Katherine Robinson

.
.
The day of the flood, wind roared in, carrying the cold of the sea. The metallic scent of melting snow filled the air, and meltwater floated across old snow. It was June, and the sun never set. Wind scoured the concrete seed vault. Inside, the lights were all switched on, and  in the dim midnight sun, the vault’s blue stained-glass window gleamed. Patches of snow, clinging to the glass, glowed blue and luminous as icebergs. Scarves of snow unfurled off the roof. When the wind subsided, the air was warmer than usual.
.
All summer, Lena had been cataloguing the seeds in black boxes stacked in the bunker’s tunnels. Every week, new seeds arrived from around the world. The vault had begun as a collection of seeds stored in the shaft of an old coal mine in Svalbard. If plants became extinct because of wars, droughts, floods, wildfires, or other disasters, then seeds could be retrieved from the vault. Now the vault was a large grey bunker built into the mountain side, surrounded by permafrost.
.
It was late, but people were still working to pump water out of the vault. Lena and her colleague, Liz, hadn’t gone to bed yet. The snow had never melted like this, there had never been a flood in Svalbard before. That was why the vault was here: the cold helped preserve the seeds, and Svalbard permafrost had always been stable, not at risk from floods or wildfires, far away from warzones and tectonic faults.
.
“We are genuinely fucked,” Liz said.
.
“It’s not great,” Lena said.
.
“This has never happened before,” Liz said. She’d been saying that ever since the flood had started that afternoon.
.
“Yeah,” Lena said. “It’s pretty bad.”
.
“Sometimes I think about how humans evolved to impress each other so that they could win status and impress potential mates, but we did not evolve to plan ahead, as a species. It’s not a great system.”
.
Lena laughed. “Peacocks evolved to impress each other, but they also evolved to deal with bad weather and make sure their chicks survived. Same with humans – they had to plan in order to avoid everyone dying all at once.”
.
“At this point, our plans to prevent that are going very badly,” Liz said. She tucked her hair into her hood and crossed her arms across her stomach. The wind was picking up again. “I just feel like it would be optimal if we’d evolved to be better at planning so that the entire world wasn’t currently on track to get incinerated in the foreseeable as opposed to geological future.”
.
“Sure,” Lena said, “that would be the ideal scenario.” She scuffed melting snow with her boot. She imagined Svalbard with no icebergs, no polar bears: blank water and bare mud. The animals were beginning to sense something was wrong – food was harder to find, and there were fewer icebergs, but they had no idea why or what was happening. When she glimpsed arctic foxes on her walks, she could see they were harried and tense, they followed polar bears to scavenge meat from their kills. “Gay people are great at planning,” Lena said.
.
“Right, if we were all descended from people who had to coordinate sperm donors, surrogates, gestational carriers, egg retrieval, IVF, waitlists, and insurance companies, we, as a species, would be much better at planning,” Liz said.
.
“I think the problem is corporations,” Lena said.
.
.
.
The next morning, the vault was still closed. When Lena walked out the door, meltwater rose up around her boots. Across the bay, snowy hills gleamed. Corrugated ridges scored the mountainside above the vault, carved by slowly retreating glaciers. White snow filled corrugations like sea spray threading down dark rocks. Lena liked that she could see how this place was made. She followed the shoreline away from the vault, cut down towards the sea, slid through thick snow, more slippery than usual. The scent of melting snow was everywhere today, water had flooded the roads, and she kept thinking about Noah’s wife.
.
.
.
What will we eat? Naamah asked Noah. What will we eat after the flood?
.
At night, Naamah couldn’t sleep. She listed plants: borage, meadowsweet, carrot, turnip, angelica, yarrow, bluebell, daffodil, comfrey, broom, gorse, ivy, iris, fennel, thistle.
.
And trees: willow, olive, oak, cedar, hemlock, balsam, walnut, gingko, sycamore, ash, birch, pine, aspen, maple, poplar.
.
She was awake all night listing plants and trees. Before sunrise, she walked up into the hills and began gathering seeds.
.
What about the babies? She asked Noah that night. God says everyone has sinned, but what about the infants? They can’t sin.
.
.
.
