Becky comes in with two girls I don't know, all three of them mid-conversation, her dark hair down today. She sees me across the room and raises a hand.
I raise mine back.
She nods and keeps moving to her table. The two girls with her glance over. I look back at my eggs.
That's enough. That's the right amount of Becky for a Tuesday morning.
I finish my coffee, check the map, and go find mythology.
***
Tomlinson is already at the front of the room when I walk in, jacket off, sleeves rolled, writing notes on the board. He glances up when I come through the door and nods once and goes back to writing.
I find a seat near the middle.
Tomlinson caps his marker and turns around and the room settles without him asking it to. He has the kind of presence that doesn't announce itself — it's just there, and the room responds before anyone decides to.
"We're continuing the transformation unit," he says. "Specifically — the boundary between human and animal in Arctic and Inuit tradition." He leans back against the desk. "Someone summarize where we left off."
A girl two seats down gives a clean summary — the permeability of form, the idea that human and animal aren't fixed categories in these traditions but states that can shift. Tomlinson listens. Doesn't interrupt, doesn't nod along on autopilot. Just takes it in.
"Good," he says. "Today I want to look at a specific story. I'm going to tell it rather than hand you a text, because it exists in oral tradition and it lands differently that way."
He tells it straight. In his voice, even and unhurried.
A hunter. A winter that went longer than it should have. He'd been tracking a wolf for days — not for any reason he could name. Just following, the way you follow something when you've stopped being able to explain why.
The cold got into him. The silence settled in after. At some point he stopped counting days and stopped thinking in words and just moved the way the wolf moved, reading the same wind, reading the same shadows under the trees.
He found his way back eventually. Walked into the village on his own feet, wearing his own face.
But he stood at the edge of it for a long time first.
Tomlinson pauses there.
He stood at the treeline and watched the people moving between the fires and he knew them. Knew their names. Knew which children belonged to which families. He knew all of it and still couldn't make himself walk in.
Because from the treeline they looked like something observed, not something he was part of. And he didn't know how to cross that distance again. Didn't know which step was the one that made him one of them instead of something watching them.
The elders saw him standing there.
They didn't send men out to bring him in. Didn't raise an alarm. One of them — an old woman — walked to the edge of the settlement and sat down in the snow. Not close. Not far. Just within sight. She brought food. She didn't offer it. Just set it down and sat with her hands in her lap and waited.
Others came. Not all at once. Over time. They built a small fire. They talked to each other, not to him — about ordinary things.
And slowly, over time, he came back. Not because they pulled him. Because they stayed close enough that he could remember what it felt like to be inside it.
Some come back, Tomlinson says. His voice the same throughout — even, unhurried. Some don't. And the ones who do are never entirely one thing again.
It isn’t treated as a tragedy.
Just a fact.
The village found ways to hold what he'd become. He found ways to live inside it.
That’s where the story ends.
The room doesn’t move when he finishes.
