The islands of Hitra, Frøya, and Fjellværsøya lie scattered off the coast of Trøndelag like fragments of a broken shield, bracing against the endless push of the Norwegian Sea.
Hitra is the largest, rising in ridges and folds, a vast green-brown body of heathland, pine woods, and deep, cold fjords. Its valleys breathe the scent of damp moss and heather, while herds of red deer drift like shadows across the slopes. Out on the headlands the wind bites sharp with salt, and above the cliffs sea eagles wheel, heavy-winged and patient. Along the inlets, salmon farms now anchor themselves like floating villages, their nets bright against the dark water.
Frøya is another creature altogether. Flat, bare, swept clean by centuries of storms, it feels almost treeless, as though the earth itself has surrendered to the sea. Here, the horizon is a constant companion; no matter where you stand, the ocean stretches around you, restless and unbroken. Villages cling to sheltered coves, their houses crouched against the weather, while beyond them the dwindling fishing fleet bobs and sways, always at the mercy of waves rolling in from the Atlantic, right there, where the world narrows into something private, and the Norwegian Sea takes over its name.
Between them lies Fjellværsøya, smaller, softer, a quiet bridge. Its hills are gentler, its coves more intimate, and patches of woodland catch the wind before it reaches the farms and meadows. Streams thread their way into hidden bays, and here the sea feels less like an adversary and more like a constant neighbor, always in view from the rises.
Together, they form a mosaic of contrasts—rugged and tender, exposed and sheltered, brutal in storm and luminous in calm. Places where the land never forgets the sea, and the sea never forgets—nor forgives—the land.
In my youth, you timed your journeys with ferries and weather, and I still dream, half in horror, of racing across Hitra to catch the last boat out to Fjellværsøya. Now, climbing the heaths behind the cluster of houses—or perhaps in front of them—my eyes fall on the chain of bridges and tunnels that bind the islands together. The waffles and coffee on the ferry are only a memory now, tasting sweeter in recollection than they ever did when they were a stale necessity.
I felt the surge of memory rise in my gut as I reached the crest of the hill. Stone, shallow ponds, and low growth spread around me—heather, bilberry, crowberry, and, if luck was kind, a lone cloudberry clinging stubbornly to the rock. I wondered whether one of these ponds still served as a well for my cousin’s cottage.
Then the view opened. The sea. And in the sandy cove below, the shipwreck that refused surrender—to water, to storms, to decay. Even now, I find myself wondering what vessel it once was.
Everything here reminded me of a time that no longer existed, and of how nothing on Fjellværsøya belonged to us anymore. Perhaps not even my memories.
If I turned my head—were it not for the hills and trees—I knew the sound between Fjellværsøya and Ulvøya would open somewhere to my right, with the old bridge I once walked on summer nights that never grew dark and never asked for sleep. Old fisheries turned into bed and breakfasts.
And further still, beyond the moor and the marshlands, past the other side of the forest, there would be a church spire, a graveyard, and a headstone that no longer carried my grandfather’s name, its letters erased by salt, by sea, by weather itself.
And again, behind me, the cluster of houses that once had been my family’s. Now, sold off to house workers at the salmon farms. Or to hold tourists.
Or worse. To hold nothing but the wear of time.
Out here, I once thought Anna Marsh was simply Anna’s name. But no—both Anna Marsh and Anna Trollsheim carried different surnames altogether. “Marsh” because she lived on the edge of the bog, and “Trollsheim” because her cottage sat beneath the rock formation called the Trolls’ Home.
I was well into my twenties before I understood.
And now I had come to have my grandfather’s stone removed—the last piece tying our family to the island. The island I had visited every summer since before I could even gather memories.
First with my brothers and my cousin. Later, only with my cousin and me.
She was a year younger, and the summer she turned eighteen—the last summer we came to the island together—that was the taste that lingered in my mouth as I gazed back over the sea.
And right here, where my rain boot now dipped into the pool of water, she had once sat, looking at me with those blue eyes. It was one of those rare summer days without rain, warm and bright, when she asked if I would mind her getting naked. She wanted, she said, to see how deep the pond was, how warm or cold the water might be.
“Naked?” I had asked.
She only grinned.
Then came her voice—“Don’t look”—as she began peeling off her top.
I turned away, though her giggles left me wondering if she wanted me to glance back, or if she was only playing at shyness. I listened to her steps in the water, the sharp intake of breath as the cold closed around her.
Then she told me I could look.
I never understood why she had wanted me to look away. She lay on her back, drifting, the water as clear as only mountain streams can be, her skin catching the light until it seemed almost translucent. Pale shoulders, ribs lifting and falling with each breath, long legs shifting just beneath the surface. Her breasts floated, dipped, surfaced again, water streaming from her prickled skin—and I couldn’t tell if her hardness came from the cold, or from something else.
