break

by Christopher Kostyn Passante

The cobalt light first appeared outside Caelan’s window the night Evie went through the ice. A small orb no bigger than a butternut and shrouded in updrafts of blown snow played at the witch window in the guest loft of their half-Cape, where he had passed out damp and shivering only a few hours before.

The strange glow, which pried open Caelan’s tear-swollen eyes like a dull shucking knife, threatened to pull him back to Ross Pond, to the crack that spider-webbed beneath her boots, to Evie, forming his name on her lips as the ice gave way. Her virescent eyes, wide and wondrously reflecting perfect flecks of snow and stars. Before the ice broke, she’d released Baxter’s leash. The blind malamute had scrabbled at the edges, circling, circling again. Snowflakes on black water. Then nothing.

Caelan squinted at the crooked window, his body stiff, ears ringing. Remnant gusts from the passing nor’easter rattled rafters and sucked the breath out of the woodstove, exhaling plumes of ethereal smoke and white-hot embers from the chimney pipe where they flitted and died against a bruised sky.

Earlier, he had vomited tranches of elbows and cheddar into a swirling blue toilet bowl down the hall. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Bile still bit at the back of his throat. His chest—just a hollowed-out space where something warm and vital used to be. He shook his head as if to reject the pain’s purchase, then sat up.

Why hadn’t he asked her at supper?

Baxter bumped into the unfamiliar walls of the loft, then settled back down on the cool oak floor near the foot of the bed. Aunt Keesey snored from the downstairs bedroom—his and Evie’s, the one he couldn’t bring himself to enter for pajamas, let alone sleep in. Their bed was in there. Flannel sheets still holding her shape. The scent of her body, the lavender oil she wore. Just this morning, she’d overslept, and he lay there watching her dress, still half-dreaming. 

You stay in there tonight, I can’t.

Aunt Keesey’s given name was Jude, though no one called her that since Caelan’s mother died. The only remaining of the four Keesey girls annealed by the unremitting gales and hard life on Pemaquid Point, she’d taken up the family name like the fishing nets she’d mend until her fingers split and bled. Keesey. The only one left to carry it.

Aunt Keesey swore she had chased a will-o’-the-wisp to the house moments before her sister died, arriving too late to find Caelan numb, holding his mother’s hand.

Canwyll corph, she said in the Welsh. Corpse candle.

She had insisted on staying, so that’s what she did.

Caelan slipped from the bed and, passing the vanity, caught a glimpse of his whip-thin body, his face as narrow as a blade, his long, sandy hair, and his eyes, the color of the shore water he’d let Evie dive into, swim, and explore whenever he lay atop her. He dipped two fingers into a water glass and wiped away the sleep rusted into the corners of his eyelids.

The glow drew him toward the window, set deliberately at a forty-five-degree angle through which witches dare not fly. Shifting his weight onto the foot closest to the crooked pane, the window groaned the way old things do when forced against their will, and the bottom glass shrieked as the panel slid free. In swept a sting of frigid winter air tinged with sweet woodsmoke, familiar and close as Caelan’s own breath. The flickering orb hung just within reach beneath the eaves, casting a blue glow, blue like fairytale moonlight, on snow-covered branches and illuminating the path back to Ross Pond, back to Evie.

The orb danced. Vibrated. Shimmied. As the light bashfully inched closer to Caelan’s outstretched arm, the bitter night air that seconds ago bit at his face and gnawed the exposed skin beneath his flannel sleeves was all at once warm and viscid. The blue light shone clearly through his skin, as if holding a penlight against a finger, and besides the illusory shrieks of a fisher echoing from the deep corners of Elliot’s Woods, a low hum like a distant brook emanated all around him.

The winter’s ice had been thinner than usual, and by mid-February, the fishing shanties had all but disappeared from both Ross and Boyd’s ponds. The Gulf of Maine and the waters around Pemaquid Point warmed considerably over the past decade, changing seasonal patterns for cod, the lifeblood of Caelan’s family for generations. Evie was born here, too—daughter of a New Harbor lobsterman—and the two met at the Rockland campus before Caelan dropped out to care for his mother when she started forgetting. With Caelan in the woodshop planing boards, the overhead doors closed against breaths of black flies, Ruth Rappaport had left the gas on the kitchen stove while boiling water for her Earl Grey tea and fell stone asleep. When Caelan found his mother, she was wrapped peacefully in her crocheted shawl, the five o’clock news on the television, and no pulse in her radial artery.

