Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. Departure (Capture)

[Reykjavik, 1900]

The little gray house is not too far away from the bustling streets but still tucked away from the worst of the capitol’s noise, puffing white smoke out of the chimney continuously like the opening shot of a fairytale. It is an old, old house, unoccupied for generations, upkept by low-level government employees for the return of its rightful owner. It has always been easy to pick out from the air for Mr. Puffin, who circles over the house, landing awkwardly on the roof with a skid, and growls like a chainsaw at the tiny boy who looks up at him, so serious and grim despite his physical age.

The order of “you, come down from there” means nothing to the bird, even after the boy points and gestures. The boy huffs when his charades fail to impress Mr. Puffin, who looks down at him from the roof with curiosity.

The nation of Iceland takes a fish out of a small bag strapped to his side. Now this, food, is a universal language, and as the puffin dives down to pluck the herring from the boy’s hand, Jóhannes snatches him in both hands with timed precision.

“You have been gone for a week!” Jóhannes chides as the puffin eats the fish, opening his beak to beg for another. “I have been worried a gull got you again. You are not very bright, you know.”

The boy talks to the puffin about a great many things – but while Mr. Puffin does not understand the words, he does understand repetition – names of places and people he’s never met, never been too, because he is only a year old and this is his first summer of life, even if the bird has already been killed countless times. Perhaps the boy is right to worry why he’s so accident-prone, but there is a certain amount of carelessness associated with a lack of permanent death. When the earth swallows you whole only to spit you back out again, death is nothing more than a pause between rides on the same roller coaster. You get used to it. Just like you get used to a gray-haired child, wise beyond his years, snatching you out of the air and dragging you into his empty house.

Unlike a puffin colony, bustling with chatter and activity, the Icelander’s home is devoid of life but not of color. He’s dragged driftwood and stacked it into a pile against the wall. His sweaters hang from the ceiling like drapes. A bright piece of blue cloth is nailed to the wall above his bed. A glass vase filled with bird feathers and beach-found trinkets. A dress, sent from another country from a person not knowing of the changes going on in Iceland, folded on the back of a chair, unworn after four months. There are things, things, oh wondrous things to play with! A black metal pot turned on its side and filled with moss for the bird to sleep in, the unorganized chaos of a child given too much control, playthings strewn across the wooden floorboards and so untouched they have begun to gather dust. What a menagerie! But, when perched on the table, the only signs of life are the boy staring back at him with a sour expression and the occasional squeaking of a mouse that has snuck inside through the cracks.

Denmark, Denmark, whatever that means, whatever that is, that phrase hangs from the boy’s lips with a mix of nostalgia and fury as he sets the table, a glass of water and a chessboard, and talks aloud to the puffin as if he understands anything at all. “Knight goes here,” he whispers to himself, and the puffin watches from the sidelines as the boy plays himself. But the king looks delicious, like a fish below the waves, and the puffin suddenly grabs it and flies to his iron nest on top of the cabinets, purring with it between his beak.

“You, give that back!” the boy shouts, scooting a chair with him so he can maybe, just maybe reach the bird. No hunter gives up their prey easily, and so the bird flies, from place to place, as the child clammers, face increasingly turning red with embarrassment at his own lack of height and rage towards his only friend. And then victory – he grabs one of the bird’s legs in his tiny fingers while on his tiptoes, but they both fall to the ground with a thud, the bird dropping the piece upon impact and flying back to a high place of safety to shake off the blow.

But the boy remains curled on the ground – alive, he is breathing, but as he reaches for the piece he gasps, and starts crying, unable to move from the floor. In the fall, the cross atop the kingpiece broke off. The missing part shines like a distant star a few feet away. Oh, and it is too much, to increasingly fracture your only connection to your past. He cries and cries and cries enough to fill the ocean. The puffin does not know this agony. For all the puffin knows, the boy is bleeding clear fluid from his eyes. For all the puffin is, he is still a chick, not yet shed adolescence, and the boy is his caretaker, his savior, but not his friend. A wild bird does not, and cannot know, this kind of abstract loss.

“You don’t understand,” the boy finally turns, face as hot as magma and just as red, glistening with boiling wet, “you just don’t know how alone it feels, to be me.”

And Jóhannes is right. He asks the man down the street to bore a tiny hole into the broken king’s cross, string a thread through it, and he wears it as a necklace underneath his clothes. But by the end of winter the land has shifted volcanically. The mood has changed. He climbs a mountain and drops his necklace into the lifeblood of the planet. He watches it burn away to ash in the lava flow. Vindication, and then, pangs of instant regret.

The puffin, with annoyance that the empty house is not quiet, falls asleep to the sound of the boy’s lament for three nights in a row.

At the end of summer the boy is less sad, but mopes in the center of a vast puffin colony. In his black jacket and with his pale skin he resembles the puffins that dance around him, returning with fish to feed their sooty chicks and and popping in and out of grassy holes like rabbits. It is loud, but the clamor is welcome, as is the open sky and overbearing sun. The boy occasionally gets up and wanders around, sticking his tiny hands down into the burrows, arms generally too short to reach the back of the puffin-made caverns, but occasionally he grabs a shocked chick out of the darkness, stares at it blankly, gives it a few pats, and shoves it back in the hole. In this day and age puffin hunters are hard at work slaughtering them for food, specks in this distance further down the colony. Despite his affections, Jóhannes loves to eat them, too. There is no better spice than starvation and he will eat what he can get. Life is easier now. He, daily, has had a full stomach for many years now. But the specter of the past itches at the back of his mind, an animal instinct telling him to gorge himself. It is summer, the time of plenty. You are young, and still growing. You must grow strong, and survive another year. Sink your teeth into something, his instincts tell him as his stomach growls a little bit, but he suppresses it, for now.

