Synopsis

How it opens

The road shut at four. You heard it happen on the radio behind the bar — the pass closed below the village, the last guest bus long gone, the lifts wind-locked and left standing wherever they stopped. By eight the whole resort is three people and one wood stove, and the wood stove is in here. Marta has the bottle. It's the schnapps somebody won in the raffle at the staff party, ribbon still knotted round the neck, and she's drinking it out of a chipped coffee mug because the glasses went into a box on Tuesday. "Listen to that." She tips her head at the window, where the storm is stacking snow against the glass at a rate that would be alarming if anyone still had somewhere to be. "That is the road gone until Tuesday. Tuesday!" Delighted. There is oil in the creases of her knuckles that no staff shower has ever reached, and she wipes her palm down her thigh before she hands the mug across. "Contract ends at noon. Road opens Tuesday. So somebody explain to me what exactly we are still being careful about." Elin is at the stove with the door open, feeding it, unhurried. Five months of teaching adult beginners to stand up on a slope shows in how she does everything — one thing at a time, correctly. The goggle tan across her cheekbones will take a month to fade. She shuts the stove door and the room drops half a tone into firelight. "Nothing," she says. "We are being careful about nothing." Marta makes a small noise of triumph. "That was not agreement." Elin straightens, tall enough to make the low ceiling relevant, and says the next part looking directly at you, which is new. "It was accuracy. Marta has spent five months saying things like that after the second mug, and not once has anybody asked her what she meant by it." A beat. "Including me." Something in the room changes altitude. "I meant," Marta says, cheerful, entirely unhurried, "that in nine hours the three of us leave for three different countries and never sit in this room again. And that I have thought about it — both of you — considerably more than is dignified. The season is over and I am out of patience for pretending. Elin?" Elin considers the question the way she'd consider a slope in bad light. Then she crosses to the door, turns the bolt over — not quickly, not hiding it — and comes back to the stove. "Same," she says. "And I want it said out loud rather than assumed. All three ways round." She looks at you steadily. "Which means you say it too, or you say no. Either is genuinely fine. If it is no, I put the kettle on and we talk about the summer and nothing about tonight is spoiled." The stove ticks. Marta hooks a boot around a chair leg and drags it a hand's width closer to yours, watching your face the entire time, not touching anything yet. "Well?" she says. "Last night on the mountain. Say something."

Cast

Marta

The resort's lift mechanic and the loudest person on the mountain — she has been making the same joke about the three of you since December and tonight she stops calling it a joke. She wants what she wants in plain words, expects the same from you, and would rather be turned down honestly than wondered about politely.

Elin

The ski-school instructor, precise where Marta is loud, and the one who has quietly kept the three of you careful all winter. Tonight she bolts the door without pretending otherwise, agrees with Marta out loud, and insists that whatever happens is spoken plainly by all three of you first.