I found myself staring at her legs, following the line of them until—
She was beautiful. A little too thin. A smile unreadable, or perhaps one I didn’t dare to read.
It felt strange, seeing her like that, because the scar below her left knee, and the ones on her elbows—I remembered being there when she earned them. Once they were just stories we laughed about, memories that belonged only to us.
But she wasn’t laughing now. She only looked at me with that same unreadable smile.
“You should join me,” she said.
I smiled back, uncertain where to rest my eyes.
She sighed, let her feet sink toward the bottom, ducked under.
I didn’t want to join her in the cold water. I’ve never been built for Norwegian swims, not in waters that barely creep above Mediterranean spring temperatures. The day before had been thirteen degrees, foggy and drizzling.
We’d gone out on my grandfather’s boat, and I had asked him why the sea was so empty, so quiet, where all the other boats had gone.
My grandfather never smiled. My mother told me he hadn’t, not really, since the war. He had been torpedoed twice and never shared a single memory of those years. Not of his travels. Not of what he had seen.
And he didn’t answer me then either. He only kept his gaze fixed on the horizon, rolling his smoke and sipping his coffee.
I started drinking coffee when I was eight, maybe nine, because it was the only warm drink on my grandfather’s boat. Brewed on a propane burner, from grounds we’d used all summer, only revived with a spoon or two of something fresh.
Christine would usually stay below deck on drizzly days, and I had joined her then, as I had so many times before. There was something solemn about her, something dreamy, something adrift from summer, sea, and boat.
“You’re really leaving?” she finally asked. “When summer ends, you’ll go to Canada? To study?”
And now, as she surfaced from her pond, she was still asking—if only with her eyes—whether I would join her.
“Don’t look,” I had told her. But her eyes stayed fixed on me as I wrung out my t-shirt, stepped out of my shoes, and let my shorts drop to the ground. I stood there in nothing but my boxers, caught in the snare of her grin.
“Coward,” she teased.
Yes, perhaps a coward. But now I was the only one in the family with the courage to make this trip, to sever us from the island. To let what we once were sink into the land’s history, soon to be forgotten.
I stepped away from the pond and climbed back down the hill. Crossed the overgrown path between the old farm and the house my grandparents had built for their retirement. Then I crossed the new road at the fork where the Old Road disappears into the forest, and found my car tucked beneath the trees.
The Old Road had never had another name. I had walked it many times with Christine, always at night. Built on sea sand, it glittered with crushed shells we gathered from the marsh as we passed.
There’s a lake somewhere near the island’s middle. She had gotten naked there too, the following night. Only this time I joined her—not shivering in my boxers, not backing away.
It was at least a half-hour walk down the Old Road, and since I was in no hurry, I left the car where it was and let my feet carry me along the white sand. Past the green house beyond the trees, through the forest, guided by memory—because how else would I know the way?
Something slipped inside me then—through skin, through bone, into my core. I didn’t mark it consciously; I only let it settle. This would be the last time I walked this road.
I noticed the stone at the roadside where Christine used to sit and spin her lies. A joke between us, the sort of laughter you can’t explain, the kind that only ever made sense to the two of us.
In memory, the lake had seemed vast, but now it was little more than a pond. Still, I knew the rock formation on the far side, where she once sat before she undressed. Where she smiled that smile only she owned. Where she let her clothes fall and stepped into the water, turning back to me with those eyes.
I watched her wade, but she was no longer just Christine; she was—
pale thighs breaking the surface, hips narrowing into the water, ribs lifting with each breath. She turned, walking backward now, inviting me to follow. I couldn’t help but notice she had shaved since the pool, the sudden smoothness catching the light, deliberate in a way that made my chest tighten. Step by step the water swallowed her, until she stilled—breasts proud, arms outstretched, blue eyes asking me.
I hadn’t hesitated then. I stripped, stepped toward her, hardly registering the water. She had giggled then, too.
She was the kind of girl who would throw herself in headfirst, and she wore that mischief on her face now. I braced for the splash, ready to shriek like a child when the cold struck me. Yet I only stood there, waiting.
But she didn’t leap, didn’t dive and surface laughing. Instead, she took both my hands, drew me close, and kissed me.
She didn’t press herself against me, didn’t tease me with the warmth of her breasts against my chest. She only pulled back, bit her lip, and then plunged into the water.
I don’t know how long I stood there—numb to the cold, lips still tingling, dumbfounded by the heat inside me.
Christine? Really?
