, March 13, 2026
Translated by
The Dwarf with the Ear
The Dwarf with the Ear was lazy and descended from a long line of lazy women, at least four generations back. It’s not good to be lazy in Iceland, where doggedness and diligence are the highest virtues. And yet, her foremothers boasted of their laziness. They were proud women who bore reproof and rumor with dignity. The Dwarf’s mother got pregnant at fifteen so she could get out of her oral exams and loll about in tanning beds instead. She biked back and forth from the tanning salon, pedaling so slowly that everyone she passed was amazed she was able to keep herself upright. The Dwarf’s grandmother was notorious around the fish processing plant where she worked for walking off the line and curling up for naps behind the redfish grader. Her great grandmother was said to have done all her washing up while seated, a cushion under her scrawny bum as she soaped plates and cups slow as you please. Her great great grandmother supposedly drowned herself in the village creek rather than take part in the haymaking. Her last words: I can’t be bothered. Sloth of this kind was an indication of a peculiar gift passed down the distaff side: they could travel through time. Yes, all of them, to a woman, were time travelers. The laziness of the time traveler is a mystery, however, for which there are no known explanations. It might stem from a lack of enthusiasm for the present, but it could also simply be an intolerance for a traditional life in time.
People who travel through space often have poor digestion because their internal clock gets thrown off mid-air. Time travelers, on the other hand, get a ringing in their ears. You can tell a time traveler by the fact that she’s generally holding a hand over one ear and asking people to repeat themselves: What did you say? It’s a difficult and constant source of irritation, comparable to an itch or a burn, and it can be quite painful.
You can tell a time traveler by the fact that she’s generally holding a hand over one ear and asking people to repeat themselves
We bolster ourselves with words like past and present and future, but these are misleading concepts. Some facts about time travel: these journeys abide by no intelligible logic and, as such, it’s impossible to debate anything that pertains to them—no different from love or any mysterious illness you could name. Possessing this gift is, to be sure, a kind of thralldom. You can’t change or cancel your ticket, because there aren’t any tickets. You can think of it as a binding agreement, signed at birth. And if a traveler gets stuck during their wanderings, the only possible outcome is death.
The women around the Dwarf knew that the gift was dormant within her, and yet none of them stepped up to explain anything to her. You see, time travel has always been considered shameful, like defecation and sex, and so the Dwarf had to figure it out on her own. In books and movies, travel of this nature is romanticized, but in reality, it’s a wretched way to live.
It was the boys at school who gave her that name, the Dwarf with the Ear. Her mom said she was a lazy grower, that every cell in her body was in stubborn rebellion.
Halfway through upper secondary school, she’d shot up to 147 cm—about 4’8” or, as her grandma put it, long of body and short of leg. She was sent to a doctor and weighed and measured every which way. The doctor said, Physically, she’s a late bloomer and that ear of hers is always going to give her trouble, but that’s the extent of it.
Final verdict: she was a pallid and pasty-faced dwarf with a ringing ear.
Every morning, the Dwarf would lock her bike at the entrance of the ninth-grade wing. She had a sea-blue combination lock, 7777 (a lucky number). On the bike frame, someone had scrawled Eivör Magnea in 8B is a little whore in black marker. She crouched on her heels, pulled up a dandelion, and rubbed its blossom, hard, across the name, snapped the stalk and rolled it along the metal bar. The sap lent a yellowish-greenish tinge to the letters, but Eivör Magnea in 8B was still a little whore.
The vernacular of the halls was biblical; it was always virginity this and virginity that.
Hey, don’t devirginize my Coke, crowed the boys when they stampeded into the coatroom, don’t pop its cherry. To which, at the designated moment, a gaggle of girls would titter like tortured circus animals. For boys, losing one’s virginity was a rite of passage. And whether it was in the community center toilet or under a garish Manchester United duvet, they were impatient to scrabble through the lusty gates of adolescence.
If a girl had a boyfriend, she lost her virginity out of a sense of duty—that was the common wisdom. Her boyfriend popped her cherry like he popped the cherry of a can of Coke by taking the first sip. In exchange for her sacrifice, the girl was rewarded with searing pain. It wasn’t supposed to be nice, not even if done under romantic pretenses. And there was no escaping the shame. The girl was either too quick to give it up (Eivör Magnea in 8B is a little whore) or too slow (she’s a nun, her pussy is sewn shut and full of sand).