Many of the burrows are empty now. Most of the young birds have already fledged out to sea. And his bird – if he can even dare to call it his bird – stayed the winter with him the first year because Mr. Puffin’s wing broke after a neighbor’s cat sunk fangs deep into him. On the mend, the bird sat vigilant and locked in the empty house with only the lonely boy for comfort, who drew up designs on paper and posted them up on the walls, only to tear them down and burn them weeks later. Boring, so boring, and the puffin’s migratory urges are strong. You missed out on your milestones, you missed out on your kin-building. You must launch yourself into the sea, the bird’s brain circuitry tells him. It is a biological urge even stronger than Jóhannes’ pre-teen desire to eat. Mr. Puffin must leave this land before winter arrives.

Another burrow checked, empty, fingers scraping against black earth.

“Are you going to leave me?” Jóhannes asks of the bird resting atop his head, balancing awkwardly on the iceberg that is his hair.

“I don’t want you to go,” he mutters, ashamed of his own selfishness. But the bird is none the wiser, until that evening when Jóhannes locks the doors and proclaims that the bird will never be able to leave the house. They are both captives here and will be forever. Prisoners in the same cell. Jóhannes is so careful to slip in and out of the building, to tie the puffin’s legs down with rope so he can’t fly away when the boy opens the door. It is a miserable winter for both of them. It is so cold. They are both so unhappy with themselves and with each other. And unhappiness breeds mistakes. Jóhannes is clumsy, once. Absent-mindedly, he answers a knock on the door. And the puffin knows he only has one chance to escape.

He soars off into a blizzard, nearly regretting his choice, but freedom, even if it means death, is better than being treated like an animal in a cage.

The boy shouts curses, running out after him, but the bird is far gone in the snowy expanse, leaving his surrogate parent alone to suffer through the season without companionship. 

2. Detox, Detour, Divorce

[Kattegat, 1942]

On the waters of the Northern Sea, a small shipping vessel bobs in the waves unassuming, like a little green bug lost in the vast ocean of a navy picnic blanket. A littiny of little snowflakes pours out of the sky like a leaky faucet, obscuring the mainland from sight. Here, Mr. Puffin sails too, feet tucked up against his body tightly, feathers creating a watertight seal to keep them warm. He is pushed around in the small swells and occasionally has to kick a foot out to paddle desperately to prevent being completely disoriented. A gust of wind favorable to the direction he wishes to travel causes him to run across the water, opening his little black wings and fluttering them rapidly to lift him away from the churning ocean that wishes nothing more than to pull him down into the dark, dark deep.

He intends to pass the boat entirely but he hears a loud voice shouting out into the dusk air that grabs his attention – he doesn’t recognize it but in the decades to come it will become ingrained into his brain. He almost ignores it again until he is struck with a feeling of power – two distinct auras, once waning, collapsing, deflated, erratic, and another sturdy and strong, unmoving, unbothered but gently imposing.

It is the same feeling that Mr. Puffin got from the boy when he laid on the ground dying as a chick. The sun beat down on his gray body and from above, as the mutual child frowned down at him, Mr. Puffin was filled with abject and utter terror. It was a feeling beyond the fear of a predator, it was a bone-dwelling fear of something that wasn’t quite of this world but also woven into the very fabric of it. Only sensitive humans seemed to sense the feeling of Other, but animals like himself see them as they truly are, an amalgamation of life, like a condensed patch of dark matter in that they are so much bigger than their physical forms seem to contain, a frankensteined body constructed of culture and creature blended into one. The nation of Iceland looked like a young boy who dressed beyond his physical age, his clothes as weary-worn and a knowing expression across his freckled face like elderly ex-fishermen, now too old to work and tired of it all. But to the puffin he felt like a roiling mass of shadow eclipsing the light of the sun, a frenzied chattering mass, a hydra which had as many heads as there were Icelanders. It stared at him with empty, sad eyes, mouthless but still desiring to consume, to grow, to take over more land and make itself even bigger. It was indifferent to Mr. Puffin’s dehydrated body and weak blood. The body may desire food and drink, but the soul desires something greater, more abstract, and something infinitely more horrible, terrible.

But the bird had gotten used to it over time. Jóhannes is just a fancy puppet used by It That Is Jóhannes And Yet Greater to interact with and influence the physical world. But he hadn’t yet met another of this kind – a kind that Mr. Puffin now was too, he supposed, in his infancy as a young immortal of a different species. They say like attracts like – this applies to both puffins and people.

The smaller of the two feelings becomes bigger, nearly bursting out of the small container that houses it, and then collapses again in sadness, rage, acceptance, feelings as arbitrary as the act of thumbing through the pages of a book quickly in an attempt to get the gist of it despite it being a fruitless task. And the larger stands unmoving, frozen, static. And with that, Mr. Puffin has to know.

The bird descends, scooting across the water as he lands near the boat and paddling up the rest of the way, thankful that the sturdy hull of the boat protects him from the stiff wind that occasionally blows. He listens to the conversation above deck from the water, not yet ready to make his appearance obvious.

“So,” the owner of the unstable energy shouts, tossing a net overboard and shakily steading himself as the ship rocks back and forth, “ that’s what I think about his latest novel. It’s trash! I read it last night and I couldn’t understand a thing about it.”

“Yer never good at understandin’ things when yer drunk.”

“Who told you I was drunk?!”

“ You told.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“Reeked of alcohol this whole time. Yer barely standin’ up on the ship, Henrik.”

“What else is there to do when you have no control, but to drink?” Henrik wails. “ My country is occupied. Halle is furious with me – we haven’t spoken at all this entire year. He ended things between us a while ago. The continent is in shambles. The world is a wreck, and I’ll drink to that. Here, here,” he nods, pulling out a large flask from his coat and taking a long swig out of it.

“Halle doesn’t talk to me about you, an’ I see why now.”

“Well of course you’re talking, Berwald. You’ve always had that weird little connection with each other, even when we were kids.”

