The Polar Station – Part 1: Polar Night

There were two beds, one kettle and four months of darkness.

"Rule one," said Ingrid. "The kettle is mine at six."

"Rule two," said Zoe. "The kettle is mine at six-oh-one."

They looked at each other across the narrow cabin, and a smile crept over Ingrid's face in spite of herself. She was thirty-six, a Norwegian glaciologist, dry and precise, with a long grey-blonde plait. Zoe was thirty-two, a meteorologist from Cape Town, small, quick, with a soft laugh and a thermal beanie that she never took off.

The station at Ny-Ålesund was a cluster of red huts on the edge of the ice. In October the sun slipped away. By November there was only blue twilight at noon, and then nothing. Snow squeaked underfoot. Aurora flickered in the sky like green silk.

They worked together: launching weather balloons, drilling ice cores, entering data into machines that hummed and blinked. In the evenings they cooked dinner in the little kitchen and ate at the shared table. Zoe sang while washing up. Ingrid, who had worked alone for years, found she had stopped minding the noise.

"Can I ask you something?" said Zoe, one night in December.

"Yes."

"Why did you take the winter post?"

"I wanted to be somewhere nobody would ask me for anything." Ingrid turned her mug. "Then you arrived and asked me for the kettle."

Zoe laughed, a bright sound in the dark. "Is it a problem?"

"No," said Ingrid, slowly. "I think I'd miss it."

Outside, a green curtain unfurled across the sky. They went out onto the porch in their parkas, shoulder to shoulder, watching it ripple.

"Green?" said Zoe, with a grin.

"Green," said Ingrid, softly. "Very green."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Sun Returns.