People said the computer teacher had sand-pussy. What do they mean by that? asked the Dwarf with the Ear, tilting her head back with toilet paper stuffed in both nostrils. She always got bloody noses in those days. Her classmate stood close to the mirror dabbing bronzer on her cheeks and chest.
That someone needs to get a shovel and dig the sand out of her hoo-ha.
Right, the Dwarf said snuffily. I get it.
It wasn’t just that the computer teacher had legs that were two different lengths, she was also a lesbian, someone said. She wore her keys on a rainbow lanyard around her neck. One day, she came to school in a dress and wearing lipstick. What a tranny, howled the boys. She was going to a funeral and had accidentally tucked her dress into her nylons before hobbling out of the washroom. Two weeks later, they got the news that someone had put a bomb in the toilet on the ninth-grade wing. Who was supposed to have been assassinated in that most holy of sanctuaries? The computer teacher? Eivör Magnea in 8B? Or maybe the Dwarf with the Ear? It was an era that many people would’ve been happy to flee.
The Dwarf lost her virginity to a classmate who was a year younger than her. It was a big age gap, especially when it was the girl who was older.
But I’m not, like, some pedophile, she said.
Of course, I know! he answered.
He was the national karate champion in his weight class and had a deep dimple on his right cheek. It’s not a dimple, he said. He got it when he was punched during a big tournament. There was an unhappy rumor going around that his stepfather had shoved him into a window ledge in a rage. Which is why she didn’t make any romantic declarations about his dimple. She didn’t tell him that she wanted to watch his dimple fill with water and become a deep pond she could drown in.
I’ve heard you’re a total brainiac, he said.
So?
I’ve heard you speak six languages.
So?
Girls are usually bad at math because they don’t get abstract thinking.
So?
They’re usually better at rote memorization, languages, Icelandic. I’ve heard your dad is in the Hells Angels. Is your dad a Pole? I just ask ‘cuz your name. And what’s the deal with your ear?
My dad’s from Dalvík and he drives a delivery truck, thank you very much, she said, holding a hand over her ear even though it was silent as the grave.
That was the prelude to her pregnancy.
A few weeks later, she got excruciating cramps in the shower. Just sudden period pain, she thought as blood gushed down her thighs. Then she felt something fall out of her. A bloody clump slipped around the bathtub. She wasn’t very far along, the fetus wasn’t in any kind of human form, but she could tell it wasn’t normal bleeding. Blood and slime swirled around the drain. She grabbed some tissue and clumsily fished the clump out of the tub and flushed it down the toilet. She stuck a chopstick down the drain (all sorts of things could be found in that bathroom cabinet), just to be absolutely sure it wasn’t clogged and that her younger siblings wouldn’t find something awful the next time they took a shower. She poured in half a bottle of drain cleaner too. Her limbs were burdened with a weight many generations old. The feeling was true and unswerving: she couldn’t be bothered with this.
Her ear started ringing like never before.
Sometimes, the Dwarf’s mom wanted some time to herself and so the Dwarf and her siblings would go visit their grandma, who lived in the same row of houses. Her mom was living on an insurance payout—a few years earlier, she’d been injured in a car accident (or something) and since then, she sometimes had painful spasms and shut herself in her room to rest (or something).
The day after the incident in the shower, the Dwarf showed up on her grandma’s doorstep with her siblings in tow and rang the bell.
Mom wants some peace and quiet, she said. Can we come in?
Her grandma had a deep, purply black eye from running into a closet door.
Your mother is lazy to her core, as is her birthright! she said. Come on in.
She was a gruesome sight to see, all bruised up like that. The Dwarf stared at her eye. It’s the blood thinner I take that does that, said her grandma. You’re holding your ear, I see. It makes itself heard when we’re good and ready for it. Yes, it’s really getting going now, she added, placing a hand over her own ear.
The doctor said I’d always have it, said the Dwarf, who still knew nothing of her hereditary gift.
It’s just a ringing. Nothing but a ringing and there’s no point wallowing over it, said her grandma, though her black eye told another story, as if it wasn’t entirely in agreement.
