Grief, and other horrors

When my brother Sigur died, his sweetheart Bryn took to sleeping in a ring of fire.

Sigur's body lay on my mother’s table for a day and a night. From all over the town, women and daughters came and mourned jealously over him, each mother swearing on this and that thing that if only he had lived, he would surely have married a daughter of theirs. “My Gudrun,” said Gunnar’s mother, “certainly caught his eye but a week ago.” The ladies left flowers and trinkets on his body with equal jealousy. If one girl placed a lock of her hair over his heart, no sooner would she have turned her head away to weep than another would snatch it up, and install her own in its place.

Bryn, who had truly held his heart, did not take any part in the mourning, or come to see Sigur’s body burnt. Instead, she lay in her grief-soaked bed, and didn’t utter a word.

It was on the third day after his death that the fire began, as near as anyone can tell. Our mother went up to check on the girl who would have been her daughter, and found her alight in the glow of her own flames, her face slick with oil. Gunnar, who has always loved Bryn, had asked after her that same day, and our mother told her even as she cowered from the flames; for though she too mourned her favourite son, it was our mother’s opinion as a widow that no woman should stew in her grief for too long. But Bryn did not wish to speak about Gunnar, and nor did she wish to take the stew and ale our mother had brought, though she seemed not to have eaten since Sigur’s passing.

Still, she didn’t appear to be getting thin. When I visited her that evening, she even seemed bigger than she had. Her face had grown rounder, her stomach fuller. In that first week, I visited her daily, and I found her fatter every day; as if, where grief ought to shrink a person, she was growing.

Often, she turned her oily face away rather than speak to me, and I was left to sit alone in the heat, watching her. More than once I dozed off. Some nights, when the enquiring mourners had gone and the house fell silent, she sang.

My brother Sigur was so loved that, in the first weeks after he died, it seemed as though my family were to be kept like guests in our own village, and not allowed to work ever again; we were fattened from great baskets of pies and bread, parcels of meat, harvests of berries and pots of pickles; we were made useless by the blacksmith’s boys feeding the chickens, and the carpenter’s son mending the fences Sigur had left unmended. With nothing to do but listen to Bryn sing in the glow of her flames, our days ambled past us, wet with grief; our beds were never dry, and every day our bread was spread with salt. We were not allowed out even to walk, and our home smelled like grief, as the mourners’ flowers wilted and rotted in the heat, and pies mouldered, and berries fermented, and meat turned to slime.

Then there was Bryn’s smell. Her feet, ankles and knees grew puffy and enormous, and she began to smell of the forge. The iron stink humming from her chamber consumed the house, seeping into the wood, the straw, the food. We knew she was at dark work, but none of us would have said; nor anyone in the village, so shielded were we by their love for Sigur.

It was only when the child came that our mother grew afraid.

Afraid for her own children, she had the devoted Gunnar fetched and sent him up to Bryn’s chamber, instead, to see what was what, and the house creaked and groaned and ached, and the child wailed. The mourners came again. “Certainly she wasn’t with child when Sigur passed,” said mother. “But what child could be born in a week?”

If Gunnar’s loyalty ever wavered at the sight of Bryn’s work, he didn’t show it. A minute in her company, in the heat of her flames, and he climbed down with the child in his arms, its skin hot to the touch. When he laid it on the table, it blackened the wood under its limbs, sending tendrils of smoke into the air.

And still, “she says the child is Sigur’s,” he said, his eyes challenging anyone to say otherwise.

That night, he bedded Bryn. Nobody can know how he passed through the flames, but all of us gathered heard him take his prize; the bed complaining under his weight, Bryn’s curious silence, the wail of the unnatural child. And several more times that night we heard the same, in place of Bryn’s singing, until in the first light of morning Gunnar came down, smug and swaggering, with half of his hair burnt away, his face black with smoke and his clothes as ash on his skin, stinking of the forge. Nobody dared speak.

The next day, when he came down from Bryn’s chamber, more of him still was burnt away. His beard, eyelashes, brows - the hair on his chest and belly and back. His skin was blackened in places by ash, but in yet more it was burnt black, like meat left too long on the spit. He smiled, smug in his conquest, and nobody dared speak in case Bryn should be angry.

The day after that, our mother screeched at the sight of him, covering her mouth and nose with her hands. His lips were burnt away, revealing the yellow smile of his teeth up to the gums beneath. The bones of his forearms shone beneath the tatters of his clothing, and below his belt, there was nothing but rag. The reek of pig fat pursued him through his breakfast. Only his own mother could stand to look at him closely, and after examining him, from bald head to blistered toe, she left our home and didn’t come back.

Whatever dark work Bryn was at, our mother whispered to us, it must almost be finished – and she was right.

On the twentieth morning after Sigur died, Bryn came down from her chamber and Gunnar did not. Her hair was unbraided, her thighs ashy. In her arms was the baby, the air about its head a shimmering halo. With great care, she laid it on the table, and sat down to her breakfast.

And now, she ate. Sausages, bread, bacon, blood pudding, eggs, berries, mead and caraway cake, and the baby smouldered in the centre of it all, gurgling and grunting and crying, and growing. An inch for every mouthful Bryn swallowed, it grew and grew, until it filled the yawning space left by Sigur, until it grew even bigger than that space.

We wept. The burning child grew bigger, taller, thicker and lovelier than Sigur, grew until it filled the breadth of the room and set the walls alight. Our home tumbled down around us, and we wept for joy.

When the fire was done, there was nothing left of our old life. The air was fresh. Bryn lay in the giant Sigur’s arms; bald, naked, quite dead. My sisters, our mother, myself - we left before the mourners could come again. We left with our chickens, and our tools for mending, and all the grief-soaked favours we didn’t want reduced to smouldering ruins behind us.