The Vault by Brittney Corrigan

The Vault

Silje has walked the four kilometers from town, dragging an empty sled behind her. She has come for the seeds. Though they are not hers, isn’t this why the seeds are here? They are here in case of devastation, or disaster, or war. In case of hunger. Silje stands before the wide steel doors of the vault, the entrance rising out of rock and snow. It’s as if the mountain had opened its mouth and swallowed most of the structure, leaving only a rectangular hull jutting back toward the sea. The narrow face of the vault, above the entryway, is illuminated by a square of mosaiced prisms, mirrors, and steel. These carefully puzzled shards also extend along the roof, ending at its halfway point as the concrete wedge of the vault slopes down to meet the mountain. Silje loves when these quadrates glow turquoise and green against the northern lights. But that display, and the darkness, are still some weeks away. Now, it is autumn, on the cusp of winter, and the vault basks in rose-tinted light. Silje stands at the entrance doors, which are almost always sealed, and adjusts her wool hat firmly over her ears. She watches her breath condense into mist in the horizoned polar sun.

Birna has been wandering the island for weeks. She can hardly remember her last true meal. She swam and swam through waters with no ice, no seals. Birna remembers reindeer from seasons past, but now there are no reindeer, either. She has been stalking the rising water, eating seaweed off the rubbled shore. She has raised her head to the midnight sun, waiting for the terns with their black caps, their bodies but a mouthful. But the terns have not come. She has looked for the mottled eggs of rock ptarmigans, and discovered none. Birna’s hunger is like a thorned thing in her belly. A thorned emptiness that should be filled with the flesh of seals. When Birna eats a seal, she can sense the cold water, feels what it’s like to rise and breathe through a hole in the ice. Her heavy, thick-furred body glistens, agile and slick. When she is muzzle-deep in blubber, instead of horizonless sea ice, she sees the snow caves, the ringed pups in their lairs. Now, Birna feels only her own body, weakening under the blue roof of sun.

For many years, Silje received seeds from all over the world and deposited them in the vault. The seeds came on planes to the northernmost airport on Earth. They came packed in boxes—and inside those boxes sealed into foil packets and glass vials—then were unloaded and brought by van to where the road ends at the entrance to the vault. A few decades ago, when the vault was built into the side of the mountain, the ocean lapped 131 meters below. The waters of Isfjorden rise and rise each year—coming for the airport, for the town—but they will never reach the door of the vault, where Silje stands bundled against the cooling air. The vault’s location was chosen because it is high, the landscape un-quaked, the rock and permafrost many meters thick. And now Silje has come for the seeds, though she knows she cannot plant them in the spoiled ground. Still, the seeds are the only promise of food that remains. And Silje is the only one left who can get into the vault.

Once, Birna leapt onto the back of a narwhal when it surfaced between ice floes. Up came the spiraled tusk, and then the blotched, unbeaked head. Birna had been sitting completely still, waiting for the moment when some creature below would need to come up for air. Usually this was a seal—the ones with ring-dappled hides or the ones with bearded faces—but that day it was a narwhal that toothed its way through the polar ice. When the beast’s breath sounded with a hollow, humid puff, Birna threw the full weight of her body upon the grey ridge of its back, locked her jaws around its blow hole, and tore. As the blood touched her tongue, she felt as if her teeth were growing longer, spindling and plunging deep into the whale’s thick skin. When she hauled its large body up onto the ice, cleaved it into sinew, muscle, and bone, her black skin flushed with the easy intimacy of the pod, a memory of diving close together deep into the utter dark. Between Birna’s paws, the narwhal’s undone tusk clattered and scraped against the glacial ice.

Silje pulls open the heavy steel door. Before her, a tunnel extends hundreds of meters into the mountain’s core. The overhead lights are still working, powered by generators that Silje will not be able to refuel when they give out. Silje watches her breath hover and disappear, hover and disappear as she walks farther and farther into the vault. At the end of the tunnel is another set of steel doors, frosted over and secure. She gives a strong tug and pulls the cold doors open. Deep in the vault, the tunnels and storage rooms are carved into permafrost, ensuring the seeds stay perpetually frozen. In recent years, as crop after crop failed against hurricanes, floods, and blistering sun, many countries retrieved their seeds from the vault. Seeds that could withstand higher temperatures, or wetter soil. Silje watched carefully boxed and sorted and catalogued seeds leave the vault until the millions of varieties dwindled to thousands. With the island’s power plant closed, and the internet long unreachable, she no longer has access to the database that would tell her which seeds are left, what is in each box, from Canada, Nigeria, Syria, Australia, Brazil. Silje unlocks the door to one of three storage rooms, feels the hairs inside her nostrils freeze as she stares down the rows of half-empty shelves. The lights suspended from the snow-ceiling cast their flickering light on the snow-walls, waiting for her to choose.