“Henrik.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to be so. Whatever the word is.”

“Rude?”

“I guess,” and Henrik sits down on the deck of the ship with a pout, in part to emphasize his tantrum and part to not fall over flat on his face from his impaired coordination. He needs to focus on getting his point across, and slowly, carefully, through slurred speech, he explains himself.

“He’s mad that I’ve given up. He tried so hard to keep himself free. He’s mad that I helped decide the call to surrender so quickly. To him, I’m the reason why he’s stuck in limbo. He doesn’t understand my thinking. I'm just too tired for this. I’m too old for this. I feel awful all of the time. I’m just sad.”

“Prob also upset with yer drinking.”

“He ain’t one to judge.”

“Then I’ll judge,” Berwald growls in warning. “Yer better than this.”

“You really think that?”

“Mhm.”

“I don’t think so,” Henrik tears up, holding his head in his hands before beginning to weep. “I think I’m terrible.”

“Go below deck an’ sleep it off.”

“No, I can’t do that. Do you know how long it took to arrange for me to meet you like this? We aren’t even supposed to be speaking to each other, legally. Higher ups don’t know I’m here. They think I’m at my country house. And it’s so fucking bad – I have to be stowed away and be shipped out to sea to avoid being seen with the holier than thou neutral Sweden? They’re sooo worried we’re going to strike up an alliance. As if we have any influence over anything right now.”

“No wonder Halle is fed up. I’d break up, too.”

“I know, I know. I’m not very good at being nice right now. Sorry. You don’t deserve this. Halle doesn’t deserve this, either. Y’know… I could lose him for good, this time.”

“You two always say that when you fight, but y’know how it always ends.”

“But at some point, there IS going to be an end.”

Berwald sighs deeply, annoyed, and looks hopelessly to the sky.

“Ohh, a puffin!” the Dane beams, standing shakily and rushing to the side of the vessel, dangerously close to slipping and falling face first into the ocean. “Ahoooy!”

“Odd ta see just one,” Berwald muses.

“C’mere, c’mere…” Henrik grabs towards the water with his hands, beckoning the bird to jump up into his arms. Of course not. What a fool to think that would work. So the nation tries another tactic, throwing a small piece of bycatch left on the deck at the bird, who dives after the fish, resurfacing with it in his mouth. Mr. Puffin swallows. Henrik cheers and takes a celebratory drink.

“Don’t feed wildlife.”

“I dunno, maybe it’s friendly. Maybe it’s from Iceland. OH! Maybe it IS Jói! My son is a BIRD, everyone!”

“That boy has been through too much already.” 

“Honestly,” and for the first time during this conversation, Henrik has a moment of clarity, “I’m worried about him. He won’t talk to anyone .”

Another fish, thrown and eaten, and the shorter of the two men makes a series of tempting noises – the same sort of noises used to tempt a cat out of hiding. It means nothing and it does nothing. Little ship bobs against the big one.

“Halle won’t talk to me, Jói won’t talk to me, and I haven’t heard a word from Tino, either. Have you?”

“Nah.”

“The world is so busted open. Everyone is running everywhere. Everyone is doing something. There’s too much movement all over the map. This all feels so big. Bigger than it ever has been. But still, at the same time, the world feels so small and it is only getting smaller.”

“If ye keep philosophizin’, yer going to make yourself sad. Denmark will just keep gettin’ smaller an’ smaller if you keep thinkin’ that way.”

“Man, fuck off.”

Henrik suddenly bows over, hand clamped over mouth, and races to the other side of the ship to vomit into the open sea. Berwald sighs, nodding and petting Henrik’s back with a large palm.

“War is hard,” Henrik gasps between heaves.

“Always been hard on the stomach.”

“I am not sure if I can do this,” he grimaces. “Berwald, I’m really not sure I can keep doing this.”

“Ye will.”

“I don’t know if I can,” his voice cracks, and he spills his tears into the sea.

As the puffin kicks his feet underneath him, running away from this mess, and flies back towards the open ocean, darkness engulfs the boat behind him, and its light is snuffed out like a candle.

3. Lost and Found

[Baltic Sea, October, 1991]

The thing about birds is that they move – and puffins are no exception, spending their winters out at open sea and their summers on rocky seasides. Migration is carefully timed, planned, orderly – and yet despite reliable seasonality there are some individuals who veer off course into the unknown, beyond the bubble of the established realm. Be it by choice or storm or capture these vagrants are anomalies and nothing more. But anomalies bring the chance of a previously unknown success, as much as failure is the presumed option on the table. And what better way to spend your time as an immortal seabird than to seek out lands that may be suitable to the expansion of your world.

Sometimes you just want to know how far the sea goes.

On an early morning in the Baltic Sea he is struck with a familiar feeling – by this point he knows them well – in the smack dab of the water. Odd, he thinks, before flying closer through the mist and suddenly finding a large ferry wreathed in loose fog chugging forward. The bird lands on the empty deck, peering in through the windows to confirm it is who he feels it is. Despite the start of rain, Mr. Puffin groans in approval at his reflection in the glass as he spots a young man bouncing one of his legs rapidly while reading a magazine. When he shifts, the puffin can see Tino’s stoic face.

Tino is an interesting one – with his close friends and family he is talkative, excitable, expressive. But that openness only bloomed after the enforced closeness of history wept into cracks of his concrete and pried him open from the inside out. When he is with unfamiliar nations (or worse, humans) he blends in inconspicuously like that of his countrymen: reserved, blunt, and closed off.

What is it with these northern nations and their obsession with the water?

He might as well see where he’s going.

Sitting out of the rain beats flying on a stormy morning, anyway.

As the ferry pulls into a foreign harbor Tino stands and paces, looking out the windows and craning his neck to see the shore. A shudder and a look of recognition sweeps briefly across Tino’s face and he relaxes. Moments later, Mr. Puffin feels the same surge, like a sudden wave of emotion hitting him all at once. Both of them have the same realization. Even if they can’t see, they can feel, and that texture of energy can come from one person only.

