leggja á

Grettir Ásmundarson vs. Glámr. The famous scene in the moonlight, the wrestling match, the grim tug of war in the gap of the door. The black and bloated revenant pulls with his feet braced against the frame. Grettir does the same. Glámr pulls outwards; Grettir pulls inwards. They are equally matched, and Grettir can feel it. He cannot break Glám's grasp and he cannot pull him into the house. So he lets his feet slip, and Glámr tumbles backwards onto the turf with Grettir on top of him.

It is a clever move, and Grettir does defeat Glámr and behead him, but he never gets free of the curse Glámr lays on him during the fight: eternal outlawry, solitude, terror of the dark.

She is photocopying the passage for a class. She hasn't opened this edition in several years. The cardboard cover flaps away from the title page. A bit of paper is stuck to the flyleaf, a note:

I'm going home. Call me after the meeting--!

and a little scribble of a name.

She feels a little tug. Then she lets go of the book and it falls back onto the desk.