Birna cannot leave the island. There is no ice, no more land, for as far as she can see across the ocean’s frigid turmoil of blue. And her legs are tired. Tired of walking from one end of the island to the other for days and days, finding only polar willow and patches of moss to eat. As Birna crests the mountain, she stares down at a hulk of something that glitters the way the ocean does during times of no-night. Her snout quivers with the smell of something living, something recently there. As Birna lumbers her wasting body down the barren slope, her fur glows yellow in the golden-armed sun.

Deep within the vault, Silje’s hunger wakes up. She recalls the last time she cooked a meal with fresh vegetables, fresh meat. Many seasons have passed since her kitchen was warm with the rich smell of lapskaus, the thick stew simmering on her stovetop, fogging the windows that framed the ever-looping dark. She closes her eyes and sees her husband’s face, small droplets of stew in his beard, his smile a sliver of light. As the months redoubled, there were no more vegetables, nothing left to hunt, no fish left to catch. Silje has been the only one in town for some time now. Her empty house is filled with empty cupboards, empty cans. A dwindling pile of items she can burn to heat the stove. The memories gnaw at Silje, eating at her from the inside out. She opens her eyes, can almost hear the seeds murmuring to her from their neatly-stacked boxes and bins. She drags a mittened hand across the base of her nose and slowly makes her way between two sets of towering shelves.

Birna grows thin as the sunlight grows thin. Two weeks ago, she wandered the streets of the little town, neat rows of colorful houses watching her with vacant-window eyes. She found only one scraggly dog, too weak to run away from her as she charged. When she held the dog’s skull between her jaws, she could hear the barking echo in her ears, could taste the sour human breath drifting across canine shoulders, canine tails. Birna pulled against the unfamiliar pressure of the harness around her neck and shoulders, listened to the crunch and glide of the sled gaining on her in the shadowed not-night. And then, there on the frigid wind, she caught the faint scent of something else living, something with breath that coiled in the air. But when Birna lifted her head from the reddened fur and looked around her, only the silent town looked back.

It is against Silje’s nature to steal the seeds. She has been tasked with safekeeping them for so long. The seeds were meant for bigger things. For humanity’s persistence and salvation. Somewhere on these shelves are seeds that survived the siege of Leningrad many, many decades ago. Scientists gave their lives for those seeds before they were relocated to the vault. Protected them from the German army, from their own hungry neighbors. The scientists’ starving bodies went rigid surrounded by bags of rice they steadfastly guarded, refused to eat. On the shelves of the vault, seeds from North Korea rest near seeds from the South. Russian seeds next to American seeds. In the outside world, cooperation came too late. The forests burned. The oceans rose. Blackened air, toxic earth. Silje thinks of her twin daughters, born so little, so sick. Though many years have passed—so many that her hair is threaded with silver and white—she still remembers their bodies, small and warm among the tubes and machines. She remembers their tiny fingers wrapped around her husband’s pinkie, around her thumb. Silje looks up at the arched permafrost ceiling, around at the curving permafrost walls, and sees her daughters in the incubator, where the nurses placed them together for comfort. Their heads were always turned toward one another. Each one held in the other’s struggling gaze.

Birna approaches the shimmering hulk cautiously, startles at her broken reflection in the mirrored roof, but does not shy away. She makes her way down the rocky slope, the ache in her belly driving her toward the first fresh scent in days. On the road outside the vault is a flat-legged thing, its skeletal form vacant and still. Birna sniffs it, but it is not the thing that is alive. She raises her head, draws the lingering scent in. The smell outside the closed doors of the vault is not the familiar smell of reindeer. Though she has not eaten a reindeer in many months, Birna remembers. Reindeer smell like beasts made of growing things, their breath sweet with lichen and sedge. Their taste used to make Birna’s head feel heavy, as if branches were sprouting from between her ears as her snout dipped deeper into their heated flanks. Instead, the vault smells like the ghost of the town. Though she has not seen a human for a long, long time, she remembers how they smell. They smell like the earth, but not the earth. The vault is like the ocean. She knows that somewhere inside is a creature that will eventually need to surface. Birna sits outside the door and waits.