Along the beach, lacy ice still bound pebbles together where the frigid tide had retreated. The heave of the sea underpinned everything here, a quietness that never subsided into silence.
.
Working at the seed vault, Lena kept thinking about the olive branch Noah’s dove brought back to the ark. How did that olive tree survive the flood, water so deep it soaked into everything? And when the water receded, there would have been nothing but mud where all the plants had drowned.
.
.
.
When the rain stopped, Noah released a crow and waited for him to bring back a leaf or a flower. What will be growing? Naamah thought.
.
She pushed olive seeds into suet and fed it to the crow. The crow extended his neck delicately and took the suet gently from her fingers. He knew his beak was sharp enough to hurt her.
.
Day after day, the crow flew out over blank water. Day after day, Naamah pressed olive seeds into the suet she fed the crow. Somewhere, as the waters receded, bare mud was drying into soil, damp and friable, she thought. Before long, those seeds would grow into shoots.
.
.
.
Lena walked until she reached a pile of whale bones. From a distance, the bones looked like swathes of snow, but closer they were a jagged tangle of vertebrae and ribs. On these beaches, men had flensed the whales. In vats that boiled all day and all night, men reduced flesh and blubber to oil. They left the bones. Lena lifted a vertebra, rayed like a propeller. The bone was porous, its centre rough as fur. She set it on the pebbles in front of her, and its rays cupped the mountains across the bay.
.
.
.
For weeks, the crow flew away from the ark every morning, and returned with nothing. Then one day, Noah saw the crow circling. The crow swooped down, landed on a dead tree and stayed. The waters have receded, Noah said, the crow has found dry land, something growing.
.
Noah watched the crow, watched longer, then turned away, disgusted. The crow was feeding on a dead man caught in the tree. When the crow flew back, Noah shut the window. He would not allow the crow into the ark, he would not allow the crow’s mate out of the ark. The crow flew at the wooden window, pecked the wood with his beak. The crow squawked. Now the crows would never meet, would never mate, would be extinct. Naamah wrenched the window open, and the crow flew to his mate. He perched next to her, cooed roughly, ran his beak through her feathers.
.
Naamah watched Noah. As long as she’d known him, he’d taken pride in his ability to do exactly what was asked of him, to do it well, to do it better than anyone else. Imagine a world in which all the animals that ever die decay in the sun, she told Noah. There would be no end to disease.
.
Noah sent out a dove, their only dove because she had killed her mate. Naamah had never fed the doves from her hand, she had left seeds scattered in their cage. With luck, the one dove was pregnant, and, if not, doves would be a myth, a pure white bird no one had ever seen.
.
The dove returned carrying an olive shoot in her mouth. Leaves arched out like thin feathers from the twig. A poultice of olive leaves will protect a wound from infection, Naamah thought.
.
Peace, Noah said, an olive means peace. The dove who brought us the olive will mean peace from now on, too. And a rainbow arched up over the bare trees, over snapped twigs and jagged branches. Naamah had not seen colours like this since before the rain, since before the plants died. In a few years, there would be olives to harvest. She imagined a world in which there is only one creature like you. If that creature is gone, then nothing else wants what you want. That’s a kind of peace, she thought.
.
.
.
Lena lifted a jawbone and ran her knuckle down the length of it. A beluga whale. When a beluga dies, its pod will sometimes keep the body company for days. She’d never seen a beluga whale here in Svalbard. She thought about how a beluga whale can hold its breath for twenty minutes, they can dive a thousand meters – whales can’t forget they are breathing, it isn’t automatic, they choose when to breathe just as they choose any other movement. She thought of this bay when whalers first came to Svalbard. Ship logbooks described arctic water so full of whales that a man could have walked across the bay on their rounded backs, as if walking across steppingstones in a river. Beluga whales, minke whales, humpback whales, bowhead whales, fin whales, blue whales. Whales hauled ashore, blubber reduced to oil, and baleen harvested for umbrellas, corsets, riding whips – baleen rattling like venetian blinds as men extracted it from huge, severed jaws. And, without warning, she was back in that room: white plastic venetian blinds, pink city light coming in through the blinds. In her mind, she was fighting him off again, she was terrified, and, at the same time, she felt nothing at all. She was aware, now, only of a feeling of motion, pushing him off again, and pushing him off again. She sat perfectly still, and she had been still then, too. This repetition, in her mind, of a fight that never happened and would not end seemed sometimes like a kind of atonement imposed now for a fight she had failed to fight then. She drummed her fingers along the jawbone, felt its weight.
