast river plain worth photographing, and here it would dash away before my fingers warmed enough for the Apple screen to recognize my touch. I glanced down along that savage swath of shadows again: was that one stag really stumbling out there all alone? how would he survive?
“I’ll do it,” you said. Your hand was sharp like fire when it touched mine to take my phone. “Gloves on now, fuckwit.”
Your own gloves off. You shook your head, not missing the chance to mock me for the pictures you went out of your way to scroll through (The fuck is all this?). There were pictures of you. You paused. You were handsome and strong, looked like our father. One where you leaned to pass me a beer and whiskey, two-fisted. One where you stood, fists on hips, to order snowshoes. I thought they’d be bent wood with gut lacings—not aluminum and plastic and steel cleats, but the kind we’d tried as kids at Ranch Rudolph in the Upper Peninsula, where I’d knelt for lickings by the sled dog puppies in wire pens. I’d said that to you, about the puppies. Your eyes went soft. Our mother. Our mother is why we go north. Her Finnish roots. Her burial in the UP. The way she’d work the northern lights into stories she told as we fell asleep back when we could lie in the dark and make each other laugh and still have equal lives ahead of us.
“Donovan?” I started.
“Don’t,” you said. I’d been waiting for you to say that this whole morning. The whole drive to the camp. The whole night before. The whole month, the whole two years since her death had killed us.
I could feel the painful spiking flood of blood rewarming in my fingers, now in the fur-lined gloves we’d bought in the shop for tourists like us. Just a few minutes more and flesh begins to die, and I imagined it, in this horrific, vividly real way: imagined the tips of my fingers crumbling off, blackened like charcoal. The cold, the heat, all one, when you’ve died.
We were the last of us. That’s what they’d said, over cheap wine in sharp plastic cups, so disposable, at the funeral. They’d loaned us flowers from another service, there having been no one to send them.
“Donovan,” I tried again. No one here but you—nowhere to go—no matter if you beat the shit out of me, blood working patterns into the ice like that shitty Snoopy Sno Cone Maker she bought us for $8.99 and we’d thought it a luxury. “It’s fucked up we never went until she’d died.” That trip to Lapland cost us thousands. Glass igloos just short of the North Pole, sleeping on reindeer mats bared to the night sky. Her dream she’d never seen.
“The fuck!” you said, smacking my arm. “The fuck?” Your voice changed. “Davis?”
This green light went on in my head. Aurora borealis of possibility. That you wanted me to speak. “Yes!” I answered.
You held my phone out, directing me to look.
You’d taken 168 pictures. At one point, I’d heard the dragonfly rattle of the camera rapid-shuttering, as we’d slow-walked to get as close as we could to the stag without startling it off before nailing at least one perfect shot.
“The fuck’s on its head?”
I took the phone, but we’d walked down the trail far enough—close enough—that I looked directly at the stag rather than the pictures you’d taken of it. Wanted that: to have seen it myself. Just like we’d had to see the green lights ourselves, to see our own bodies lit and shifting under that wavering, magical glow. The fuck is a picture, when you can feel the real thing. The fuck is it, to have cheated her of that.
But my question repeated yours. “The fuck is on its head?”
The stag—large as a cow, broad shouldered—kept bending its head to graze where it had pawed aside ice and snow to reach that stingy tundra vegetation that the world’s greatest environmentalists claim is invested with all the nutrients of eons and so suddenly, warmingly at risk.
Stag grazed a matter of seconds. Then threw its head. Thrashed about. A mosh-pit exuberance with no one but us to see.
You. Me.
The camera. Zooming in.
A head.
“What the actual fuck?” “The fuck.” “No fucking way.”
Ice dribbled wet, melted, from all the fucks breaking through my beard.
A head.
“A fucking head.” “That’s a head.” “How the fuck did he do that?”
He looked at us, the stag.
Close enough now we could see the blackness in his eyes. The deep well of thoughts behind it. Him mulling us. Mulling my gloveless fingers. My idiotic meteor-blue phone. You and your idiotic imitation of a woodsy man, the creases still in your lumberjack checks. The chilblains welling already on our cheeks, which would be scarred for years by cold we did not understand. Your grizzly bear paw, begging me now to back away.
The fuck, the stag thought.
The severed head of another stag hung from his antlers, forehead to forehead.
We could not fathom it. Stared hard at the horror show of sheared neck bone, of throat, a head ripped clean off. Shrunken stillness of the dead face, staring blind into its killer’s shaggy brow. The dull weary thrash of the living stag, begging that head be gone. The thing he’d beaten, unrelentingly locked on his antlers, brow to brow, rack to rack.
You’d called me “the favorite son” in your choking eulogy to that empty room. But you’d been the one to give it.
“He’s all alone,” I said.
Your laugh. “He wasn’t always.”
The stag’s tongue dangled from his mouth, frothing. He stared hard at us, shoulders braced, gathering to burst away. Instead, made a decision. Heavy exhale of resolution fell instantly into its own crystalline microcosm of snow. Hung his head low. Took one step. Then another. To see if we would help.
ELISSA FIELD is a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. Her writing has been nominated for Pushcart, Best American, and Best Small Fictions, and included on the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. She has stories appearing in Conjunctions, SmokeLong Quarterly, Maudlin House, Peatsmoke Journal, Fractured Lit, Reckon Review, The Citron Review, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. She has won frequent awards and fellowships, including for drafts of her novel in progress, listed in awards by the First Pages Prize, Heekin Foundation, and James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She is querying a novel and story collection. She lives in a ridiculously cool historic house under an ancient mango tree. Find her on Instagram and Threads @elissalfield.
Featured image by Martin Bennie, courtesy of Unsplash.
