Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen

Author:Berit Ellingsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781937512408
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2015-11-19T06:00:00+00:00

20

THE NEXT DAY, HAVING MET KAYE SEEMED LIKE A dream. He could barely remember what Kaye had said and what he had said and why. Yet he knew he hadn’t said what he’d imagined saying if Kaye recognized him, and he hadn’t said what he most wanted to. There had been too many people around for that. He ought to have asked Kaye to talk in private, but since Kaye had been busy, his students and co-speakers waiting for him, it had seemed that Kaye would say no, so he hadn’t done that. Next time, he thought. Next time they would chat more and he would say what he needed to.

And Kaye was not living on the coast? Where was he staying? Still in the city? Then why was he holding lectures out of town? The assistant professor could easily have gotten twice the audience at the university, particularly if he was still popular among the students.

He slept until the afternoon sun woke him by brightening the panorama window and gleaming above the mountains in the west. He got up, turned on the laptop, and checked his mail. No new messages.

He changed into training clothes and shoes, and ran along the fields, whose edges were more clearly defined and drier than before. The air was chilly. With the heather and bilberry shrub gone, their gamey fragrance had been replaced by something less wild and more familiar: soil and dirt. In the distance a flock of sparrows lifted from the ground, but he hadn’t seen as large a gathering as that which had warmed him earlier in the fall. The sunlight was sharp but pale, and he turned his face toward it to soak up what little warmth it held.

When he returned to the cabin the sun had already sunk to darkness. He kicked off his muddy trainers, left them on the deck to dry, and went inside to wake the laptop from its sleeping mode. No new mail. He returned outside, attached the rubber hose to the tap, undressed, and showered in the cold water on the veranda. Then he dried, threw the moist t-shirt, sweatpants, and socks up on the banister, and hurried back to the warmth inside.

There he pulled on soft indoor clothes: a pair of faded light blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and a gray cardigan he had borrowed from his father. He checked the mail again before he filled the old pot with water and made oat porridge with blueberry jam. After he had eaten he found a couple of IQ tests online, and completed them as fast as he could. He assumed similar tests would be part of the astronaut selection process. When he needed a break, he put on the headlamp, went outside to the pile of logs he had stacked against the southern wall, and retrieved a few. The pile was down to twenty or thirty pieces of pale birch trunk speckled with black. He doubted the neighbors would be happy if he

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