NIKKI KERSHNER

1.

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It is past midnight on the lonely two-lane highway between Fairbanks and Anchorage. Our friends sleep in the backseat. No one else is coming. The bounds of my vision become the world’s edges—mountains, a winding road, the glowing pink band on the horizon where the sun has ducked briefly out of sight. Summer nights up here don’t get darker than twilight, and the sun will soon begin its ascent again, but for now this is forever.

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Then the road curves, and a dark shape enters my peripheral. You make a sad noise, but I say nothing at all; I’ve never seen a dead moose before—I’m not from here. It looks like an abandoned toy with its spindle legs splayed.

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Fifty yards later, a car slumps lifeless on the opposite shoulder. It’s only when we pass that I see the front is crumpled. It’s only when we get back to Anchorage—the sky distilled into overcast dawn, the world cleaved back wide—that I think maybe we should have stopped.

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It is morning, and I feel born again. I’m so tired it makes me cry.

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2.

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Below the bush plane, there is more wilderness than I ever knew existed. Scale is impossible to determine without something manmade to compare, and the landscape looks precisely like the tiny, mossy ecosystem I see when I crouch to examine a forest floor. The lichen in the pitted moose prints is the same as the trees in the valley; the brown tundra is the same as the dead patchwork grass under my fingers. The plane’s shadow ripples over the water, wings open like a bird. Shapes move beneath the surface, but I can’t tell if they are fish or whales.

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You and I talk about how everything fractals into the same patterns—galaxies cluster together just like cities on a night map of Earth. Macrocosm, microcosm.

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You tell me about snow piling against the window, and the inflection of your voice is the same as when you say that you love me with every fiber of your heart. Alaska is your big world, and I am your small one.

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3.

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My great uncle dies. I didn’t know him well, but he was a writer, the only one in my family. When I was twelve, I told him that I wanted to be a writer too, but I struggled to finish stories. He told me if I get bored of a story, I should quit it and start a new one. And if I get bored of that one, too, that I should quit writing and pick a different hobby.

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Years later, I emailed him a short story, because I hadn’t quit—but I wasn’t trying to prove anything. The file corrupted and he asked me to send it again. His wife would have read it to him because he was ill and mostly bedridden. 

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I forgot to resend it. Now he’s dead.

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I think mostly of my grandfather, who shares his brother’s affectionate bluntness. Until this week, they used to call every Sunday, across decades and oceans. Where do the conversations go now?

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4.

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I travel between worlds—some yawn, others cling close. In our bed (really, your bed that has also become mine) a tiny universe presses between us. When we kiss, the other worlds are not made aware. Good secrets. There is nothing but this, and just like the drive to Anchorage, it lasts forever until it doesn’t. 

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Life pans wide once more.

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