Lisa woke up only when the train stopped. She had spent all night trying to fall asleep in her second-class seat. Apparently, she had eventually succeeded. The seat had actually not been the biggest problem, the light had been. It never got completely dark this time a year, not this far north. Lisa suddenly felt her heart jump as she noticed that the sign outside said 'Bastuträsk'. This was her stop! Suddenly she was wide awake and sprung into action. She grabbed her rucksack, hurried down the aisle and made it out just in time.
Tuva was waiting for Lisa at the station, though not on the platform. There was no platform. There was a station building, but it didn't seem to be in use as such any more. Tuva was the only person as far as the eye could see. A smile erupted on her freckled face, which was framed by half-long dark hair, when she saw Lisa.
``Welcome to the North!" she said and embraced Lisa.
``Thank you." Lisa said and looked around at the few buildings around. How could a town, if you could even call it that, this tiny have its own train station?
``Let's go." Tuva said and motioned to the one car on the little area with leveled dirt that functioned as a parking lot. It was a Volvo that looked to be on its third decade. ``It's pretty close; just an hour and a half." she said and looked at Lisa as if to gauge her reaction. Lisa opened the car door carefully. The window was held in place by duct tape and she was almost afraid that the door itself would come loose.
``You really can't do anything without a car out here." Tuva said, almost apologetically. ``I bought it last week from a Finnish guy for 700 euro and I'm gonna sell it before i go back to Stockholm for next semester."
There were a few houses by the road right outside town, but then there were only fir trees.
``Aren't you afraid that the car will break down?" Lisa asked.
``Yeah, then I'll have to eat noodles with a side of noodles til' Christmas."
``But how would we get someone to help us?" Lisa said and looked at her phone, which had zero bars of service.
Tuva shrugged. ``It's summer, we won't freeze to death if we have to wait a bit."
Lisa shuddered. It was easy to imagine that you really might freeze to death if your car broke down around here in the winter, but today was midsummer's eve. Lisa's friends had thought that she was crazy to go this far north to celebrate.
The conventional option was be invited to go to someone's vacation house in the countryside, preferably in the archipelago, to have a traditional dinner and dance around the maypole. All of the vacation houses that might reasonably be in question for Lisa were cramped cottages where you had to argue about who would spend the night in a sleeping bag on the floor. But not having your own room wasn't supposed to matter. On midsummer's eve you were supposed to sneak away and fuck under the open sky, anyway, and pray that you weren't full off ticks when you got back to the table. Most likely, though, no one would get to fuck, unless they got too drunk to mind the ticks, and some nerd with a beard would just lecture about how the shortest night of the year was traditionally believed to be suffused with erotic energy.
Within Lisa's circle of friends privilege of a traditional midsummer's eve celebration was reserved for couples, and Lisa was between boyfriends. Some of her still-single friends had considered it a minor betrayal for her to leave the city and not party with them like usual. They thought the thing she was going to instead sounded weird, even though Lisa hadn't told them about the sex part.
"I think it's really cool that you're doing this, but it will also be cool if you change your mind at any time." Tuva said with a dead-serious expression.
"We've done stuff like this before." Lisa reminded as reassuringly as she could.
Tuva had introduced her to sexual performance art. They met close to a year ago through Lisa's boyfriend for the explicit purpose of having a threesome. The boyfriend was now an ex, but Lisa and Tuva had jointly put together a performance piece with the title "masturbation tutorial". It was structured as an object lesson where they took turns in the role of 'the teacher' and 'the demonstration object' to show different techniques. The delivery was dead-pan, as if they were really trying to teach their audience how to masturbate better, but the real point was the social commentary in the subtext. No more than a dozen people ever saw the piece, but Lisa was still really proud of how it turned out. It was the first artistic thing she had ever done and to her great surprise it felt good, not just OK, to expose herself to the not-quite-strangers of Tuva's extended friend group. Lisa had meant to invite her own friends too, but got cold feet at the last second.
"This thing is different, though." Tuva said, still concerned. "It's totally OK that you're not religious, but some people really do believe."
Lisa realized that she had seemed flippant. "Yeah, I know this is serious." she conceded.
"It's my heritage." Tuva replied sincerely.``There are written sources from as early as the sixteen hundreds that talk about fertility rituals, but the practice is probably way older than that." she explained. ``Isn't it awesome!" she continued, enthusiastically. ``Female sexuality as an object of worship! I think that when the practice was banned in 1879, that can be understood as an example of the state enforcing patriarchy." She paused for a moment. ``I don't think I have told you, but right at the end of last semester I got the OK to write my master's thesis about that. My advisor wants me to include the colonial aspects of the imposition of Christianity on the Saami indigenous people as well, but I guess that's fair."
``Congratulations!" Lisa replied emphatically, but she felt a sting of envy. She had a topic for her master's thesis as well, but not one that excited her nearly as much. Tuva had this cute, nerdy way of getting excited about stuff.
Tuva stopped the car next to a wooden one-story building with a cross on the door. Next to it was an almost comically small church, probably not much larger than someone's living room on the inside, made from rough-hewn stone. Beside it was a wooden steeple painted red.
``Is this the place? I thought..." Lisa asked, surprised.
``The priest here is really cool. She doesn't mind the traditional stuff at all, even though it's technically pagan." Tuva explained, with heavy air-quotes around the word 'pagan'. She leaned over to Lisa's side. ``I'm so happy you are here." she whispered and quickly kissed Lisa on the cheek before she opened the car door. Lisa felt butterflies in her stomach.
There were a few other cars parked, but no other signs of people. The wooden building, which was apparently the church hall, had a cast iron stove as it's center piece. A half-dozen tables and a commensurate number of chairs were arranged around it. The only person inside was a woman with ginger hair down to her waist. She was collecting and stacking chairs. The contours of her slender body could be seen through the impossibly thin fabric of her thin linen dress. Even though there was no electric lighting, it was clear that the woman wasn't wearing any underwear.
