Page 146 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

It was rather anti-climactic when the article never came out. I checked the online pages of the Reykjavik Gazettedaily for almost a year, and was only ever met with the usual reports on rebuilding of societal structures and the odd sob story about someone who had perished in the pandemic. Moreover, the young vixen’s name disappeared from the newspaper’s list of reporters. Likely, her editors recognised that nothing valuable could be gained by stirring up an old controversy. Isabella Moreno was nothing but a very young, very ambitious junior journalist, trying and failing to find her big scoop.

Oh, but how I had worried about the smear article coming out, terrible visions of renewed public outrage assaulting me at night. I started keeping my old bow by the bed, and I dug out my two old pistols from the storage room where I had kept them safely locked. Especially during the summer, I would get up atthe faintest sound and wander around our land in the mellow midnight sun.

Iceland’s population was about 200,000 at that time. It had never been a populous country, not even before the Outbreak, and certainly not after it. In most places, there was a sense of community. People knew each other and knew where everyone lived. I feared we would have to move back to mainland Europe to avoid persecution.

Once again, I started having nightmares of ant-like, swarming crowds oozing over the peaceful, rolling hills surrounding our home, driven by a single-minded malice and only one thought in their collective mind: attack!

I never knew whether in those dreams the people were infected or not.

It made no difference.

EPILOGUE

Harnessed by the passing of time, incredible tales of the pandemic have appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Accounts of the dead rising from their graves and anecdotes of people transforming into furies mere minutes after being bitten. And, unsurprisingly, a myriad of conspiracy theories, claiming that the governments or the richest of the rich planted the virus for obscure benefits of their own.

The full truth never survives the sweeping tides of history. Is it really so damnable that I myself may have helped it on its way to oblivion here and there? As I said I would, after all, right from the beginning.

Dozens of myths have shrouded my own story for decades. There have been whispers about Isabella Moreno’s disappearance right after she visited me. Her body has never been found. The same could be said of a single shred of evidence regarding my supposed involvement.

Looking further back, it has been rumoured that my sons are not my own. That, instead, I wrenched them from the arms of their dying mother during the Lausanne Hospital outbreak, wherein I had been admitted to get a hysterectomy. That the twins’ resemblance to Einar is nothing but a lucky coincidence.

And perhaps the gravest of them all is the one proclaimed by someone I used to be friends with. Monika Kaminski. She maintains in her own accounts that Szabolcs Albert died not because of his crimes against her, but because he was the loudest, staunchest opponent of Einar Andersen’s strategies, which eventually led to a rift between the two erstwhile friends. And to Albert’s assassination.

Do not mistake my silence on all this slander for fear of the truth being exposed. I am not afraid of the truth. I am indifferent to it.

Few dare recognise the fallibility of human memory for the opportunity that it is. The opportunity, at long last, to impose order upon the chaos of life. To bridge that bleeding, festering gap between what was and what should have been.

To no longer mourn the tragic events that inevitably accompany the human condition, to no longer lament the countless disappointments along the way. But be consoled instead by their untenable fragility, for they are only ever present in the moments in which they are occurring and then never more.

To see our existence for what it is: a mere seed, larva, spark.

I, Renata Andersen, made of disintegrating flesh and breakable bones, I am but a brief ripple in a vast ocean. So was Einar Andersen, the enigmatic man, long turned to dust.

Our counterparts, brought to life in those pages, have the potential to be infinitely more than we ever were. They are reflections that began moving on their own accord, untethered by the watchers of the mirror.

I no longer remember Einar’s real face. When I close my eyes, all I see is the face I myself have endowed him with, a face made not of skin and meat but of pen strokes and imagination.

That is why I can no longer be sure whose voice it is that whispers to me from shadows at night, always from just beyond a corner. The voice that says to me,

“Write no more, my girl, and come to rest. Let us have what eternity we can together.”

Renata Andersen