The Dwarf with the Ear crept back home once her siblings were zonked out in front of the TV with Grandma. She put her eye up to the keyhole in her mother’s bedroom door. There was nothing to see; the hole had been stuffed full of toilet paper. Then she pressed her ear (the silent one) to the door, but she couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in her other ear. She pushed it open. That was a horrible mistake. The Dwarf with the Ear tried to forget what she saw.
She never mentioned the miscarriage.
A year later, her mother was bedridden. The Dwarf with the Ear considered moving to Dalvík, but her siblings had already gone up there to live with her annoying stepmom and not-that-great dad. The Dwarf still hadn’t traveled through time in anything but the most poetical sense of life’s standard passing. She was living with her mom and, instead of registering for junior college, decided to get a job.
It came as a huge relief to the Dwarf to learn what she was capable of.
She started waitressing at a midrange restaurant on Aðalstræti, so she’d have the means to maintain her lifestyle—a cinnamon roll and chocolate milk from the convenience store every morning and hair-lightening cream to give her highlights. The restaurant patrons were nice to her because she looked younger than she was, even though she put very little effort into her job and was in no way service-oriented. She showed up late, left early (citing migraines), and took every opportunity to perch on a little stool in the kitchen. And she was never in the least bit obliging whenever customers asked if it was possible to get this or that.
Sorry, was her refrain. We’ve never offered soy sauce here.
Around this time, the ringing in her ear got worse. It was continual now, didn’t come and go according to her mood, as her grandma had said.
One evening, she came home from her shift and found her mother lying on the sofa. Instead of being afraid of what she saw and retreating, she inched closer. Her mother’s eyes were closed, and she had her hand pressed tightly over one ear.
Understanding struck like a bolt of lightning that spread through the Dwarf’s body: this was just her mother’s shell.
What’s going on? she asked when her mom returned and sat back up. The answer was that she sometimes went back many centuries and met her foremother as a child out on an Icelandic moor. Together, they played with bones and shells, toys before there were toys.
She’s a little girl with a disconcerting presence about her, but where do I get off saying such a thing—I’m a woman who visits her from the future. She holds her ear too, poor little thing, she must be our foremother.
She didn’t have to convince her daughter of their supernature. It was unnecessary to spell anything out for the Dwarf, who didn’t doubt her mother’s story but rather understood now why she had grown so weak. These journeys were exhausting.
It came as a huge relief to the Dwarf to learn what she was capable of. Over the years, it had cost her considerable effort and agony to live with the ringing, but she tried to tamp it down. It turned out that time travel came as naturally to her as dropping off when she was sleepy or slaking her thirst with a glass of water. When the ringing became so loud as to be unbearable, she’d simply follow her mother’s example and close herself in her room, prop a stool under the doorknob, acknowledge the sound, and feel it transform from a high frequency ringing to a hypnotizing murmur. If she was at work, she went into staff locker and hid, tucked herself behind the coats in the closet and stored her husk there.
The Dwarf took mini-breaks to the future, to the red-walled breakfast room of a house she suspected was a sanatorium. Animals acted as waiters and remarkably, the heaping porcelain plates they bore didn’t slide right off their backs. It was there she met a tiny old woman who was so feeble she could hardly keep her eyes open. They became fast friends without having to say a word, and the Dwarf was tempted to imagine that the old woman was her daughter.
It was always mealtime in the breakfast room. The Dwarf and the woman would sit across from one another at a small table and eat. In the present day, the Dwarf had little appetite, but in the windowless breakfast room, she ate ravenously, dispatching slice after slice of bread spread with a thick layer of butter, rich cheese, and something that reminded her of marmalade but wasn’t. She didn’t know anything about the old woman, but questions were unnecessary. Between them existed a mutual trust and the understanding that they belonged to one another. After they’d finished eating, the Dwarf would return to her own time. Sometimes, she missed the old woman and was overtaken with a feeling of emptiness. She found herself worrying about her friend, hoping she wouldn’t fall ill or die in the sanitorium.
Her mother started traveling more than before, spent more and more time far from the present, and eventually, she got stuck in another time. The Dwarf waited and waited for her mom to come back, squeezed her lifeless hand and pressed her own ear to her mother’s. She thought she could make out a faint ringing but that could be coming from herself. In the end, she called an ambulance and her mother, thirty-two years old, was declared dead upon arrival at the ER. Cause of Death: heart failure. But the Dwarf with the Ear knew better.
