It is like a lonely lighthouse at the mouth of some Norwegian fjord.

It is like a lonely lighthouse set on a rocky island at the mouth of a Norwegian fjord that is leaning ever so slightly against an easterly gale.

The leaning lighthouse is a matter of some concern to the little fjordic town nearby. Some townsfolk have made a committee dedicated to the preservation of the lonely, leaning lighthouse that stands on the rocky island at the mouth of the fjord that leads to their town.

They have meetings every month where they sit in a circle in one of the member’s fifth grade classrooms and discuss a plan of action to save my heart from toppling over into the sea.

We should make fliers, someone says, and they nod. We should write letters to our representative member in the Storting, another says, surely the Norwegian parliament would act if they only knew about the state of our leaning lighthouse. To which they all nod. Perhaps, the kindly widow of the town’s late parish priest offers, he should reach out to some of his old friends? 

There is a disapproving murmur in the group. Impossible. Dangerous. I think it is best, the committee president says, if we confine ourselves to what this committee can reasonably accomplish.

I can make copies if we do a flier, the teacher offers.

Fliers?! Listen, the small widow of the town’s late parish priest insists. She insists despite being the kind of person who has, so far in her life, very rarely been insistent. This, she says, is a man who thinks it will be an imposition, to reach out to his loved ones, or that they will ignore him because they find the failings of his personhood repulsive. He believes that if this is so, that if he reaches out to them and hears nothing back, that it will mean that they never cared for him. But the truth is that it is this loneliness that is eating away at him. A drowning man can cry out for help and he may not receive it, but if he does not cry out, then he will surely drown.

The members of the committee sit with this thought for a moment, shifting awkwardly on the too small elementary school chairs. The scope of the problem with the lighthouse suddenly feels oversized, just as oversized as their adult bodies are for these chairs meant for nine- and ten-year- olds that they have been made to sit on, at least two of the committee think. 

In the end, they decide to make fliers.

And so my heart then is like a small Norwegian town nestled in the valley of great rust-colored cliffs, stone beaches lapped by north Atlantic waters, where a band of civic-minded townsfolk made up mostly of retirees distribute black and white fliers to households and local businesses—pressing the small papers in the hands of the local fishmonger and the cheesemaker and the jeweler who makes her rent selling to American tourists the Nord-ish necklaces and earrings, costume jewelry she purchases from a regional wholesaler who also supplies a store the next fjord over and also the next fjord and the next. She takes the flier with a smile and a nod, but after the pensioner has left her shop she gives the sheet one quick look and folds it in half, puts it on the disorganized stack of other papers that she’ll never look at again.

How tacky, she thinks and goes back to scrolling the online catalog of wholesale jewelry.

And the lighthouse leans, leans and groans, and the little town settles in for dinner in the long twilight of the evening. 

Except the widow, a little thrilled by her recent pugnaciousness, who allows herself for once a pour of her dead husband’s Akvavit. She has a thought, but she needs some courage. So she takes a pour of the Akvavit and another, puts on her walking shoes, and sets out of the little parish house, into the nine o’clock Norwegian daylight, fixed on a thought…

No. Sorry. Forgive me, I’d like to try that again.

The widow, a little thrilled by this new register in her voice, a little alien but also so much herself, thinks of how to chase that feeling and also chase away her doubts. And she thinks of the Akvavit. And she thinks about the Akvavit.

You see, it has been a little bit less than a year since he passed: her husband, the parish priest. Since then, in the cabinet over the refrigerator, she has quietly minded his bottle of Akvavit. As she went about the parish house, waiting for news of when she would need to relocate, cleaning and dusting and minding the house in general, she has also been minding this bottle. 

She has dusted it.

She has picked it up and put it back.

She is old now. She is aware of this in how some people look at her and talk to her, and sometimes she feels it when she gets up out of bed or feels unnaturally cold at random times and, of course, when she thinks of her husband, but there is some part of her that does not feel old. Memory has that effect. You turn a corner and catch the smell of holly on a summer day, wet grass in late February, the chatter of teenagers on the football pitch, and you’re seventeen all over again.

When she dusts  off the bottle, she’s twenty-three, newly married to a man she thinks of as so much better than herself. Except that he drinks. He is a Godly man. And he is a kind and smart and funny man, once you have a chance to know him, except he isn’t any of those things when he drinks.

When she picks it up she is twenty-seven and they are in the Congo on a mission trip and she doesn’t speak their language and they don’t speak her language and she’s bleeding. She’s pregnant and she’s bleeding and she’s needing to go to hospital and needing to find her husband. Some villagers find her a van and they drive her to the local hospital and they run tests and procedures that she can’t fully understand and there is a nurse who tells her in English that her pregnancy has failed. It takes a few times for her to hear the words and translate them and then understand the fact of what the nurse is telling her. And when she understands…She cannot say who she was when she was made to understand, except that she was a different person.

He stopped drinking after that. They never really talked about it, but she saw the change in him.

