"World Swallower" by Jessie Garbeil

Jasmine spends an extra ten minutes in the hostel shower trying to scratch the black sand out from under her toenails, in haphazard pursuit of exorcizing this island from her body. She had left her shoes on at the beach, but this land is forward and unrelenting, and it always found a way to come home to her, an unwelcome lover gone sour in the fridge. Grotesque and divine, she hunches her spine against the walls, lifting each foot painstakingly to hip-level and dragging her ragged fingernails under her toes. From two stalls away, an obnoxious adolescent sound of lips and tongue, soft moans and bare feet sliding against cheap tile floor. She wants nothing more than to be them both. 

She admits defeat on clawing all of the earth out of her and steps out of the now-lukewarm spray of water. Two unread messages on her phone, both from Dana: “everett in the cafe looking for you today” and “at least tell him you’re okay.” Jasmine wraps her phone in her towel, leaving the message unopened. He can look for her again tomorrow. She is otherworldly today. 

It is her coldest day since arriving in Seydisfjordur, and she cocoons herself in three layers of wool and cotton before stepping foot outside. She has selected the reverent in-between of midsummer and the heart of winter where no one really bothers to go to Iceland except for true believers like her: the adventurers have left their four-wheel-drives and hiking poles behind, the lovers have yet to arrive to see the northern lights, and she can almost convince herself that she finally has a place that belongs to her. 

 Jasmine needs a drink, and she needs to be convinced of her own insignificance again (she is feeling too arrogant and god-like tonight, like all the men she tried to leave), and so she wraps a wool scarf around her neck and cocoons herself up to to her chin, just to feel the cacophonic scratch of it against her skin. How wonderful it is to feel pain rather than silence. 

—

The bar is empty and delightful. In it Jasmine is a deity, her hands and her limbs barely visible even to herself in the low light. Her drink tastes ambrosia and her phone is beckoning, cruel and pitiful like the boy she left behind. 

“Mind if I sit here?” She looks up from her texts, now opened but left unanswered and accusing,  to see a scattered blonde woman, no more than a few years older than her, towering over her seat. She has the features of neither a girl nor a grasshopper, the sort that men would find plain or frightening, and wears the standard young backpacker uniform of expensive hiking cargos and a fleece. Predictable and vain - this is delightful. 

“Yeah, of course.” 

The stranger takes a seat next to her, leaping lithely onto the bar stool, harelike and alert. She raises a spindly finger to wave over the bartender and order him in a soft, vaguely accented lilt, in a way that she clearly thinks is alluring. 

The bartender takes his time making the stranger’s gin and tonic, like you are supposed to do when the tourists steal away your homeland; the stranger watches his every move, and Jasmine watches her watch him. The stranger isn’t annoyed by his familiar form of rebellion, but she watches him with the darting eyes of a child at the zoo, staring nose to glass into the zebra pen. Jasmine doesn’t like travelers unaware of their own exploitation, but she resists the urge to dismiss her and waits for the woman to say something, expecting her to use one of the usual budget traveler lines of interrogation: how many countries you have been to, how long you have been in Iceland, if you are still holding onto any taboo remainders of the person you were before you started traveling. Jasmine likes the last one the least, because everyone always is but no one - least of all her - wants to admit it. 

The gin and tonic is completed, passed careless across the bar, and the stranger begins her consumption carefully, eyeing Jasmine as she slips her chapped lips around the straw. It is the usual solo traveler foreplay, that disregards gender or sexuality and relies solely on unknowingness. Jasmine feels less than she usually does, or maybe attraction has changed since Everett has started looking for her. She likes him better now than she ever did so small and like a goldfish in his downtown apartment, when he is looking blindly for her, lost sheep boy that he is. She is the shepherd here, and he is so meaningless that the world’s best scientists and historians could study him for centuries and never find a thing. That’s the best verdict for someone that you once loved and stopped loving. 

“You seem like you’re running away from something.” The stranger is already tipsy, perhaps from a shot of cheap liquorice liquor in her backpack or a beer slipped from the hotel minifridge. “I just got back from this yoga retreat which of course turned out to be a cult down on Lake Atitlan, you know, in Guatemala, and you give off the same energy, I dunno. Like I don’t mean it in a bad way, it’s just an observation, and it’s why I came over to you, actually, because I really get it and I’ve felt that way a lot, less so lately, but still a lot.”

