“Stop it.”

I jump. The knife clatters to the floor. I place my palm over the blood that is beading on my skin. It wells, then flows down my arm. Isaac is standing in the doorway in pajama bottoms and nothing else. I glance at the stove, wondering if he’s come down because he’s hungry. He walks briskly over to where I’m still standing and bends to pick up the knife. Then he does something that makes my brow furrow. He puts it back in my hand. My mouth twitches as he wraps my fingers around the hilt. I watch, numb and wordless, as he points the sharp end at the skin just above his heart. My hand is locked underneath his, gripping the hilt with trepidation. I can’t move my fingers—not even a little bit. He uses his strength against me when I try to pull away, yanking my arm and the blade toward him. I see blood where the knife is pressing into his skin, and I cry out. He’s forcing me to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to see his blood. He pushes harder.

“No!” I struggle to break free, pulling my body backwards. “Isaac, no!” He lets go. The knife drops to the floor between us. I stand, riveted, and watch as the red gathers and then trickles down his chest. The cut is no longer than an inch, but it’s deeper than one I would have made on myself.

“Why would you do that?” I cry. That was so cruel. I grab the only thing I see—a dishtowel—and I hold it against the cut that we made together. He has blood running down his chest, I have it running down my arm. It’s morbid and confusing.

When I look up for his answer he is looking at me intently.

“What did you feel?” he asks.

I shake my head. I don’t know what he’s asking me. Does he need stitches? There must be a needle somewhere around here … thread.

“What did you feel when that happened?” He’s trying to catch my eyes, but I can’t take my eyes from his blood. I don’t want the life to bleed out of Isaac.

“You need stitches,” I say. “At least two…”

“Senna, what did you feel?”

It takes me a minute to focus. He really wants me to answer that? I open and close my mouth.

“Hurt. I don’t want you to hurt. Why would you do that?”

I am so angry. Confused.

“Because that’s what I feel when you hurt yourself.”

I drop the dishtowel. Nothing dramatic—it’s just become too heavy to hold along with my understanding. I look down at where it lies between my feet. There is a bright red stain on one side of it. Isaac bends to pick it up. He also picks up the knife and places it back in my hand. Grabbing my wrist, he leads me back to the table and firmly plants me in front of it.

“Write,” he says, gesturing to the wood.

“What?”

He grabs the hand that’s holding the knife. I try to pull away again, but his eyes still me.

“Trust me.”

I stop fighting.

He presses the tip into the wood this time. Carves a straight line. “Write here,” he says.

I know what he’s telling me, but it’s not the same.

“I don’t write on my body. I cut it.”

“You write your pain on your skin. With a knife. Straight lines, deep lines, jagged lines. It’s just a different kind of word.”

I get it. All at once. I feel grief for everything that I am. Landscape is playing in the background, a strange soundtrack, a constant soundtrack.

I look down at the smooth wood tabletop. Pressing down, I carve the line we made deeper. I wriggle the blade around a little bit. It feels good. I do it some more. I add more lines, more curves. My movement becomes more frantic each time the knife meets the table. He must think I’ve gone mad. But even if he does, he doesn’t move. He stands behind my shoulder as if he’s there to supervise my assault. When I’m done I toss the knife away from me. Both hands are pressed against my carvings as I lean over the table. I’m breathing hard, like I’ve just run six miles. I have, emotionally. Isaac reaches down and touches the word I’ve made. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t even know what it said until I watched his fingers trace it. Surgeon’s fingers. Drummer’s fingers.

HATE

“Who do you hate?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

I do a short spin into his chest, forgetting that he’s right behind me. He grabs the tops of my arms and clutches me against him. Then he wraps his arm around my head, forcing my face against his chest. The other is circling my back. He holds me and I shake. And I swear … I swear he’s just healed me a little bit.

“I still see you, Senna,” he says into my hair. “You can’t ever stop seeing what you recognize as part of yourself.”

A week later, Landscape stops playing. I am stepping out of my shallow, lukewarm bath when her voice cuts off in the middle of the chorus. I wrap a towel around myself and dart out of the bathroom to find Isaac. He’s in the kitchen when I come careening around the corner still clutching the towel to my dripping body. We stare at each other for a good two minutes, waiting for it to start up again, thinking there is a kink in the system. But it never comes back. It feels like a relief until the silence kicks in. True, deafening silence. We are so used to the noise, it takes a few days to acclimate to the loss of it. That’s what it’s like to be a prisoner of anything. You want your freedom until you get it, then you feel bare without your chains. I wonder if we ever get out of here, will we feel the loss? It sounds like a joke, but I know how the human mind works.

Two days later the power goes. We are in darkness. Not just in the house. November has come. The sun will not rise on Alaska for two months. It’s the ultimate darkness. There is nowhere to find light, except crouched in front of the fire as our logs dwindle. That’s when I know we’re going to die.

We eat the last potato sometime in late November. Isaac’s face is so drawn I would syphon out my own body fat to give him if I had any.

“Something is always trying to kill me,” I say one day as we sit watching the fire. The floor is our perpetual hangout, in the attic room—as close to the fire as we can get. Light and heat. Light and heat. The barrels of diesel in the shack are empty, the cans of ravioli in the pantry are empty, the generator is empty. We’ve chopped down the trees on our side of the fence. There are no more trees. I watched Isaac hack at them from the attic window whispering “Hurry, hurry…” until he cut them down and hauled the logs inside to burn. But there is snow, plenty of snow. We can eat the snow, bathe in the snow, drink the snow.

“It seems that way, yes. But so far nothing has been able to.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” he says.

Oh yeah. How easily the brain flits about when there is no food to hold it in place.

Lucky me.

“We are running out of food, Senna.” He looks at me like he really needs me to understand. Like I haven’t seen the goddamn pantry and fridge. We’ve both lost so much weight I don’t know how I could ignore it. I know what we’re running out of: food … wood … hope…

Isaac set the traps we found in the shed, but with an electric fence we’re not sure how many animals can get to our side without frying themselves first. Our power is out, but the fence remains on. The hum of the electricity feels like a slap in the face.

“If our generator ran out of power, there must be another power source on the property.”

Isaac puts another log on the fire. It bites gingerly at the wood, and I close my eyes and say, hotter, hotter, hotter…

“It’s all been planned out, Senna,” he says. “The zookeeper meant for us to run out of generator fuel the same week that we were plunged into permanent darkness. Everything that is happening has been planned.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.