Evie stayed over that night and all those that followed. She had just started her senior year that fall, and the two were supposed to travel to England and Scotland over winter break. Since she was a little girl, she dreamed of living in a castle. Caelan couldn’t promise a palace, but they could visit—Windsor, Alnwick, Hever, Dunnottar, Craigiever. The castles would wait. She gave up her apartment in Rockland and moved into the weathered, shake-shingle, two-bedroom Cape with the strange witch window overlooking a corrugated metal roof of the attached boatwright’s shed—twice the size of the house—in which Caelan restored wooden boats, just like his father had before he slipped his big toe onto the trigger of his Winchester with the barrel tucked neatly beneath his chin on the night before what would have been Caelan’s fifteenth Christmas. Everyone else had been at church.

Caelan buttoned his Carhartt, pulling the corduroy collar snug to his neck, and from his pockets found leather gloves, still balled into damp fists. Baxter only raised his eyes. Past their old bedroom, the sounds of Aunt Keesey’s cadenced breathing and the battering of frigid blasts against wooden windows. He quietly slid two logs into the iron woodstove, and the room glowed like dawn. Caelan’s work boots, propped upside-down on the register, warm and dry against his wool socks. He held a breath, turned the brass knob, and stepped out into sub-zero air that hit like a frozen swell. The orb settled at the forest’s wood line, but he made his way across the driveway and drifts, where the woodshop squatted just below the witch window.

Through the wicket in the barn door, familiar scents of turpentine and fresh wood shavings mingled with burnt coffee. Atop an ancient cast-iron woodstove scavenged from the Friendship Sloop propped out back, the blue-enamel coffee kettle Caelan had left perking for after he and Evie’s evening walk with the dog. Coals still warm in the stove’s belly, the iron hissed at the melting snow from Caelan’s sleeves. With a shop rag, he moved the kettle off the heat and gazed out the back window at the light shining on the tarped wooden sailboat perched on a rusty cradle between the shed and the woods. The old sloop had slipped its mooring and had taken a beating on the shoals just south of Pumpkin Cove during a gale the summer before; its owner—a retired lobsterman named Gentry—released the thirty-three-footer to Caelan, thinking both he and the boat too damaged and frail to sail again. Caelan imagined Evie’s arms around his shoulders as he piloted the sloop around Muscongus Bay at sunset, dropping hook, catching supper, bundling up on deck to watch the Northern Lights.

His chest hollowed as if an ice pick pierced straight through it and his heart. None of it would happen now.

Caelan shifted his feet. Beside his leather apron on the workbench, her half-eaten apple, the apple half she saved for him, the half of the whole he’d forgotten, shriveled and browned. He palmed the fruit, its red skin soft where she’d last held it. He touched its flesh to his mouth, closed his eyes for a moment, then threw it into the stove where it hissed at him. Tears welling in his eyes, a photograph taped to the pegboard between mallets and chisels, Evie, Fourth of July. A face full of freckles. A rare smile lately from the only one in the whole world who understood the one holding the camera.

And he broke down for the first time the first night after the evening Evie died. His crying surprised him. He cried long and hard enough to remember that he’d never cried after his mother or his father died. He wondered if he’d ever cried so hard.

He had. A summer canoe trip on the Penobscot with his father, his Uncle Philip, and his cousin Michael, a month younger than Caedan’s nine years, best friends. On the third day, the sky went gunmetal, the air chilled, thunder so close, ripples pulsed on the water. The flash stole the sound from Caedan’s ears and stripped the color from the world around him. Then Michael was dead, slumped backward in the canoe, eyes wide open as if still trying to comprehend what had just happened. A carbon spiderweb tattooed across his neck and face.

In the silverlight, three of them in one boat, paddling to North Lincoln. Uncle Philip rapidly breathed clouds in the shape of the only word he could whisper until the boy was back home and buried.

No.

Caelan formed the same word on his lips now.

He had finished crying. What in this world would ever make him cry so hard again? He didn’t want to know. He held the shop rag to his eyes, blew his nose, tucked his hair back behind his ears, and pulled on his ballcap. Next to the hanging tools over the workbench, he opened little drawer compartments one by one, dug among the fasteners, shackles, hanger bolts, and clevis pins, until he felt the little box. He thumbed the red velvet, soft as a deer antler, pocketed it, slipped on his gloves, and pushed open the wicket where the cold, clear outside met him.

He had cried so long that the snow stopped, and the sky cleared through bare trees, but the puckish orb waited patiently at the wood line. A haze of woodsmoke draped the shed roof until a rogue down sheer sent the gray cloud whipping into a cyclone, stirring within it a swarm of red cinders yanked from the stove. Evie loved campfires, woodstoves, fireplaces, and he’d find her often in the darkest hours of the night, snuggled in a nest of Afghans on the braided rug before the glow of the stove, the room a swelter of heat and autumn light. He’d lie beside her, woodsmoke tangled in her auburn hair, she would stir but not open her eyes. Soon, her breathing would steady, and her body would curve into his.

