Plots

Things had always gone over the cliff. Peat bricks spent from burning, fish skeletons picked of flesh, tufts of gritty wool loosed from skeins. Elin’s uncle walked off its edge the year his health turned. He chose his exit one ordinary night, leaving a cordial goodbye and the diagnosis he had never shared tacked to the kitchen cabinet. She often thought of her uncle’s bones rolling over the seabed, of how the churning waters below must have washed them clean. Elin’s parents, too, went over the cliff — first a poplar box of her mother’s ashes, then, months later, her father’s. This left Elin and her brother at the helm of the house, living as sensibly as they had growing up, quietly relying on one another, two middle-aged children.

For long stretches, Elin’s brother would be out at sea on fishing jobs. Those lonely weeks, Elin focused on the knitting so that he would have something new and warm. He’d return with his windburned skin blotched purple, gripping a line of cod he’d nicked from the haul, a dumb, proud smile on his face. She was always glad to see him, to have his wordless company in the house. But then, impossibly, there was the end of him, too.

Before she received his ashes, she had imagined them as a pile of stodgy black feathers. They arrived instead as a mound of whitish sand in an ordinary ceramic vessel. As she overturned the pot and sent the last of her brother over the cliff, he dispersed into grains, pocking the surface of the ink-colored sea below.

When the seeds arrived, Elin thought they were a memorial gift. People from across the island had sent fruit baskets: apples, berries, oranges, shipped in from the mainland. Elin had subsisted on them in her paralyzing grief, tossing the rinds into her garden. That’s what I’ll do, Elin resolved to herself, and what you’ll become. From the closet she pulled a spade and left it by the door to pick up again at the right time.