Naglfar
A shipbuilder in the underworld finds that his masterwork is also his own demise.
Source photo attribution: Alexey M. - Photomanipulation by D. A. Anderson - Photo used under Creative Commons license
The ship I built wasn’t meant for me. It was for others. Spindly trees grew out its top, like the masts for sails, or nerve endings, or fingers. Maybe to grip the air and sky.
Beneath it were heavy anchors, fashioned as medallions out of every metal once held precious: iron, tin, copper, bronze, steel. Gold. The gold one I embossed with an angelic symbol, and some teased that it was Icarus. Fair enough—gold was the sun’s metal, so why not give him the metal that belonged to what threw him out of the sky, like a scorned lover, his most audacious advance so thoroughly rejected that he never recovered?
“Tsk tsk,” they said as I banged on with my hammer. “Should’ve been more reserved, should’ve been more timid—nature is as predictably cruel as providence is fortuitous.” I hung that one from the keel with the gut of a bison, dressed with eagle feathers, glued on by the wax of bees—what else?
The anchors kept the ship from floating into the sky. A few hung low and dragged in the dirt, carving a trail that would otherwise belong to a lazy snake or worm. The ship lumbered on its static path through the city—thoroughfares of dried waterfalls, windowed buildings without glass; lobbies and ballrooms full of dusty mannequins holding cocktail glasses mid-conversation, wordless; a groaning wind that echoed the creaks of the ship as it hovered along the avenues.
A procession followed the Flying Dutchman. A white sheet hung off its aft. It was a tarp to keep it dry while I still worked on it, but no great work is ever finished, so instead it dressed the sterncastle, flowing down in tatters, like a bridal veil for its rear. The processioners held onto it by its loose threads, as if they were holding onto a kite.
The whole ship would’ve been a balloon if it weren’t for its makeshift ballasts and walking riggers. It baffled even me. Maybe it was due to the egg growing at the top of the tree-masts, a joke for a sail—a single cell carrying all the memories of the passengers inside. Who knew that souls floated? It was a good counterweight for Icarus, the heaviest of the anchors, carried along the belly—the irony.
I didn’t intend it this way, if you can believe me. I was sure that I was fashioning something for an eternal, heavenly cruise. What’s beautiful to the divine is hardly normal for a mortal. I required everything that was sideways, backwards, and otherwise refuse: nothing true or straightforward would work. I crafted the ship’s hull from clay, the shells of insects, fingernails, hair, and mispronounced prayers, etching them all into the sides of the hull. There’s a strange nobility in finding the beauty in what’s perverse and resurrecting its value by way of arrangement alone. At least, that was the attempted art.
I suppose it fitting, then, that when I declared the effort nearly complete the processioners, fitful with laughter, held me down and blew up my face, which swelled like a grape until it was the size of the bow itself. It deflated and my cheeks went hollow and my eyes sunk, but otherwise remained oversize—and as it did they dipped me in plaster, affixing me as the figurehead, face-first, to the front of the ship.
The ship floats the same winding path for years I can’t count now; I watch the grooves in the ground made by the medallions that I fashioned to its underside. The din of the pots and pans that the processioners bang behind me was torturous at first, then boring, and now simply an unpleasant but unavoidable fact like the sandy ground, the must in the air, or the mildewed smell of occasional standing water.
I stopped wishing either for the egg to pop and the ship to crash to the ground or for the anchors to fall loose and finally set sail into the sky. We seem cursed to monotony, set in our ways, never improving toward a predictable future nor climaxing in the present. If we do, I suppose it will raise a feeling in me so intense it would be apocalyptic. But I don’t entertain that possibility—that’d be like enjoying a torturer as a court jester. Instead, I’ve learned to sit content with discomfort in humility; I’ve developed some kind of infernal patience.