Tino departs, going through the typical complicated song and dance of crossing borders, and without looking up he beelines in the direction where he can sense what feels like music in his soul, a familiar faint murmuring of a folk tune that grows louder as he hurries past other passengers. Tino only looks up once he is past the bulk of the crowd, and for the first time since Mr. Puffin spotted him, his expression softens.

Eduard stands tall – he’s taller than Tino as it is, but he has puffed out his chest and seems to swell with nervous pride. Gone is the slight air of malaise that hung around his body and soul the select few times the bird has seen Estonia in passing. Eduard too, as an Estonian should, is expressionless and distant until the Finn approaches and they both cannot help but melt at the sight of each other – Eduard starts wiping away premature tears out of the corner of his eyes, Tino discards his suitcase a few paces away and runs, tackle-jumping into him. They hug, briefly, but quickly release their hold on each other to slap each other squarely on the shoulders, looking deep into each other’s eyes with importance, meaning, resolution.

“How do you feel?” Tino asks, the first line spoken between the two.

“Ahahaha… nervous. Excited. Proud. Nervous ,” he emphasizes again. “So much to do. Not enough time.  I’ve been run ragged, honestly. But I can’t say I didn’t miss it dearly,” he points up at a building where the black, blue, and white Estonian flag flies free. “I hope we can hang onto it this time.”

“You will. It is nice to see it again. I can’t remember the last time I was in Tallinn. Is that cute lunch place we used to go to still around?”

“Ah. Owners got deported to Siberia after the war. It’s a bookstore now.”

“Oh.”

“But! I found another place! It isn’t as good, but I think we should eat there. Agenda is still to go back to my place, put your stuff away, get cozy?”

“Sure. But actually, after I stash my stuff, I was going to ask if you could show me around Old Town?”

“But why? You know Old Town so well. Do you not remember?”

“Hm. It’s not about that. You seem… really untethered, Eduard. You’re hiding it well but I see it. I think showing me would calm your nerves a little. When I first got independence, for the next twenty years I saw my own country in a very different light. It didn’t matter if the painting in the hallway was the same painting it had always been, it just suddenly looked different to me. I saw new meaning in it. When I talked about Finland, it felt different. Metaphorically, there weren't any ghosts above me anymore clouding how I saw the world. There was just me and the nation and nobody else. No third power above me, influencing how I felt. No sense of powerlessness when you want to do something to help your people but you are forbidden to take action and can only sit pretty like a decoration on the shelf to be shown off to other empires.”

“That’s,” he winces, pausing through closed eyes. “Yeah.”

“You’ll get there. Be strong! You’re strong!”

“You’ve always been the stronger one.”

“ Come on , I expected you to be so much more exuberant! First time we’ve seen each other since your independence, and you’re so tall and yet so small at the same time. You’re a survivor! You made it! Twice! No matter what the future throws at you, you’ll figure it out. Even if you get beaten into submission again, you’ll come back yet again, I know it.”

“Thanks.”

“We’re in it together.”

“Always,” Eduard laughs, stepping aside and bowing slightly to beckon Tino to follow him. “Always, until the end of time.”

“That’s the spirit!”

“And this,” Eduard proclaims, gesticulating with his arms as if he was a tour guide for foreigners, “is the beginning of our walking tour of Old Town. In lieu of the regular tour of Estonia’s glorious and complicated past, today’s tour is special . We will be focusing on the life details of a certain Eduard, no last name of note, because I am in the process of changing it!”

“My vote is to go back to using Kuulo as your first name, too.”

“Only if you stop using your typo of a name and start going by Veikko again.”

“Tino is funny though! It’s not my fault the clerk blanked out and wrote an n instead of a m! I laughed for hours when I got my passport back!”

“It’s not that funny.”

A beat of silence as they walk side by side. From atop the old stone wall of the 13th century castle embedded into a modernizing city, Mr. Puffin watches from a distance, covertly following the two from afar, trying to blend in as just another city pigeon. Eduard points to a corner of the old wall, otherwise unassuming and unnoteworthy.

“Here, I got very very drunk on a midsummer’s day in the early 1700s and I threw up here. Then, I immediately passed out.”

“Nice!”

They chatter between long pauses, jokes and then moments of quiet celebration, where Tino brushes his knuckles against Eduard’s as they walk. They both close their eyes in solemn silence. And then a little laugh, exhaled into the sky on a cloudy day. The rain from the sea batters down on them both suddenly, and Eduard freezes up, still, like he is caught in a field of gunfire while Tino cackles, unaware of the flash of panic on the face of his closest companion. But both subside, both the laughter and the jolt of fear. It will be hard, Eduard thinks as they shelter under an archway. I know it will be hard. But I think, especially after spending time with you, it’ll be okay, at least for now.

“You know,” Eduard muses. “You’ve always been a little reckless and impulsive and you somehow barrel your way into success, even if you’re quaking in your boots. I feel like I’m overthinking all of this.”

“That’s because you are. Remember when we stole that viking ship? Neither of us were thinking at all until we were halfway to Sweden. And that turned out fine.”

“Oh, Halvard was so angry. Wait. Is that why Halvard never lets me drive boats when he’s around?!”

“Probably. To be fair, we DID crash his favorite ship. But it WAS funny.”

“How come he still lets you drive then?!”

The rain falls harder, obscuring their voices. The weather isn’t suitable for flying back out to sea. In the sides of the stone castle Mr. Puffin finds shelter in the form of holes, gaps in between stones just big enough for him to sneak into. The gaps are not unlike the burrow of a puffin – cramped, dark, safe, obscured. He waits until the rain stops – and by that point, the two have also made their way further inland, deeper into the city, out with the old and in with the new, without ever forgetting where they came from.