That was the thought echoing in my head as she surfaced, grabbed my arms, and dragged me down with her. I didn’t care how cold it was. I didn’t care if I drowned. I only remember her letting go somewhere beneath the surface, leaving it to me to find my way back.
It wasn’t deep, only disorienting—the twilight dark in the water, my head buzzing from her kiss. I found my feet, found the air, but not whatever she had decided to leave behind.
And as soon as I stood, she pulled me in again. This time, all of her pressed against all of me, and her kiss wasn’t asking anymore. It was telling.
I can still remember my confusion.
“Christine?” I whispered. “We can’t—”
But she didn’t stop. No—she grew intentional. Not only with lips and breath, arms and skin, but deliberate in every movement. She rubbed herself against me, one leg draped over my hip. I couldn’t hide what she stirred in me, and she had no wish for me to.
“Who decides what we can or cannot do?” she whispered.
It was the old rule between us on the island: two months of summer when no rules applied. No curfew, no mealtimes, no parents to reel us in when we acted out. Just two grandparents who let us be, and an aunt who tried to play strict but whom we always managed to slip away from.
“We do,” I whispered back. At least I think I did. Maybe I only let the thought lodge in my head.
“If you’re really leaving,” she said, “then let this be a summer to remember.”
I could have kissed her forever—waist-deep in water, bathed in nocturnal twilight, pressed close in that endless moment. If it had been up to me, we would still be there, kissing, rubbing against each other. But she pulled away, slipped from my hand, and waded back to shore.
By the time I caught up, she was already gone again, darting between the rocks, giggling like she used to—before marriage broke her, before children wore her down, before all she once was faded into nothing. But she was still eighteen then. When I found her sitting in the soft grass beside the road, she only patted the ground next to her.
I sank down at her side. We didn’t say much. It felt like she was still deciding what the night should become, and I was left waiting for her verdict.
“You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?” she said at last, turning to me.
I blushed. Tried to answer. But no words came, no coherent thought bridged the gap between body and mind.
“It’s okay,” she hurried to say. “We just can’t send you off to Canada like that.”
Her eyes.
“Can we?”
I don’t know when Christine stopped being my cousin. It must have happened somewhere between the Old Road and the lake. Somewhere between water and rock, between grass and twilight. On that night when I learned she was a woman—and I, by every measure, a man.
She never asked again. She let the question hang between us, and when I couldn’t answer, she did.
She slid onto my lap and kissed me, and then it was no longer thought or hesitation—only the hush of bodies taking over the night. Her weight settled against me, thighs bracketing mine, the warmth of her pressing close. I was hard; she was softer than I had ever known a body could be, the curve of her hips shifting as she found her rhythm. Heat bloomed between us, wordless, because words would have broken the spell. If we had spoken what we both still feared, we might have faltered. We might have stopped.
I felt myself enter her with the tremor of her breath, the way she tightened around me, then yielded, and the way she rocked against me, carrying me with her. My head pressed to her chest, her heartbeat quickening as her rhythm deepened, until we were no longer two, only one unbroken motion beneath the stars, beneath the pale moon, beneath the breath of the island.
“You can’t come inside me,” she whispered.
And all I could think was: it might already be too late.
The truth is, I don’t know when it happened—when I did, when she did. How many times or for how long. I only remember the grass, the sky above, her warmth all around me. I only remember what the rest of that summer became.
And it was nothing like this one—this summer of gravestones and endings, where I walk the island not to live, but to let it go.
The walk back to the car felt pointless without her hand in mine, without the moon, without her giggles.
She should have been here with me. But Christine was gone—the summer before.
Cancer. Always cancer.
She had never again been as beautiful as that one summer. And now, sitting in my car, I remembered the morning after: how she refused to go back to being my cousin, how we spent the rest of the season caught between believing in something else and denying what we both knew. August came, and I crossed the Atlantic. She stayed behind.
Every piece of the island was a memory. Not just sex, but the little games of lies, the sudden giggles, the scents of salt and woodsmoke that clung to us and became part of who we were. The strange tension below deck while our grandfather steered into the waves. The stolen kisses when we prayed he wasn’t looking. The clatter of dishes in the kitchen, the laughter as we chased grandma into the living room—not to help her clean, but to steal a moment to slip close, to brush against each other, to—
be between.
And those summer nights that were only ours. When nakedness was the comfort, and clothing the awkwardness.
Later, when I stood with the pastor, confirming that my grandfather’s grave was to be erased from the register, I looked out at that same Atlantic breaking against the rocks.
Wishing I could hold Christine once more—under the spell of the Fjellværsøya moon. And perhaps, as the pastor would have it, we’ll meet in the end.
