The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

The Hike

To travel time was no different than to move in space. Not according to Joan.

“This won’t be whimsical, or cute,” she told me. “It’s painful. The same way a hike up that mountain takes the work of your calves and your lungs and your will.” Joan sat still at her desk, in her orange swivelly chair, and pointed across my chest and out through the window, into the vastness of the greywhite sky above Mount Planck. The airs over its top bent and waved, like an enormous iridescent bubble. A stormcloud, the villagers were calling it, but it wasn’t.

“I’m going again tomorrow,” I said.

“To the top?” Joan asked. “Why? Doesn’t look like anything up close. You know that.”

“I know nothing,” I said. Joan laughed. We could agree on some things sometimes.

“Hoping perihelion does something cool? Me too. Well I’ll need you back by 2pm,” she said. “Running the machine again. And don’t ruin the thing by looking too closely, for the sake of Wheeler. Like you did with that crush of yours. Girl ran for the hills, you were so obvious.”

The bubble over the mountain had been increasing its glow and size over the past months. First, a small dim red, and then lighter and lighter and bigger and bigger until it had become, as it was now, like a creamsicle, with a sweet outer layer of orange showing through its translucent and bendy barrier a cool white interior. I wanted to get up there before it burst, or disappeared some other way.

Joan didn’t need to remind me about the analogy to love. I saw it for myself. Had tried too hard with Alice, I knew that. Couldn’t bring myself to lean back, relax. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll have to make my way back down before then anyhow, sun will be low and leaving early.”

“Yep. January doesn’t leave us much light,” said Joan. “Machine should run fine for it though. Just be back when the insolation dips to twenty, please.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “Less than one.” I opened the door to the cabin and turned back to smile at her. Joan sat, still in her own frenzy at the wood desk by the window, fixed in space, her tea steaming upward and her laptop lights reflecting off of her glasses. She shined.

“And wear your good boots,” she said, not looking up at me, still typing. “I don’t need you barreling down the mountain and coming in with a limp for the real hike.”

I got to the top of Planck before noon, the sun at its highest and still just barely a radiating line of pink over the forest to the east. No villagers were bothering to make their way up anymore. Not since the bubble had first appeared months ago. I put my things down on a warm patch protected from the snows under the tent of a pine, a spruce, where the bottom branches had broken off and left a cave inside. I laid my briefcase of instruments out at the base and sat on a bed of dried needles. The canopy kept me from seeing the sky. Good. I didn’t want to look up yet.

I had seen it before. From here even. But I felt compelled to look again. Any great scientist would. This is what we’d all been waiting for. An anomaly of the sky or stars. Something in our lifetime which was strange and new. What every science kid dreams of. A thing to discover, to define, to name. A piece of the universe to own. To be the first to understand.

But in real life, turns out, new, strange things fade away quickly, become the same mystery as the-everything-else. Attention had dimmed on the bubble. So soon too. Seemed the same priority as every other curiosity on earth. It was simply added to the list of things-we-don’t-know.

So before I capitulated to it, to the apathy or acceptance of the bubble as just-another-thing, I was compelled to come here again. To try to see it better. To figure it out. And if I failed today I would go back to the monotony of the same labwork I’d been doing for decades. Working, slowly, with Joan on the machine.

Last time I’d come, I used every tool I could to examine it, though the bubble looked from underneath like nothing more than a crack in the ether, a clear spill of oil, like you were looking through a dirty telescope lens. The distortion was visible insofar as the sky turned slightly dreamlike, but the whole of the bubble wasn’t obvious unless you looked from far down in the village or a helicopter over the forest.

I looked over at my briefcase. I thought of the spectrometer, the magnets. None of it had helped.

I crawled out from under the tree, and arched my neck up to look, and watched the clouds through the bubble moving and high far over, each obscured and slightly oranged. I saw a snowy owl through it, and then a flock of shorebirds. Nothing. No new realizations. My pager buzzed 25 DEGREES. Joan.

The sun was gone by the time I got to the bottom, the village lights already on and tinting the streets and snows a shimmering amber color. No one was out.

When I opened the door, Joan was still at her desk at the cabin, tapping her foot.

“See?” she said, nodding toward the window. I looked out onto Mount Planck. The bubble was gone.

She pulled the machine up from under her desk and flipped the switch I’d carved from iron ore. The pyrite innards flashed and the room glowed green. I felt my gut connect to the ether.

“A new universe.” Joan said. “You got your boots on?”

I looked down to the snow at my feet, watched it at once melt and crystallize, frost inching up me.

Dana Jaye Cadman’s debut poetry collection Nova is winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, forthcoming 2026. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in North American Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Southeast Review, Four Way, Conduit Magazine, and elsewhere, and her stories in Okay Donkey Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and Mystery Tribune. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and a Pushcart Prize, placed as finalist in the Jake Adam York Prize, Georgia Poetry Prize, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction: Radical Futurism, the Great American Fiction Contest, longlisted for the Uncharted What the Wild Carries Prize, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Pace University, Pleasantville. Find her work at danajaye.com

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