Jasmine makes her best attempt to contain her own shock at her new line of psychiatric analysis, an unfamiliar one to her, by bringing the cold rim of her glass to her own lips. She is an American too, and, like Jasmine, good at hiding it with a faint curtness that sounds a bit Scandinavian and a tight frown, but it shoves through in her own emotional untetheredness. The foreplay continues, but the moment is broken, because she can guess that she is failing in hiding her surprise. “I dunno, I feel like travel is always about running away from something.” 

“Yeah, I guess it is, isn’t it. I’m Jeanne, by the way.” The name doesn’t fit her: it is too French, or too clean and corporate, or too interesting, for the copycat hippie look she embodies. Still, Jeanne is suddenly fascinating and deeply despicable, if for nothing else than her reckless interrogation. Brazenness is the enemy of oblivion, to her at least. What an American thing to think. 

“I’m Jasmine.”

“Isn’t that funny. Jeanne and Jasmine. Cute.” Flatlining voice, dead eye stare as her wavering pupils continue to trace after the bartender. Jasmine doesn’t get the feeling that she finds him handsome (though he is, in a hearty, wartorn way), but that she is still observing at the zebra pen. She doesn’t like safarigoers. 

“How do you like Iceland?”

“Oh, I love it, I mean, it’s beautiful everywhere you look, but it’s also so quiet, you know, I just feel like I’m going crazy when I’m driving out there alone.” 

Jasmine resisted the urge to tell Jeanne that this was all part of the point. Her own first trip had been especially brutal: she was constantly falling ill with unexplained sicknesses that lasted only for a couple hours, she felt especially prone to near-hallucinations, and she was haunted by the constant fear that the whole island was trying to swallow her and no one would know. That was why she had come back - to be swallowed whole by this place. 

“Yeah, sure, I get that.” 

The stranger never paused or even seemed to take the time to breathe. Jasmine finished her drink in one long sip, just to hide the distaste that had to be playing her face. “Where are you from?”

“Virginia, but I’ve been living out in California for a few years.”

“Oh, God, lucky, I love LA. And the Bay Area.”

Jasmine didn’t bother to tell her that she had been out in the Central Valley, and that, much as she hated its arid violence, she detested the state’s cities even more. Hollywood’s vapid magnetism had never appealed to her, and San Francisco had lost its magic when the tech bros doggy-paddled across the bay. Instead, she asked the only thing that could save her: “So what are you running away from?”

Jeanne’s cotton-candy face exploded in a delighted grin, and, though Jasmine got the sense that this was the question the stranger had come to this bar to answer, she took her time to reply, picking the somewhat shriveled lime from the rim of her glass and squeezing it between her fingers. The sour juice dripped slow from her hand, trickling a faint stream down her wrist and into her shirt sleeve. . When she did bother to answer, she dropped her fireworks smile and replaced it with a careful, thoughtful line suited for a movie star much prettier than her: “A boyfriend, actually. Or maybe an ex, depending on how you want to play things.” 

Jeanne looked expectantly at her, and Jasmine couldn’t bring herself to give the stranger what she wanted, though it was blissfully clear: oh, really? me too. They could cross the coldest nether regions of the Atlantic and the sub-Arctic and still, all that really mattered was men and God. All of the great explorer places she could go and there was still no respite. 

“You too?”

“No. Running away from a lot of things, I guess, but sure, a boyfriend, maybe, is one of them.” She found herself drumming her ragged fingertips over the wood of the bartop. Everett had managed to fluster her, even here, where she was supposed to be godly and out of reach. 

“So, has it worked?”

“Not yet. Or maybe a little.” It didn’t work in this bar, where Jasmine was suddenly so acutely aware of the eyes on them both and the wrong language on their tongues, but it worked on the beaches, where the chest he used to touch was curled inward to weather the screech of wind, and it worked on the glaciers, where she was small and insignificant amidst this retreating brave new world. Here it woefully failed, like all travel does. 

Just out of earshot, the bartender muttered something to a mountainside of a fisherman in Danish. He was talking about them, or maybe she was growing into the type of American she most hated - narcissistic and paranoid, all white teeth and dirty manners. Jasmine hid her interest by swallowing hard the last sips of her drink.

