CRYOSEISM — ERIN CALABRIA
/High up between dark shoulders of stone, the glacier’s ghost shimmers and glints. Now and then, its phantom ice hisses, cracks, recarving old moulins and crevasses, foliations once chilled into slow-motion cascades.
To get there, the Gallaghers ford ten mountain streams—or the ghosts of those streams, anyway, their rental car splashing into swirls of spectral gray. In the backseat, Janie and her brother Billy forget to roll up their windows, and droplets of no-longer-water spatter in. But there is no damp, just a brief, cooling whisper that soothes their sunburned knees.
The trailhead starts in open pasture, sheep nosing grass and yellow hawkbit. Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher lead the way into bristle-thick forest, looping around switchbacks, panting up stairs dug into raw dirt. There are places where rock overhangs the trail, places with signs not to linger in case the mountain decides to swallow them whole. Janie glimpses a wren or two—not ghosts, not yet, she thinks—though the birds flit too fast among the beeches for her to tell.
The glacier’s ghost, when they reach it, wavers like a mirage. Translucent veins of ice jag and buckle over treeless moraine, glowing with eerie blue light. Mr. Gallagher gathers them all for a picture, then sweeps panoramas on his phone. Mrs. Gallagher kneels, real water shining on her cheeks as she arranges an offering of small stone cairns. Janie follows Billy to the terminus, both of them shivering as they pass through the wraith-like pillars of the glacier’s no-longer-toes. Inside, it reminds them of the swimming pool that closed when they were small—so much clear, cold blue, so much brightness cast in rippled nets. Billy listens to the echo of ice melting in the sun, a burst and fizz, trapped air bubbles sparkling like soda pop. Janie traces her hands along the once-glacier’s rings, its striated memory of dust, pollen, volcanic ash, thawed away now into earth.
Later, back in the motel, Mrs. Gallagher takes a long, scorching shower. Mr. Gallagher uploads his photos, though of course no ghost is captured there, only mountain rock. Billy glances over Janie’s shoulder as she thumbs through a field guide, looking for the wrens. Together, they read about the two surviving species, then another, extinct now for over a century, first seen by Europeans when an island lighthouse keeper’s cat came home with one clenched between its teeth. They read about how, for days, the cat laid bird after bird at the lighthouse keeper’s feet, until those wrens were gone.
In the dark, on the brink of sleep, the Gallaghers feel the weight of their bodies. How solid and alive they are—how not-ghosts. And yet from time to time, their blood will sough like alpine streams with no more meltwater to feed them. Their breath will flutter like wings no longer scooping air. And in the pulse of their loudest heartbeats, they will hear shard after shard of glacier ice calving down mountains, away to sea.
Erin Calabria grew up on the edge of a field in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. She is a co-founding editor at Empty House Press, which publishes writing about home, place, and memory. You can read more of her work in Little Fiction, Milk Candy Review, Longleaf Review, Pithead Chapel, and other places.
