Flash fiction: Marta + Mjøsa

The woman at the edge : In the beginning, you think your story is about loyalty. Perhaps about true love. About becoming someone’s rock. You would be one of these thousands of virgins waiting at the shore, mending, keeping the hearth warm…

The truth is you are a wetland getting drained.

This Re-wetting story is about a Norwegian woman. It was 1943, and the air carried the weight of iron and absence. Her lover had been summoned to the front, leaving behind nothing but a lingering scent on a folded letter. Every day she went to the lake and waited.

The woman at the edge: You believed this to be your story, to be only these few sentences in his story. The Penelope in his Odysseia. You would still be important, be someone, for someone else. A carpet cannot exist without the threads.

She waited. As months turned into seasons, her despair deepened, but the lake remained a constant in her everyday walks and thoughts.

The woman at the edge: The once-clear waters are now choked with algae. Would Penelope sometimes bath in the salty waters? Or was there too much seaweed, blocking her way?

One misty morning, the lake called to her—not through words, but through a pull. She started to feel more, not only at the edges of the lake, but also on the fields and in the forests. There was a forest on a steep hill which had ears and eyes. Everything wanted to roll down into the lake. The stones, the autumn leaves, the spring flowers, everything except her.

The woman at the edge: Who is Penelope? Why did the big writers not tell her story? Is it not more difficult to wait at the edge than to move on the sea?

She started to dedicate her work to the lake and nature. And slowly she found kinship with the lake.

The woman at the edge: Penelope was not merely waiting; she was caring for and mending the heart of Ithaca, keeping the fires of hope and prosperity alight for her people during the long years of uncertainty.

The lake had been re-wetting her.

The woman at the edge: Penelope’s endurance and mental strength in maintaining her faith and managing her kingdom in Ithaca require as much, if not more, strength than Odysseus’s physical trials. She has always been the stronger one. She could not move, because she was the land, the water, the edge, and his home.

When her old human lover returned, war-weary and changed, he found her by the lake, a silhouette against the setting sun. As he reached for her hand, she hesitated. She realized that the love she had for him was now entwined with her love for the lake and its surrounds. In the twilight, she chose.