“Yeah, that’s how it goes everywhere.” Jeanne tapped her fingernails - just as rugged but slightly sharper and longer than Jasmine’s - intently against the bartop. The bartender tilted his head slow towards her, eyes low and hardened cold, and Jasmine fought the inherent urge to move away from Jeanne. What frail and abject American cruelty this was. Despite his resistance, though, he inevitably gave into her silent demand: how small all were against the vicious tide of visitation and its hearty, hearty appetite for consumption. “Another one of these, please.” 

He followed her order and savored his time slightly more this round, pouring the gin meticulously and slow, sexual and taunting. Wanting to be wanted. Uncaring and loathing, desperate. Jasmine wondered if she, too, was a zebra in a pen now. She had taken on enough of this island’s weight now - how it made her sorrowful and sallow, how she drove for so long on roads to nowhere that she started seeing phantoms in the clouds where earth met sea, how people in the streets tried to talk to her in a tongue that still didn’t fit right on her,. She had tried, really tried, and in her mouth her gums and her crooked teeth twisted together and tangled up all the words, until it sounded less like a mother tongue and more like witchcraft that didn’t belong to her anymore. 

The second gin and tonic was passed across the bar. Jeanne locked her blue eyes forcefully with the bartender’s and lifted the glass to her mouth, tilting her skull backwards and backwards until the liquid swept so swift into her open lips and spilled down her chin as seafoam. There was still sand under Jasmine’s toenails, even though she couldn’t feel it in the moment: it sunk into her, dragging her down with the tide of hatred and desire. She drank the rest of her drink in one bitter lame breath, eager to escape her own zebra status and become a safarigoer, scamper from the lower to the upper echelons of “tourist.” Everett would hate how easily she had given up her scruples for this strange girl who wasn’t even very pretty. She had never hated herself so much alone. 

Her glass clattered to the wood of the bar with less grace than she had intended. The bartender turned his head - he hadn’t been looking at her, she realized - and sunk the crevasses of his mouth into an even deeper frown. The stranger looked on with childlike, sickening pride: “good job, you bitch, you’ve sold your soul, too.”

Jasmine’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she knew it was Everett without even looking at it. The glaring, gnawing text was simple and without his usual poetry: actually, don’t bother.

Jasmine clumsily fiddled a stack of small bills out of her pocket, rapidly feeling the euphor effect of the drinks in her body: how the gin twisted down her gut and into her thighs, leaving her fragile and hound-like, helpless sheep dog against the wrath of her observers. No one was on her side, she was on no one’s. The bartender took them wordlessly; Jeanne only watched her with carnivorous eyes, sharp fangs and curled smile. He savored his time returning her the change, but she was tired of the sex games.

“Keep it, it’s fine.” Everett’s words, telepathic and nauseating: actually, don’t bother.

Her feet carried her flightlessly over the wooden planks and out the door of the bar, without a goodbye to the gawking stranger and the young god bartender, scarf tightening her neck raw for the taking and hands shaking in the sudden biting wind. The town was almost deserted this time of night, her only companions in the beginning of night two lovestruck teenagers, curled around each other on a park bench across the street. Jasmine looked away quickly, her appetite for judgement absent and fleeting. The end of the world in the distance - where black fjord met black sea. Her first trip here, just twenty and overwhelmed by all the safarigoers she could be and all the zebras, foolishly driving down muddy, weatherworn ditches and pushing her car out, all sinewy limbs and survival spirit. No one here to save her (what a lovely, erotic fantasy, when they were all here to save her). Everett in her phone, frostbite and pretty words. The sting of salt against her torn cuticles, the tsunamic, welcome heat that followed amidst all the cold dark nothingness. 

All Jasmine could bring herself to do was remake her body as a traffic hazard: limbs snow-angelling against the fresh asphalt, turning her insides into an icebox. She allowed herself the euphor just for a moment, then rose to her feet before the lovebirds or the old man stumbling back from another bar could notice her. So she started to put one callused foot in front of the other callused foot, all regret and perilous hope, towards the hostel, the ocean, or the edge of the world, zebra girl that she was. 

Jessie’s writing - across novels-in-progress, short stories, and essays -  is united by an interest in exploring the ideas of apocalypse, travel, and the flawed and sometimes strange ways in which we interact with each other. Jessie grew up in Kailua, Hawai’i, and currently lives on a very different coast in Chicago, her work is ever-influenced by the intensity and natural chaos of the islands that raised her. Jessie’s creative nonfiction and essays can be found on Substack, at “apocalypse rejection therapy.”