Pip sometimes brings it up. He is absentminded, with a potato-shaped head that leaks things. He snaps out of his blank stare, sees the empty place setting, and asks when Mother is coming home. No one responds, eyes on our plates, and then Pip will remember and fall silent again.

That first winter after she vanished, the three of us would tell one another stories about where she had gone. Pip said she had been snatched away by an albatross and dropped into a volcano where she lives with a family of giants. Bryndis spun a tale where Mother was swallowed by a whale. I preferred a story about the sea god, Nomos, sweeping her off to his undersea kingdom to be queen for one year. At the end of her reign, she will return with treasure chests gathered from sunken ships as her reward. Pip once asked if Mother prefers her undersea home now and that is why she hasn’t returned to us. Bryndis fled the room in tears hearing that.

They were just fairy tales told to comfort and distract. Come spring that year, we stopped telling them. Pip, to this day, will try to entice us into retelling our stories, but neither Bryndis nor I have the stomach for it. Sometimes Pip recites the fairy tales to himself, sitting out on the cutting block in the yard, talking to the air.

“Pip, wake up.”

He has fallen asleep. He does this more and more these days, falling asleep while sitting up. Eyes half-closed, nose running. It is disturbing.

Father looks up from his book. “Pitr,” he says, snapping the boy awake. “Eat.”

Pip spoons the fish broth into his mouth and makes a strange clucking sound as he eats. He drops the spoon and claps his hands. “It’s Midsummer Eve!” he cries.

Father scowls but keeps his eyes on his book.

“Can we wrestle an octopus?” Pip asks. “Or roast a shark?”

“No more talking,” Father replies. “Eat.”

The good Reverend Uriah never liked the Midsummer Eve festivities here. Too pagan and too bawdy, he complained. He despised the vulgar rituals that honored the old sea gods and frowned on the tradition of the merry husbands who chose a different wife for the shortest night of the year. Last year, he forbade them outright, and so the day passes like any other. A little more sunlight, but that is all.

Outside, the wind has picked up, rattling the precious glass in the window. I suddenly remember the warning from Agnet’s husband.

“There’s a storm coming.”

Father’s eyes never stray from his book. “It’s just the wind, Kaspar.”

“Gunther says it’s going to be a squall.”

The book is closed, my father out of his chair. A weather warning from the hero harpooner is not to be taken lightly.

“On your feet, all of you,” Father says. “We need to seal the shutters before it lands.”

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