Silje has grown used to being alone. The others have all left, or died, and last winter her husband succumbed to an illness that swept through the town with rapid ferocity. Though so many abandoned the island, Silje had insisted on staying to manage the vault, to accommodate the increased requests for withdrawals. And then those visits ended like so many other efforts ended. Now, no more planes land with seed collectors and supplies. No more boats navigate the archipelago and its shrinking masses of land. All methods of communication collapsed, first into static, and then silence. Silje lost all contact with the world beyond the island. She tries not to imagine what might have befallen everyone, everything, outside these isolated shores. She goes on living, goes on caring for the seeds. The seeds must be ready in case someone—anyone—comes back. Silje moved herself into the smallest house on the highest ground. The summers had been growing warmer for many years, and this past summer was the warmest yet, permafrost melting and flooding large swaths of the island. Deep inside the vault it is still cold and dry. The seeds will not grow on the island, among rocks and ice. But the island has nothing else to offer now, save for the seeds. At night, the first hint of winter holds Silje’s little red house in its arms. The coal plant is deserted. When the snow comes, everything will be buried. Silje stands before the rows of seeds, trusting that their carefully tended lives can somehow save her own.

Birna’s body, even when hungry, is built for patience. When still-hunting on the ice, she waits for her prey to come to her. Her body knows how to go for weeks and weeks without food, feeding on itself. Sitting outside the door to the vault, Birna remembers the three un-lonely years when she was a mother. It has been a very, very long time since she has seen another bear. But her memories are patient, too. They allow themselves to be carried through wind and snow, through everlasting night, and they come to her when she is still, and waiting. First, the little bear-beginnings floated inside Birna while her body fattened up and the seasons turned. She came to this island as the dividing cells landed themselves at her core, burrowed in, and began to grow. She ate seals, and reindeer, and once a walrus that rippled and creased her skin with every swallow. Her lungs expanded with the strength of its bellow. She shook her head from side to side, tossed a long strip of hide across the ice, and reveled in the crash and groan of the fight. Inside the earthen den, snugged in by snow, Birna waited for her cubs. And once the cubs came, the three of them waited together for the winter to pass and the cubs to grow strong, their bodies curled into one another like milky dreams. Those years with her cubs, Birna felt that her body was three bodies, her belly three bellies, her heart three hearts. But her cubs have been gone many seasons now, and Birna knows she is the only heart left. The two cubs will never return to her, no matter how long she waits.

Silje’s hunger claws at her from within. She chooses a large plastic box from Burundi, hoping its contents will be something she can eat. She has little chance of sprouting the seeds in her empty kitchen, of growing anything as winter brings its unending dark. So she imagines taking the seeds into her mouth, tasting their weight on her tongue. The box just fits within the span of her arms, and she hefts it onto an open section of shelf at the level of her waist. The barcode on the outside of the box tells her nothing about what might be within, so she does what she is forbidden to do. She uses her hunting knife to break the plastic seal and lifts the tight-fitting lid. Inside, neatly-labeled, silver packets and rubber-capped tubes nest in even rows. Rice. Sorghum. Cowpea. Eggplant. Kidney beans. Plantains. Silje imagines steaming platters and savory stews, though she knows that’s not what she’ll be able to make with these seeds. Instead, she’ll swallow them one by one, wait for them to fill her fallow belly like a ripening field. Silje replaces the lid and hoists the box into her parka-bundled arms. She carries it gently, as if it were a child. A child she has been caring for and protecting for its many tender years. She opens the room’s ice-kissed door and steps again into the tunnel, making her way back to what’s left of the light.

Each time a seal streaks toward the surface, Birna can sense it in her massive paws. Her jaws unlatch just a little. She salivates, anticipating the taste, the way her body will feel sleeker and swifter with every swallow. Her black eyes alert, the sea reflected in each lens. It is like that now, as Birna waits outside the vault. She can hear the measured footfalls drawing close. Can smell the earth-not-earth scent growing stronger within her powerful snout. The thorned thing in her belly turns over, needling at her from inside. Birna is unmoving, her thin and shaggy form poised to attack as the woman pushes open the door.

When Silje opens the door of the vault, she sees not the sled, not the road, and not the waters of Isfjorden beyond. She sees the face of a polar bear, just two meters from her own. At first, she thinks the bear is a ghost. The ghost of her hunger, the ghost of what’s left of the world. She has not seen a polar bear for many months, though once they roamed the island in the hundreds. Auroras of bears against showy polar lights. In the glacial seconds it takes for Silje to accept the very real body of this particular, unlikely bear, the beast has risen on its hind legs, doubling its height. Silje’s heart is an iceberg, a cold blue rock in her chest. Her arms stiffen around the box of seeds. The bear’s haggard body is like a building storm, an ice shelf cracking, collapsing as it crashes back to all fours and charges. Silje steps quickly backward and does the only thing she can think to distract the bear: she summons her strength and hurls the box of seeds at its open mouth. The heavy box shatters as it hits the ground, bursts into a hail of packets and vials around the startled beast as Silje slams closed the door.