And when they were back in Norway and he’d taken the job of parish priest, and in the evenings when some church member would come to their place and need to talk to him (usually men), he would take out a bottle of Akvavit and pour their visitor a glass and pour himself a glass, and into the night he would talk to them about their worries and fears. And the parishioner would drink when they felt a need for it, and then the priest would take hold of his glass, raise it to his lips, smell it, and put it down. 

It’s an odd thing, loving someone who loves someone or something else. Even if they love you more. Even when they give that thing or person up for you. 

There is a space in them that becomes a space in you.

Nora! She thinks to herself in her husband’s voice, Is this perhaps reckless?

Nora, she hears him say, or no—he would not have called her “Nora”—Kjaere, he had called her when they were alone. Kjaere, he would have said, Is this wanted?

Right now, somewhere, there is a letter that is being written by some bureaucrat in the Lutheran Church of Norway. Maybe they are trying to be sensitive to her as she grieves, delaying. Perhaps it has already been written and is only waiting on another bureaucrat’s approval. But it will be approved. It will be sent. It will arrive at her door unaccompanied, along with the various coupons and credit card offers and time-sensitive deals for cable TV, and it will change her life all over again. She knows this. But for now she fills the jealous space inside her, returns the bottle to the cabinet,  puts on her walking shoes and sets out into the Norwegian twilight on a mission to save my heart…

And this is where I’ve stopped. 

Forgive me. This is where I, and not the widow, and not the narrator, have stopped. The lighthouse is leaning, the small Norwegian town is in decline, and Nora/Kjaere, the kindly widow, is at the threshold of her parish house.

I think I know how it ends. In the end, the narrator after some time away will say something profound, starting with, For months now I’ve been trying to find the lighthouse, the town, the widow. 

But I don’t know how to get there. It’s been six months now, and I’m not sure where the widow goes next. 

I feel great anxiety about the widow, the town, the lighthouse. I feel anxiety about each of them, but also about every other thing. I spiral sometimes thinking about— ah, hell, the impacts of global climate change. Inflation. Urbanization. The issue of political polarization in Norway and the European Union in general. And on top of this also, you know, ethno-nationalism, globalism, social welfare, the paradoxes of a liberal progressive country whose economy is disproportionately dependent on petroleum. The war in Ukraine. I cannot overstate the war in Ukraine.

I try and think about how these issues might affect the town, the lighthouse, and onward  down the line of my thinking: What have any or all of them to do with the state of my fragile heart?

In this greater context, I don’t know why the widow should care or anyone should care at all.

The town feels so small. And the lighthouse, if I am being honest, feels like some distant point on the horizon as, let’s say, the fifth grade teacher cleans her dinner dishes at the sink, thinks about her lesson plans for tomorrow’s school day, and thinks of little Gunnar who is falling behind as she absent-mindedly looks out her kitchen window that overlooks the little town, the inlet, and the lighthouse which, from a distance, doesn’t seem to lean at all.

And when there really are lesson plans to write. Dishes to be cleaned. When there are dogs that need walking. Difficult conversations to be had between a husband and a wife after the kids have been put to bed and they are looking at the finances. And the husband knows already what he will have to do, that he will have to go back to the oil rigs, though he hates the work. Or really, he does not mind the work, he accepts the danger of it, but now that Sofie and Gunnar are a bit older he knows they feel the absence of him. He feels his absence. And she does not want him to go for this same reason and also the way the work changes him. He hasn’t told her this but she knows, in the way a wife knows, that the last time he worked on the rig there had been an infidelity. 

She doesn’t know the details. She doesn’t want to know the details. But she thinks about what it will mean about him and about their family and what it will say about her if he comes home again with infidelity in his heart. 

And I don’t know. About any of it. Without knowing the question, I keep searching for the answer. For months now I’ve been searching for the lighthouse, this town, the widow. At odd thoughtless moments I find myself scrolling through social media, looking over images of the Norwegian coastline, going down various internet rabbit holes. 

The town is frozen in time, and I am not. The widow is the widow, the town is the town, the water is the water splashing against the small rocky outcrop on which the lighthouse stands and leans.

It is winter now and the lighthouse leans.

It is spring and the lighthouse leans.

It is summer and the widow is still standing there at the threshold of the parish house, the home she has known for over a decade and that she will have to vacate any day now. She is powerless to stop it. And I feel powerless to stop it.

I do not know how to save her. And she doesn’t know how to save me. And so the problem of this story is also what holds me and this woman together in this small space, at this specific time. And pretty soon I will have to let her go, and she will have to watch the lighthouse fall, and then there will be what happens next. 

Though that won’t be now. This past weekend I found a local liquor store that sells Akvavit. I bought a bottle on a lark. That evening after dinner I poured a drink for my wife and myself. I set the glasses between us. 

I didn’t say what I meant to say. Before we knew it, the night got away from us. 

It is the foulest drink I’ve ever had. I can’t think how anyone could drink the stuff.

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Brandon Forinash is a public school teacher in San Antonio, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a masters in Creative Writing in 2011. After a long time away from writing, he came back to it during the pandemic. This is his first publication.