Keep me

Amy Stewart

Soaked in legend, these hills in northern Iceland, but you’re too sensible for any of that. You prefer a torch and a first aid kit to stories and s’mores round a fire. But it’s quiet out here, bucolic, and you’re alone. You’ve brought your heavy heart and it isn’t content to be still.

Maybe that’s why you see her. Her face clarifying itself out of the eddying mist, the brackish water beneath mountain lawn, a sky of ice that smells of smoke and birch. More fog than person, perhaps, but she knows your name. You’ve seen her face before. Perhaps she’s a composite of all the faces you’ve seen, put together into something new.

Go on, take her hand.

You expect her fingers to be cold, but they’re not, they’re as warm as your mother’s. She holds your thumb to her mouth. It feels like an ice cream melting inside your skin. She wants something from you. The words are already leaking from your lips, so you let them, and she closes her eyes and drinks in the ones she wants. The others slip into the breeze, like blood into water. It’s a relief to be rid of them.

People mark the change in you, later. You’re lighter, calmer. You never tell them about the woman on the hill. She is your new secret, and she is a joy to keep.

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Amy Stewart is a freelance copywriter by day, writer of feminist, speculative fiction by night. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at York St John in 2019 and is currently studying for a PhD centred around female circus performers at Sheffield University. Amy’s work can be found in Undivided Magazine and Ellipsis Zine, and she also received a Highly Commended Award in the 2019 Bridport Prize for her short story, Wolf Women. She’s most often found ambling around the Yorkshire countryside with her partner Phil and rescue dog, Wolfie.

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