Birna shakes her head to clear the impact, stares at the closed door of the vault. She senses her prey is trapped. No vast ocean to hurtle away into, shadowing beneath the ice. Birna’s patience is the kind hardened by failure and honed by eventual success. She can smell the earth-not-earth scent sharpening on the other side of the door. Birna is prepared to wait. She lowers her head to sniff at the strange items scattered around her, pushes at them with her dark-clawed feet. New scents tendril themselves into the black caverns of her nostrils, call to the thorned thing within. She flays the shiny-skinned objects with her teeth, crushes the slender not-eggs beneath her paws, and the seeds spill onto the frozen ground. She laps them up with her inky tongue, feels them spiraling down the length of her throat. She sways as an odd warmth begins at her snout and spreads across the arch of her spine. Birna’s back rises in a landscape of hills, her skin sweats with the lush pulse of equatorial green. An unfamiliar blooming overtakes her body, and she sits back on her haunches, drunk with sprouting, dizzy with fronds and leaves. Birna is landlocked, river-swept. Her eyes begin to blur, and the vault disappears in a forest of clouds.

It is against Silje’s nature to kill a polar bear, one of the planet’s few remaining sacred beings. But living here, at the crown of the Earth, Silje’s heart has accepted its beaconing, its will to survive. Resting one hand against the steel door of the vault, she catches her breath, watches as it forms and reforms in the numbing air. The vault was built for short, efficient visits. For deposits and withdrawals. Not for hunkering down. The cold is deepening in Silje’s body. She cannot wait inside the vault for as long as the bear can wait outside. She removes her mittens and reaches one hand over her shoulder, to where a rifle is slung across her back. Though she cannot remember the last time she saw a bear or any other living creature, she has not broken the habit of always being prepared. No one on the island would ever venture out unarmed, even if the only fanged thing they had seen for months was the sun. Silje knows the bear will not leave her. She can hear it shuffling and rummaging on the other side of the vault. When it goes quiet, she readies herself, and readies the gun. Balancing the rifle carefully, she slowly tilts her foot against the base of the door to nudge it into motion. No breath hovers before her lips. Then Silje kicks hard and casts the door wide.

When the vault door opens, the earth-not-earth smell rushes into Birna’s nose, pummeling the fevered haze of the seeds. She rights herself easily, swings her head side to side as she weighs her strategies, the sure way, this time, to take down her prey. She holds the human’s eyes with her own, measures the human’s steady gaze against the gnawing hunger at her body’s core. When Birna lunges forward, she feels the ocean lift her limbs, feels herself vaulting the waves. But then comes a sound like icebergs colliding, and the pain explodes in her chest. As she thunders to the ground at the human’s feet, the cold begins along her spine, where it presses against the open door. Birna hears herself moan, a rough, exhausted sound that spills down her tongue, past her teeth. As the pulsing of her body lessens, she remembers how it was when her cubs came. Alone in her den, she strained against the rhythmic throes. When the cubs finally slid from her body, she licked and licked them until they emerged from their cauls, their faces searching for the warmth of her side. Now Birna opens her mouth wide, calling out for those two hearts in the dark.

Silje winces at the echo of rifle fire rebounding through the empty slopes. The bright stain of blood on the thick, white fur beside her boots looks to Silje like the flare that will certainly come at the end of the world. She nudges at the bear’s side with the tip of the rifle, but the animal has gone still. Shaking, she sets the gun on the ground and crumples beside the bear’s open mouth. She touches her forehead to the place between its unflickering eyes, cups her hands gently at the base of its jaws. Then she sits for a while against the propped-open door of the vault, the motionless creature beside her drenched in blue-gold light. The bear is too massive for Silje to move on her own, so at last she unsheathes her hunting knife and kneels between its massive paws. This bear’s pelt will keep Silje warm when the darkness comes. She’ll store its meat in the frozen rooms of the vault, enough to survive the winter and face whatever remains when the sun returns. In her little red house that evening, Silje will take the first morsel of the bear’s flesh into her mouth, and her limbs will pulse with a calm patience, an unfailing strength. She’ll close her eyes, and her heart will spin. She will see a flurry of seals racing beneath her as she walks between mountains of snow. She’ll feel the ice under her feet, buoying her across an expanse of blue. And there, at the top of the world, will be her daughters. Her little twin cubs. Two beings with their bodies curled close together, reaching for each other across the long night.

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, and 40 Weeks. Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.

Published February 28 2022