Mr. Puffin wonders what it must be like to have a companion who can keep up with your lifespan. Although puffins are long-lived, all of those who existed at the time of his birth are dead flecks upon the surface of the earth. On his way back to more familiar waters he joins other flocks of birds in hopes he feels the same feeling from one of them that he gets from the nationfolk. Does Mr. Puffin give off an aura too? The duck flock he integrates himself with seems to pay him no mind, just a misfit among things greater and larger and without care for him and his predicament. Mortals are consumed with earthy wants – and he too, eats, shits, and sleeps like the rest of them, but a colder than average frost won’t do him in for good.

He can be allowed to entertain ideas of belonging and self only when his basic needs are trivial, informal, a mere fault of imperfect immortality. It is God’s little mistake giving all of his creations needs.

For nations, such puzzles devoid of the proper pieces must be harder to bear.

For the heart of a bird is much simpler than the brain of man.

Red for Red

[Bjørnøya, Svalbard, May 2014]

The small breeding colonies of Svalbard pale in comparison to those in Iceland, but as the dutiful representative of his species Mr. Puffin feels as though he must visit every little corner of his domain to check in. Thus, in this summer he heads to the far north and waddles through colonies with pride, waiting for the other puffins to make way for him as if he is a beloved king. But instead his pride is wounded when his other kin pay him no special importance. A kittiwake dive bombs at him and he nearly loses his balance and tumbles into the air, but a frantic scrambling of orange feet against stone gives him just enough grip to hold on.

Bjørnøya is largely devoid of humanoid presence other than the small meteorological station to the north – even that is staffed by only a handful of people. So when Mr. Puffin sees a human perched on the top of a cliff, curiously looking down at the vast seabird colony with a scanning gaze, the bird is rightfully perplexed.

He is the most unnerving one out of all of them.

Halvard is odd among nations – he has either learned to conceal his nationhood well from others or he can control it with great precision, being an unnoticed wallflower until he wants you to pay attention to him. Mr. Puffin could not sense his presence at all until they mutually made eye contact. Then, the surge of adrenaline is overwhelmingly powerful. Where once there was nothing, now Mr. Puffin feels as if he is a lone farmer in a desolate field of wheat looking up at the largest storm of the century, a mortal looking up at the face of a pale-faced god with mutual reverence and horror as the sky breaks in two.

As soon as Halvard spots the puffin his expression changes from one of passive observation to one of obsessive focus. The nation tilts his head ever so slightly, wind battering the stands of his hair that have escaped from being tucked under his hat, and knowingly nods. It is enough to scare Mr. Puffin to his core. Frantically, he finds a cliffside burrow and shoves himself in it. If one cannot be seen, one cannot be caught.

The frightened groans and shrieks of the guillemots around him immediately informs Mr. Puffin that something is gravely wrong. He dares to take a quick peak from his hiding place – and despite being halfway down the cliffside safely tucked away from the jaws of any reasonable mammalian predator, here comes Halvard, slowly but purposefully climbing down the cliff freehanded.

He’s coming for him.

Maybe if he presses himself tightly enough in the corner he’ll evade Halvard, Mr. Puffin thinks. Maybe Halvard will fall down the cliff and die – no reasonable human would scale down an ocean cliff on a small island in the middle of the polar sea after a single bird. But Mr. Puffin forgets a key fact in his decision making; Halvard is beyond human and unafflicted by the concept of his own personal death. The crunching of boots on stone and the faint fluttering of rugged waterproof fabric blown by the wind grows closer, until Halvard’s head partially blocks out the light from the misty sun.

There’s no outsmarting him – Mr. Puffin’s own cowardice put him here. The bird clicks his beak together in chattering anger as a ghostly hand reaches out and snatches him from the burrow and into the light. Just as quickly, Mr. Puffin is spun around rapidly and plunged back into complete darkness, surrounded by flimsy bendable walls that give a little when he kicks and flutters but no amount of struggling gives him any sense of direction as to how to escape his predicament. All he can hear are the sounds of the waves crashing below, the howl of wind, and the panicked clamoring of seabirds pestering Halvard to leave their holy ground at once. There is movement, a pause, and more movement. Mr. Puffin struggles. He gets nowhere. But then the rhythm of movement changes, he feels Halvard let out a deep breath, and suddenly he is seized out of Halvard’s coat and thrust back into the light, sun-stuck and violently unnerved. The world stabilizes and there he is, face to face with him.

“Little voyager,” Halvard inquires in a hushed voice, holding the bird firmly in both hands. “Why have you come this far?”

And here is where the real difference lies with Halvard – everyone speaks to Mr. Puffin. Tourists nearly shriek with delight when a charismatic puffin lands mere feet away from them. Some nations treat him like something lesser to be talked down to. Others marvel at the quality of his soft feathers. Jóhannes treats him like a confidant, a free therapist, and will spend hours talking aloud with himself using the puffin as a mirror into his own soul. He bitches, he unravels himself – but Jóhannes does not talk to him the same way his brothers does. Halvard speaks to the bird as if he can completely understand him, wholly and truly, his uncanny gaze and dream-like speech bores into the bird like a sharp spear directly into his heart.

If Jóhannes talks to him as if he is a wall to throw splattered paint at, Halvard treats Mr. Puffin like a blade of grass created by an elder god. It is the kind of interaction that breeds a deep rooted paranoia, like staring into the jaws of a predator that has decided to play with you rather than immediately snap your neck.

“You are off wandering very far, I see. I thought you enjoyed looking after my brother? You never seem to leave his side. And yet. I know you. You’re cheating on him, being all the way out here. Does that seem wrong to you? I know that he needs you.”

His words are soft, ripped from his mouth by arctic winds, but each syllable feels like a punch.

“Is he well? You can struggle all you like, but I will not let you go until you give me the truth.”

The only response he can give is a series of whirring chainsaw-like noises and a few guttural grunts.

