“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…
I was a single mother raising two boys who became everything to each other in years when we were all alone, and sometimes that loving melancholy haunts my stories. More than once, I wondered how any of us would outlast the grief of losing one of us. These characters aren’t my boys, the mother not me, but the thread of that question runs through. As does the question, Why have we never taken my half-Finnish mother to see the northern lights?
Essentially, three impulses went into writing this story:
The first was absence. I’m sometimes obsessed with what it takes to write silence, emptiness. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day did it; the Colin Firth and Julianne Moore film A Single Man did it. For me, absence in this story came from that feeling of being alone while not alone, while in the presence of someone who is, if only by chance, your one person. I 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. Many members of my family are from Michigan’s sparsely populated Upper Peninsula; my mom’s part Finn. All the references to empty, northern cold, to the northern lights, helped me build silence.
My second obsession, which I’ve been teaching in workshops, is the superpower of objects in story. This story began, for me, with stumbling on a photograph of a stag, stuck as victor of a battle that left his opponent’s head torn off, caught on his antlers and staring into his face. So symbolic of a certain futility in archetypal male power struggles—as with these brothers, wordless in how to mourn their mother’s death. Other objects were fun play, along the way: the idiotic new iPhone, the hipster hiker gear. The paradox of beards conveying one message while they also froze mouths closed, preventing speech. The exposed tundra, in a nod to human futility in how our planet is doing in our care. The story wandered a little, however, until I spotted another photograph, this one of a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian crownlet in a museum. Gold band, studded with alternating stars and the heads of stags. Adding that crown supplied the memory of a mother who once had dreams, and it was this object that finished the story for me. Objects are perfect when you don’t want speech.
And third…I can’t talk about this story without mentioning language. The story’s nickname, in-house, was “Why the fuck we go north?” There was debate over whether this story “gave too many fucks”—but the reality is exactly what critics would say: people swear when they don’t have words for what they really feel. The language really was the point and the brothers’ only way to express their broken hearts, the “bro speak” that said, We’re still here.
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.