She was fired from the restaurant. After this, the Dwarf reluctantly applied for a job at a bowling alley because she heard there wasn’t much to do there. The supervisor was quite laid-back. He didn’t care if the Dwarf loafed around on her shifts or that she was never on time. Sometimes, they rented the place out for kids’ birthday parties. During one such party, the Dwarf was going from table to table, collecting greasy paper plates and slices of pizza. There was another girl on shift with her. She seemed really young and had just started. The Dwarf could really feel their age difference.
I’m almost sixteen, she answered when asked. She said that she had terrible cramps, walked around bent at the waist, sweeping used napkins and pizza crusts into a tub. The Dwarf didn’t tell her that when she had excruciating cramps in the shower one day, it turned out to be a miscarriage, she just went out to the reception area to find some painkillers. The boy at the counter gave her a clueless look, but a middle-aged woman (the only one of them who ever cleaned the holes in the bowling balls) opened a drawer and took out an aluminum packet of ibuprofen. The new coworker didn’t complain after she took the pills; she was a good worker. She liked helping kids put on their bowling shoes and even played a round herself.
At the end of the day, they walked out into the frozen darkness together and watched the kids getting into their parents’ cars. The Dwarf’s ear was ringing like crazy. The pain was unraveling her.
Are you okay? asked the girl worriedly. Do you feel faint? She said something else after that, but the Dwarf couldn’t make anything out.
Did you say something? she asked, one hand over her ear. She wasn’t given a chance to hide, but that didn’t change anything.
Back in the red breakfast room, she was sitting across from the old woman she’d been missing. Her ear had gone silent, as it always did when she arrived in a different time. In the middle of the carpeted floor, in between white-clothed tables, was a deep hole. She could hear voices echoing up out of it.
What is that? she asked and pointed at the hole.
That is a deep hole. We must all get into it, answered the old woman, adding that there was plexiglass over the top of it.
What do you mean?
Plexiglass is a scratch-resistant, transparent material.
No, I mean, we all have to get into the hole? asked the Dwarf, suddenly losing her appetite.
At some point, yes, answered the woman anxiously. That’s my understanding.
What if this isn’t a sanatorium? What if it’s a prison?
Do prisoners live in luxury? asked the old woman. Her face was sorrowful and shriveled with age.
Do you even know what it looks like outside of this place, what’s around here? asked the Dwarf.
No, I’ve no idea.
Time is a substance that comes into being so very deep within a person that it cannot be fully understood.
The Dwarf knew she had to rescue the old woman and pulled her to her feet. The linen napkin fell out of her lap, and she swatted away the sniffing muzzle of a little donkey. The other guests did not look up from their plates. Backs bent, the Dwarf and the old woman crept to a narrow, low-slung door and went through it with a twist of its red-lacquered knob. They found themselves in a white stairwell intended for the waitstaff.
It’s possible you’re my descendant, but I think that isn’t very likely because I’m not going to live very long and nor am I going to have any children. So I don’t understand who you are, but I’m going to get you out of here, she panted, hoisting the woman onto her back.
The Dwarf felt like it had been a long time since she’d gotten her name, since she’d stuck the chopstick down the drain and started to work, a long time since her mother had died. Many lifetimes. That was both accurate and inaccurate. Time is a substance that comes into being so very deep within a person that it cannot be fully understood. Our ideas about time are, as such, empty conjectures. At any rate, the Dwarf with the Ear—contrary to scientific evidence and hypotheses—was now in the future. No longer in the bowling alley parking lot, rather stepping out of a red breakfast room with an old woman.
The Dwarf asked the old woman to hold on tight, boosted her upon her back, and, with the lady’s arms tight around her neck, began to climb up the fire escape. The ladder took them up to the roof, from where they took in the smooth, wide-open ocean, stretching as far as the eye could see. The ancient morning sun unfurled itself across the firmament and filled the Dwarf’s heart with hope. The prison rose out of the sea like a sheer cliff.
When the Dwarf took a running leap, the old woman didn’t loosen her grip.