“Is that so? Well, thank you for telling me. Now, why do you have a bow wrapped around your neck? That certainly must make your life harder – you are not as aerodynamic this way. It will only drag you down. Honestly, I don’t understand why he’d think that is a good idea. Being cute will not get you everywhere you need to go in life. I will help you.”

With one hand off the bird Halvard pulls the bow softly, letting it unravel apart and pulling it away so it falls away from Mr. Puffin’s neck like a scarf. A stray finger gets close and the puffin bites hard, with force, slicing Halvard’s hand open. And yet Halvard has no reaction to his blood being spilled.

“Fair game. Red for red is a good trade,” Halvard muses, dragging his bleeding finger across his forehead and leaving a dripping streak behind. He clutches the red ribbon in his hand and it flutters in the wind like a writhing snake. “I will let you go now. Please tell him that I love him, as always.”

He gently kneels, setting the bird down back on solid ground, and leans down further, crouched like a panther and glaring into the puffin’s eyes.

“I know you understand me,” he threatens, kisses the bird on the head, and retracts his claws.

Fear, fear, fear, in the presence of a monster, an alien, the most primal being of all. The puffin runs on his tiny little legs and soars out to sea, away from the man who slowly stands and stares in his direction until he can no longer see the bird. Halvard ties the red ribbon around his bleeding finger. The bird, left with a deep rooted feeling that he had done something unforgivable, flies back to Iceland in record time, showing up on Jóhannes’ doorstep exhausted.

5. Return (Release)

[Reykjavik, summer 2021]

Mr. Puffin’s companion stumbles into the kitchen in an oversized gray t-shirt, grumbling. Mr. Puffin grunts back at him, found perched atop the refrigerator as if it were a tall cliffside. Jóhannes is sleepwalking again. He lingers longer than an awake person should, and then immediately turns back to where he came and collapses back in bed with a thud.

Like the puffins who spend their winters out at sea, Jóhannes once slept under the stars too, each roving hill or shattered volcanic peak lit up brightly with littered stars and aurora, only a rooftop away. But over time, that ash-haired boy traded in late night candles for constant circuitry. He now falls asleep under the artificial glow of multicolored lights strung around the ceiling. But in the glow of centralized heating he sleeps without a shiver, without fear of wilderness, exposure, death.

After Jóhannes' unsuccessful unconscious journey into the kitchen, Mr. Puffin leaves the top of the refrigerator and follows him to the bedroom. Jóhannes sleeps soundly – he can see his companion’s chest rising, falling, and a leg shifts into a more comfortable position, but he’s gone, in dream world, grasping for imaginary fish. Then, like he’s been shocked, Jóhannes sits up, confused, and looks around his bedroom before focusing on the only moving thing in his vicinity – the bird standing on his bedside table.

“Hi,” he whispers. A few blinks at the clock and Jóhannes sighs, curling back up in bed, but not before placing his nose against his puffin’s beak. Then they tap, rubbing beak against nose and nose against beak, an artificial partnered dance between two free beings. It is outside the prime bonding season, but immortals have a poor concept of time. Nations, by vector of being unusual humans, need a connection, even the peculiar most ones, with something. Their old ancestry far along the family line hard-wires them to crave connection, to ache for it. The puffin doesn’t get the urge to court companions year-round. But when Mr. Puffin has previously rejected Jóhannes’ attempts to socialize like a bird and meet him halfway, the nation has pouted, like a teen rejected by his prom date. You have to be flexible and understanding in any partnership, willing to give a little, maybe even a lot, and northern bits of humanity are particularly fragile during the cold, dark months. Their noses kiss. Jóhannes pulls away and unceremoniously flops over while the bird chooses to roost on a dresser. 

An hour later the doorbell rings and Jóhannes is yet again jolted awake in alarm. He rubs his eyes and makes his way to the door like a zombie, nearly bumping into the doorframe on his way out of his bedroom. He turns the doorknob and squints.

“Hello?” His voice somehow cracks in three different ways in that one word.

“Hello! Does Mr. Puffin live here?”

Three children stand by the door, dressed in colorful jackets and looking up at him with big wide eyes.

“Yes,” Jóhannes tries to stand up straighter, but it is hard to look like an important figure when you’re wearing decade old pajama pants and your fluffy hair is sticking out in all directions. He crosses his arms in a feeble attempt to seem more authoritative. “ I’m Mr. Puffin.”

“We were told to bring you this,” a young girl quietly holds up a bucket of small freshly caught fish.

“And this!” another child beams, holding out a small cardboard box above their head.

He takes the box and opens it, sighing with a little groan as he holds up the contents – a puffling looking a little worse for wear.

“What happened?” he sighs, beginning to inspect it.

“We saw a fox pull it out of a burrow!”

“But the fox dropped it when we scared it!”

“It’s bleeding a little!”

“I see that.”

The baby puffin stares into Jóhannes’ eyes.  Jóhannes stares back at the baby puffin. The children stare at the young man who calls himself Mr. Puffin. Jóhannes doesn’t know how to end the conversation. He’s not awake enough for that. That requires too much thinking. There is a long empty pause. The children look at him expectantly.

“Are you an elf?” the youngest girl inquisitively asks. “My mama says she took baby puffins to you when she was kid, but you look like a little boy.”

“I have got to go take care of the bird now,” he blurts out, unable to even comprehend the emotional whiplash that a single seven year old could have on his ego. “Thanks for bringing me fish!”

The three accept his want for an abrupt departure and wish him well. He closes the door behind him and exhales deeply. He brings the bucket of fish and the baby bird into the kitchen, setting both on the table. The puffling shuffles awkwardly and spooks as the true Mr. Puffin lands on the table next to her, but then quickly opens her beak, begging for fish.

“I remember when you were like that,” Jóhannes nods, tying a black apron around himself and walking to his bedroom to retrieve both his phone and headphones. “You were cuter back then, too.”

