Free Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen

he said. “Come with me.”
    “For how long?” Michael said, frowning.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “For as long as necessary.”
    Michael sighed and looked at him as if he were a beloved, but naughty puppy who had just peed in his favorite shoes.
    “I can’t,” Michael finally said. “I have my family, my friends, my job here. And what are you going to do up there anyway?”
    “Renovate the cabin?” he said, but it came out much less certain than he had intended.
    Michael gave him the look again. “You’ve already bought the place, haven’t you?”
    He nodded.
    When he was a toddler his mother took him to a nearby park that had a large circular fountain on its thin lawn. The fountain’s shallow but wide basin was bounded by a simple concrete ring. The fountainhead in the middle was dry and had rusted shut a long time ago, leaving the water smooth and dark. He enjoyed sitting on the circumference while stirring the lukewarm, algae-green water and watching the reflections caught in its surface. As the mirror images of the knobby trunks and leafless branches of the brutally sheared oaks behind the pool trembled and merged into one other, the sound of the surrounding children and their guardians muted to nothing. Even from far away the fountain blinked like an eye between the streets and houses.
    When his parents found a new home in another neighborhood they stopped going to the park and he forgot about the fountain, until his teens, when he started seeing a round body of water the color of the sky in his dreams. As an adult he oncepassed through the park by coincidence. Recognizing the footpath that led up to the fountain, he began to hurry, eager to see if the eye of water was really there at the top of the hill, as it always was in his dreams, or whether it was just something he had made up. He ran the last stretch, expecting to see only brown grass and bushes shivering in the cold spring gale, but when he reached the top of the slope, the fountain was there, its encompassing basin shallower and more algae-filled than before, the flagstones littered with gravel from the winter’s ice and snow, and the oaks grown taller and thicker than he remembered them. He marveled at having found the place from his childhood that he still visited in his dreams, and sat by the pool for a long time, watching the reflections of the bleak clouds rush across the sky in the water. Having revisited the site in his waking life, he never saw the fountain again in his dreams.
    The train line from the honeycomb towers was closed due to a power failure in the grid, so he had to take a bus to the central station for the journey to the mountains and the cabin. On the way there the street filled with people: women, men, young, middle-aged, elderly, who carried posters and banners, shouted slogans and sang, and banged on the windows of the bus and the other vehicles that came to a halt. The crowd was protesting against the city council’s increased taxes and the cost of utilities such as water, power, and renovation. The bus driver pulled into a side street to get away from the demonstration, but even there the traffic was choked by people.
    After half an hour with barely any movement, the passengers became restless. First, a man in a suit and tie rose from his seat and told the bus driver to open the door to let him out on the narrow pavement. The man exited and was swallowed by the crowd. Fifteen minutes later a young couple in fleece jackets and large backpacks exited the bus too. The traffic remained still for a while longer, then started and stopped a few times,like a vehicle with ignition trouble, before it flowed again. But because of the detour and the unfamiliar streets he couldn’t tell if they were getting nearer or further away from the station. The small TV screens above the seats were filled with news images of buildings on fire, vessels spilling refugees in a stormy sea, livestock carcasses drying in parched fields,