Ynè-Kee's Journey

To Shayne Keen (for introducing me to the band King Buffalo, from which an image in a song of theirs led to the creation of this story).

Ynè-Kee froze at the sight of her own face peering down at her from the emerald flame of an aurora. This vision, the shaman said, was a sign that a journey must be taken, and that closure was its purpose.

    Next day, after making preparations, Ynè-Kee spent extra time with her son. Part of her did not want to go, as the boy had just lost his father and sister in a recent battle. In her own grief she retreated to the hills every sunset. There she watched light dance across the boreal landscape to distant waters where it was lulled beneath the horizon. Often she wondered where all that light went, and if it was better there.

    After saying her goodbyes, she climbed atop her mammoth and headed west through the snow.

    Several days into her journey, under a setting sun, Ynè-Kee arrived at the sea. A pair of eiders zipped over her head from the leaden waves. As she idly followed their flight, she looked over her shoulder and discovered a cloud of wispy fog seeping out of the trees. This fog, she noticed, was stretching toward the coast like breath returning to a mouth. Ynè-Kee’s people believed fog held dark spirits, and a shiver of fear joined her many shivers of cold.

    Ynè-Kee thought about what to do. Not far away she observed a canoe leaning against the icy edge of the shore. Better to get off land, she thought, than to face whatever lurked in that fog. So she got off her mammoth and considered the canoe.

    By now the fog had channeled itself into several human-like forms, bent and misshapen. Arms unfurled outward like tentacles.

    As shadows stretched across the snow, Ynè-Kee noticed, as she so often did, the play of light between descending sun and landscape. In the darkening shine of things, the fog-shapes morphed into aspects of her deceased loved ones. Ynè-Kee gasped.

    Her next thought was she must return home, for she feared tricksters in those shapes, and could only think of her son anyway. He needed her, and she found herself missing him. But she remembered the shaman’s final words: The journey will attend to your grief. So she took a deep breath and opened her arms to the ghostly approach.

    The shapes went quietly by. They weren’t her loved ones, just wisps of fog.

    A trick of the light? No, she’d seen them, had even sensed them. And yet, if the purpose of that vision was to melt her grief like spring snow, it did nothing to drain it away. The mammoth, sensing her despair, extended its truck affectionately. This she stroked, weeping.

    At length she plucked a frozen tear off her cheek and placed it upon her tongue. The taste was bitter. She left the mammoth and climbed into the canoe, pushing off with the oar. Calmly she floated out into the wake of the setting sun, and there disappeared into that dance of light between sun and sea.

First published in Weird Fiction Quarterly in 2022. It is exactly 500 words per the guidelines of the publication.