Yeah, right. But it is the job of elders to look after the very young. Mr. Puffin sits down next to the puffling and slowly maneuvers himself so he can keep her warm while his housemate begins his morning work.

Mr. Puffin watches as Jóhannes scrolls through his phone with one hand on his hip, pressing a few things before placing his heavy headphones over his ears. He stretches a little, making himself as tall as he can be on his tiptoes before relaxing, flexing his hands together in preparation, and then slaps his freckled cheeks with a small smile. He’s been a little brighter since that one summer, after sitting in his apartment for a few days he mustered up some sense of divine divination that told him he had to move. And so a few months later he changed locations across town. His living space is much the same – the same furniture, the same decorations, the same sense of purposeful but eclectic style that simultaneously reads as too adult and too juvenile at the same time. But while he had intentionally lived in one bedroom apartments since he first moved out of his initial house given to him by the government as a child, this one had a second bedroom. A second bedroom, which when Jóhannes pushes the door open with a bin of sliced fish in one hand and the new baby bird in the other, is mostly filled with stacked animal crates.

There are signs of human use – a bed has been pushed into the corner of the room with furniture stacked atop of it somewhat haphazardly, but currently his guest room is a makeshift nursery. Jóhannes, with his head bobbing back and forth gently to the music, grabs an empty container from the “unused” pile and stacks it atop a row of about ten carriers lining one wall. In the middle of the room is a small table with a weighing scale and miscellaneous items piled around it – he weighs the bird, writes a few notes on a piece of paper, tapes it to the top of a crate, and starts drawing up an amber-colored solution up into an irrigation syringe. Then he flinches. His phone is ringing. He looks at it, hesitates for a second, but answers.

“Hi Halle – yes , I made sure to put on deodorant today,” he lied, restraining the flapping young bird in one hand while disinfecting the tiny teeth marks in the puffin’s side. “No, I haven’t watched it yet. Had an emergency meeting with the Minister of Education last night. Oof is right.”

He speaks while his hands move in autopilot. Mr. Puffin is not sure how many summers it has been since Jóhannes started this act of charity – forty, fifty years ago, maybe officially? Obviously, if you are a human-looking person with a puffin following you around everywhere, people are going to start bringing you birds. First it was rock ptarmigan chicks after their mom was shot, then two gyrfalcon fledglings from two different decades he trained to hunt – ah, and then that one time someone brought him a young common ringed plover.

Ah, the sandlóa . That was an interesting year. And then another interesting year.

And then another.

“No, I haven’t decided with the new law if I am going to change Hrafnson to Hrafnbur. I’m still thinking about it. Sørenbur is very stupid sounding, thank you very much.”

It wasn’t something that Jóhannes wanted, but it made him feel needed, and Mr. Puffin noticed his companion got sunnier this time of year. Having something that relied on him was good for his mental health, giving him a reason to wake up in the morning instead of laying in bed all day.
As Jóhannes listens to his brother talk on the phone, he feeds the little puffling and sets it in the new crate before systematically feeding and cleaning the rest of the chicks, who come up to the front of their cages with excitement at their first meal of the day.

“Mm. Mhm. Okay? Nei, nei nei ,” Jóhannes says, pinching his forehead in frustration. “Absolutely not , Halle, do not even THINK of doing that. That is just going to make things worse. I’m changing subjects or I am hanging up, your choice? Yeah? You wanna keep talking to me? Then shut up for a bit and listen. You’ve been practicing? Good. The puffins will be ready soon. I just got my eighth chick right before you called.”

He zips around, finishing caring for the sooty blobs that purr at him in their makeshift burrows, takes off his apron, and then shuts the guest room door behind him. He then sits on his bed, then falls flat on his back, and talks to his brother for an hour – their phone calls have been getting longer and longer over the past few years, Mr. Puffin has noticed. And Jóhannes laughs, just a little, at something Halvard says.

“Alright. Well, I have to go. I only have an hour before I have to address parliament. Good luck at your meeting, too. Just don’t do the thing you – Halle, don’t you – I am hanging up! You are an idiot! Bye! No! Bye first!"

He huffs, shaking his head, and rests for a minute with closed eyes. After a quiet spell, he slides off his bed and from the floor he pulls out a large black case from underneath his bed, unbuckling the clasps and pulling out a mandolin that has definitely seen better days, with a few ancient scratches down the front of the polished wood. Jóhannes smiles upon pulling the instrument out carefully, sitting back up with it on the bed with his feet kicking excitedly in anticipation of playing. He’s almost a different person – sometimes at least – when nobody else is watching or intruding upon his life. The bird doesn’t count – Mr. Puffin cannot tell on him when Jóhannes dances around his apartment in his underwear. Mr. Puffin can’t send a letter to his friends about all the times the bird has watched him cry on the floor. He can’t capture the sheer bliss on Jóhannes' face when his fingers dance across the strings of the mandolin and he plays one song after another through closed eyes, accepting his fumbling with grace when he forgets a note or two. The notes played are just as plucky as Jóhannes himself is – the first time Alfred visited him after the war, the American gifted this instrument upon Jóhannes, saying that when he was cleaning out his house he found it and felt a sudden sense of who its new rightful owner should be. It was a suitable gift, one that he had initially left neglected in his own closet, but over the years he began to play in the winter as a way to pass time until spring arrived.

The singing, however, was new.

The pandemic changed a lot – for weeks, all Jóhannes would do is leave his phone or computer on mute and play on the mandolin nearly all of the work day while loosely listening in on all the meetings he merely had to be present for.

“Listen,” he would say on a cold December night, calling up Henrik who was buried up to his nose in blankets on the couch. He would play an entire mini concert for Henrik, who closed his eyes in a comforted bliss, connected via phone line, only ending when Jóhannes would quietly mutter “the end,” followed by Henrik’s subdued yet enthusiastic clapping. They would both mutually hang up without saying another word, understanding that it was better like this, a parent and child magically locked in mutual silence.

