Mirrors to Atlantis

Chapter 1

Polina awoke to the jarring scream of her father's old, dented tea kettle from down the hall. He was already preparing for his day in his room, which was on the opposite end of the small apartment they shared. She brushed her long auburn hair away from her face and squinted at her cluttered nightstand bathed in the warm, orange glow filtering through the curtains. Her small alarm clock displayed the unwelcome time: 4:43 am. The room was frigid, a stark reminder of the harsh winter in their Arctic port town of Dikson.

She rolled onto her back, her exasperation at being rudely awakened mingling with a sense of nostalgia. It hadn't always been like this. Polina's childhood was filled with memories of living in Vaiya with her beautiful and eccentric mother, Katarzyna. Their modest house was adorned with beautiful antiques and dotted with trinkets from her mother's world travels. Katarzyna had a passion for collecting pottery and silk scarves from distant lands. She worked as a hair stylist in Gatchina, a bustling city not far from their Vaiya home. Katarzyna adored parties, dancing, and all forms of beauty. Tall, slender, with wavy auburn hair and green eyes, she and Polina were strikingly alike. Yet, Polina's slightly darker complexion came from her father, Boris.

Boris, a stern and hardworking man with a penchant for stoicism and a devotion to his job, had brought about a schism in their personalities that led to their divorce shortly after Polina's birth. So, Polina had lived with her mother.

It was only when Polina turned seventeen that she saw her father again. The occasion was her mother's funeral. Katarzyna had tragically perished in a car accident on her way home from work. This loss devastated Polina. Not only did she lose her mother, but she also lost her home, her friends, her hobbies-everything familiar.

The morning after her mother's funeral, her father arrived to pick her up. Silently, they made their way to the airport, and together, they journeyed to the remote town where her father had lived for the past eleven years. Polina clutched her single suitcase and backpack as they rode the elevator to the seventh floor. There, she was greeted by their new home: a small, cluttered two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a view of a neighboring block on one side and a parking lot on the other. There were no trees, just barren rock in the summer and a snow-covered tundra in the rest of the year.

That was four years ago. Now, Polina worked as a cashier at the local grocery store in this town of fewer than 500 residents. She had grown accustomed to the bitter cold of winter and the perpetual darkness, followed by the midnight sun in the summers. She didn't particularly enjoy either, but she had learned to coexist with these harsh realities.

Polina remained adrift after her mother's death, with no clear purpose. She had decided against pursuing higher education. Moving to Dikson and severing ties with her previous life had left her in a melancholic and detached state. Her father's reserved nature and their mutual numbness toward life didn't help matters. They existed in a state of limbo, neither living nor truly alive-mere spectators of time passing. Neither had concrete goals or plans for the future. Polina half-expected to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood, not as an aspiration, but as an inevitability. She had never experienced romance, nor had she ever harbored career aspirations. Once, she had briefly considered becoming a prima ballerina, but her height, at 178cm, was a tad too much.

Polina's daydream was shattered by a crash from the other side of the hall, accompanied by her father's string of expletives. He had knocked over a stack of books perched on a chair outside his room. Deciding that returning to sleep was futile, Polina went to the kitchen to silence the screaming kettle. Pouring her father a cup of tea, she watched him come into the kitchen with pieces of the broken chair in tow. "Thank you, kitty," he said, using the pet name from her childhood. "Before you leave, please do something with those books on the floor." With his tea in hand, he left for his day at the port, carrying the chair fragments under his arm.

Polina peered down the hall at the scattered books, poured herself some tea, and leaned against the kitchen counter. As she gazed out of the window into the tiny, dim apartment, it was still not yet 5 am. Her shift at the grocery store didn't start until 8 am. She stood there, lost in thought, with the warm mug cradled in her hands, her mind drifting.

A short while later, the jingle of her cat Sebastian's collar snapped her out of her reverie. He rubbed his face against her elbow, signaling his hunger. She attended to Sebastian's needs and then went to the stack of books in the hallway, kicking them into her father's disheveled room and closing the door with a sigh. Checking the time, it read 5:10 am. With hours to spare until work, Polina often occupied her winter days with sleep, occasionally reading, but mostly sleep.

She lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling, and listened to a cassette her mother used to play. It was her favorite opera, Carmen. Hearing it on her old boombox transported her back in time to Vaiya when her mother still danced in the kitchen. Those were the days when the house smelled of antiques and her mother's perfume. Polina could walk barefoot in the yard, feel the lush grass beneath her feet in the summer, help her mother tend to their vegetable garden, inhale the scent of flowers, sit in the shade of a tree, and listen to the leaves rustle in the wind. Back then, her friends' voices filled the walls of her childhood home, and she didn't feel so alone.

Her pleasant reverie was abruptly interrupted when she sat up to check the clock. It read 7:00 am, and her alarm had sounded to remind her to prepare for work. She stopped the boombox, rewound the tape, tossed her mug into the sink, and hurried to her room to don her green uniform shirt embroidered with her name: Polina Morozov. She bundled up for her walk to the grocery store, bid Sebastian goodbye, and ventured out into the frigid, dark winter morning.