.
And suddenly she heard shouting.
.
She looked up. Liz was standing in a motorboat, idling close to shore. “What’s wrong with you?” Liz shouted, she was reaching for a gun, unlocking its case.
.
Lena looked behind her, then. The bear stood on the bank above her, head down, shoulders slouched.
.
She loved polar bears: millennia of variations and mutations that culminated in a white bear in white snow. A body that evolved until it was so well suited to its world that it became invisible.
.
Lena tried not to step on the bones as she hurried across the pebble beach. She didn’t run, running would imply urgency, and the bear would run too. She did not look back. She ran into the sea, and it was so cold, she felt suddenly hot. A person can live about two minutes in the arctic sea, she thought. She had googled it, curious how long she would live if she fell overboard in Svalbard. She dove for the boat, and Liz dropped a ladder across the side.
.
On the boat, she looked back at the bear. The bear’s head was lowered, jutting out from her shoulders. The bear was staring at the boat. Standing like that, the bear looked bemused, sceptical. Lena kept watching her. Lena was numb. She unzipped her anorak and peeled it off. Already it was freezing into its own stiff shape. She stripped off her fleece pullover, her tee shirt. She unzipped her drenched, frozen jeans and pulled them off.
.
“Jesus Christ,” Liz said, bringing her a parka and sliding it over her wet shoulders. “What were you doing? The bears love that beach. You didn’t even bring a bear gun.”
.
“They love most places,” Lena said. She zipped the parka over her bare chest. Her body was tingling now. Her skin was turning bright red. She looked at the gun, lying on the boat floor. They were speeding out to sea.
.
Liz turned around. “There’s a blanket in the chest,” she said, she was steering away from the shore, away from the bear.
.
“I’ll be fine,” Lena said. She cinched the waist of the parka.
.
“Are you OK?” Liz asked after a minute.
.
“Yeah, I’m warming up. I’m fine. And it’s warmer than normal today,” she said and laughed.
.
“You don’t seem fine. You could have died.”
.
Lena inhaled slowly. “Statistically, it’s unlikely,” she said.
.
“We’re unlikely to die of everything until we die of something that’s statistically unlikely to kill us,” Liz said.
.
Lena watched her steering the boat. She liked Liz. Liz’s red anorak fit her perfectly, which was strange because anoraks were shapeless. Lena closed her eyes. She wondered, half asleep, if Liz would sleep with her. Liz’s husband was back in Boston. Liz spent months at a seed vault in Svalbard. Maybe Liz was gay. Or bisexual. Maybe Liz had mistaken compulsory heterosexuality for genuine heterosexuality. Maybe Liz hadn’t read enough Adrienne Rich. She thought of watching Liz undress her, watching Liz watch her, her body becoming unfamiliar, desired in someone else’s eyes, something she had never seen before, brand new. Lena’s head was spinning.
.
“I’m fine,” she said again. She opened a plastic trunk on deck. “Isn’t there a towel here somewhere?” she said.
.
Liz let the boat idle, lifted a bench seat up, searched through the compartment beneath it. “Here,” she said, holding out a red fleece blanket.
.
“Thanks.” She was shivering now, finally, her teeth chattering.
.
“Look,” Liz said. “I’m just thinking, maybe you should talk to someone or something. You’ve seemed down a lot recently,” she said. “I could help you find someone. Someone to talk to,” Liz said.
.
“OK,” Lena said without thinking. “But I’m OK,” she added.
.
She looked back at the beach. If the bear was still there, she would need binoculars to see her. She imagined lifting binoculars. As she focused the lens with one finger, the bear loomed and blurred in her hands, then resolved into a clear shape: a white bear in white snow. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She wanted this: a creature strong enough to harm her who chose not to.
.
.
.
Katherine Robinson‘s poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as The London Magazine, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been long-listed for the BBC National Short Story Award. She is currently a PhD candidate at Cambridge University and a trustee for Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary in Shetland.