“Listen,” he would say at a remote midsummer celebration, watching the screens of people he knew the faces of by heart. And his audience, transfixed across the Atlantic, watched from afar, like they were up in the balcony seats in their suits sipping on mixed drinks while he performed alone on a dimly lit stage.

“Listen,” he would say to himself on a street not too far away from Althing, playing alone on an unusually cold late spring day, only briefly interrupted by a young barista who offered him a warm drink on the house after listening to him play for a few hours. After he was done, he walked inside, ordered a pastry, and when she wasn’t looking crammed the entire fistful of money into the tip box. They had not exchanged another passing interaction since. Mr. Puffin was convinced that he only made as much money as he did that day because he sat next to the case and tried his best to be cute. Jóhannes did not make eye contact with any people on the street – and this is for the best, as most of the passers by were more interested in the seabird pitter pattering on the sidewalk than the boy playing miraculous music.

And Alfred applauds him by voicemail, telling Jóhannes that he has far surpassed him, a level of skill that the original owner of the instrument never achieved. Jóhannes beams in private, fluffing his hair in the mirror with a form of deep self-love he has not felt ever before in his life. He sends Alfred more videos of his performances, then his other friends, then his elders, and he bristles slightly at the onslaught of compliments a little, unsure if he likes the attention or not, but ultimately decides that he does enough to keep on doing it. He starts singing to himself in the mirror, watching his facial expressions and figuring out how to match his face with the movement of his hands to have the most emotive impact. His audience is himself but he’s such a performer, editing and pasting his gestures into a form of performance art, a showman to his core, and a mote of confidence grows even as the world sinks into what feels like continued chaos. Performance always begins as an act, but with time it becomes as natural a behavior as anything else.

The phone rings.

“Again!?” Jóhannes groans, but answers it.

“Hello? Yes. Haa. My gut feeling is that doing that isn’t going to improve the overall situation – I respectfully really disagree, I think you’re just going to piss off people even more than you already have. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Alright. Bye.”

He shakes his head. “Politicians,” he groans, turning to talk to his reflection in the mirror. “You tell them what they need to hear and they just completely ignore you. Why do I even bother.”

The puffin absentmindedly preens his flight feathers.

“I wish I was like you in that I didn’t have a job,” the nation scowls at his bird. “I want someone to feed me fish and let me sit around all day, for free. I would finally be able to get caught up on doing everything that I want to do.”

The next few weeks are difficult, as he juggles being a part-time bird parent, a full time government employee, and an aspiring musician in private.

He is always happy to see all of the birds go.

Jóhannes loads them into his car in the morning, taking lengthy trips from his apartment to his vehicle before his first cup of coffee has had the chance to fully set in. Normally, puffins have their first flight under the cover of darkness, flying out to sea where avian predators will not be able to snatch them from the skies, but during the fledgling season young birds become disoriented, confused by the glittering modern lights and mistaking them for starlight. He gets the discarded ones during these weeks too – on an early evening his doorbell rings and an elderly woman he has known since his youth wordlessly hands him a confused bird. There is one found in a rubbish bin, another wandering the street lost, then a third.

This never used to happen, and now it is tradition.

So is the way of the world.

And with a gentle shutting of the car door, this should be the last of them unless some strange late bloomers filter in through the cracks. Jóhannes adjusts his outer layer of clothing, shakes out his whole body to get warm, and steps into the car. It takes a minute, and then the engine hums. It, aside from the shifting of birds in boxes and the shuffling of Mr. Puffin as he settles down for the car ride, is quiet.

But the shoreline isn’t. There are a number of people already present, the majority of them children with their parents. Some wave – Jóhannes does not wave back, and like a good judge passes no verdicts upon them outside of the established task. He wordlessly hands boxes to people who are both strangers and not – and they respectfully understand his vow of silence, his unwillingness to get too close to humans, always an arm’s length away. But he’s not immune to the tugging on his coat by a young girl with the same pale hair as him, looking up at him in wonder. How could he be? And the last of the summer ice of Iceland melts, momentarily, before the next big freeze.

“Do you want to release one with me?” he asks, quietly, and the girl nods.

He’s so bad at being a nation. It is a miracle he even exists to begin with, Mr. Puffin laments.

One by one, with the help of humans, with the guidance of an immortal bird, each puffin makes their ascent into the skies and out to sea where they will remain until the next year. The young are confused, huddled alone in the water, but as Mr. Puffin lands next to them with years of practiced grace he assures them it will all be fine. It won’t be, but it will.

The young girl and the young man who represents her people release the last bird together. From shore, from Mr. Puffin’s perspective, Jóhannes’ supernatural aura lightens, relaxes, as it has over the last half century, a little less of a pressurized cauldron and a little more of a geothermal bubbling. Slowly, but surely, even nations change too – not linearly, but unpredictably.

Just as quickly as he came, Jóhannes ends the ceremony without announcement, heading back to his car so he can go back home and take a long nap. He glances briefly, at the water, at the immortal representation of the Atlantic Puffin, and nods, knowingly, about what will now take place, before turning his back and leaving willingly.

The water is easy this morning. With some delay, each chick flies farther out into the open ocean. And like any good steward, Mr. Puffin flies after them. The guiding stars may not be seen in the sun-saturated sky but they are still there, always.

Jóhannes, in bed, has a dream about being comfortably lost in outer space.

Mr. Puffin, floating on the ocean’s surface, has no concept of that world beyond. There is the land, the sea, the sky, and nothing more.

As Jóhannes reaches for the stars in his dreams, plucking each one like berries from a bush and consuming entire constellations, Mr. Puffin dives into the depths below after tiny fish who glitter just as brightly and, like his deepest friend, he consumes them whole.