The strange light was no longer above but ducking under the trees where the path led through the woods to Ross Pond. Caelan began following its glow that still hummed in the muffled stillness of the snow-covered forest. Soon, the path left the naked hardwoods that groaned above and into the pitch pines, stressed and creaking from the heft of the snow. In the spaces between the boughs, constellations smeared a black-and-blue sky, and the lone fisher cried again. The light floated faster down the trail than Caelan could trudge, snow knee-deep in clearings. He’d pass through the vapor ramparts of his own breath as he chased the little blue orb through the thickets. Soon, snow-covered canoes resembling the humped backs of whales signaled the pond’s edge.

The indents of Evie’s tracks still apparent from where she squatted at the shore just after sundown, perhaps to test the ice’s surface, disappeared in the middle of the pond. Achromatic against the hushed black woods, the snow-covered clearing hurt his eyes to adjust, and when they did, the scattered imprints of Caelan’s boots from hours before met with the volunteer fire team’s, who failed to extract Evie’s body.

I’m sorry, son, but she’ll be down there till the next thaw. 

She sank. Evie sank. In her parka, her Docs, her green baggy pants, and flannel. She sank to the bottom. Her rust-colored hair, skin like China, delicate, slightly opened jaw, chattering teeth, the elbows and cheddar still in her belly from supper, and no diamond ring on her willow-thin finger. There, at the bottom of Ross Pond, until spring.

Don’t bodies float?

Decomposition slows in frigid water. Gasses. They don’t form without bacteria, and you need warmth for bacteria, son.

Caelan and every little child whose father goes to sea learn this before they can pray Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

Monuments of sailors lost in these frigid waters fleck the North Atlantic’s unforgiving shorelines.

What about the ponds?

The orb hung in the middle—a blemish on pure white—then sank into the frozen depths. The ice groaned like an old wife’s warning with each and every footfall, but his steps were at least as sure or as careless—he didn’t know which—as Evie’s.

I pray the sea won’t take me deep.

He stepped into her footprints as if he could somehow feel closer to her, and a strange warmth spread into his chest, his head, his arms and hands, and legs and feet as he neared the breach.

If I fall through ices thin.

The water yawed, a great black mouth on a face of cold white, the ice scabbed over clear and slight where her footprints broke through and she was swallowed whole just hours ago.

Let me, Lord, please rise again.

And lit by the bolt of blue light, at first dim then clearer, Evie’s wraithlike face pressed against the ice, crystalline eyes open wide as if peering dreamily through a cloudy window. He jumped back, and the ice popped like a gunshot across the frozen pond. He settled on his hands and knees, wide, to distribute his weight. Face to face with his love, a China doll behind glass. Her long, red hair, woven with weeds, swaying in slow-motion, hands stretched delicately from within the flannelled sleeves of her aubergine parka. Affixed to the ice’s underside like wet paste on tissue paper, her upward palm—love, life and fate lines she taught him—abrupt like jagged, little, frostbitten scars.

The fisher cried, the trees snapped, the ice groaned, and Caelan swore he heard the whisper of his name. Gravelly, ancient, penetratingly cold.

But here she is, bathed in blue light from below.

His tears frozen solid to the corners of his eyes, Caelan kneels closer. He presses his ungloved hand against the ice above Evie’s. Cold, humming numbly, his blood retracts.

He pounds on the ice with the heel of his hand, but it will not break where it had opened for her just hours before.

Evie, do hear me?

Her gaze too content for death, too wondrous to be conscious of the pain in Caelan’s world, this side of the ice.

But underneath, he understands now, is the happiest he’s seen her.

And the ice sighs, long and steady, from end to end and all around him, echoing off into the woods, the woods, where the fisher-cat cries.

The encasement an elegant ossuary, solid, glowing, permanent—a frozen kingdom beneath, a divide uncrossable above.

Still sighing. Still breathing.

Kneeling above Evie, Caelan reaches his numb fingers into his pocket to find the imperfect diamond ring.

He had driven to Boothbay early one morning in early fall while Evie was in class. The ring, he found, in an antiques store that dealt in estate sale merchandise. Evie loved a good story. The ring, the shopkeeper swore, was from England, at least a century old. Worn thin in one spot and reshanked, the diamond cleaned and reset—here, you can tell by the solder.

England. Where Evie wished to one day find her roots. Soon, he would say, but no longer.

The ice pings, cleaves. Now, he can only remind her of the promise he’d made. The promise he keeps.      

Photo of Christopher Kostyn Passante

BIO: Christopher Kostyn Passante is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at Drexel University. He holds degrees from Clarion, Wesley, and Plattsburgh State universities and is an Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop alumnus. He was a 2025 runner-up for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and his work appears in the Bellingham Review, Wilderness House Literary Journal, and Raven’s Perch. A former journalist and nonfiction author, he lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where he draws inspiration from long walks among the Allegheny Mountains with his wily Australian shepherds.