LoveStar by Andri Snaer Magnason Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Indridi and Sigrid lived in an endless apartment block, which wound around the old Coke factory that had been converted into the Puffin Factory. It not only bred puffins for the LoveStar theme park in Oxnadalur but also honey-scented roses. When Indridi opened the window in the morning the house was filled with the fragrance of roses and honey, and “Eat me! Eat me!” sounded from the Puffin Factory across the road and echoed all round the neighborhood.
    The Puffin Factory was a gigantic space. The puffins not only had to be on show in the LoveStar theme park up in Oxnadalur, they also had to be conspicuous in the countryside on the way there. Trucks packed with puffins went out daily to distribute them on hillocks along Highway One. They could hardly be bothered to move and so were easy prey for predators, but that did not matter too much as the production cost of each puffin was small compared to the pleasure they afforded passersby.
    The Puffin Factory was built following the unprecedented popularity of romantic movies based on Jonas Hallgrimsson’s life, which LoveStar had produced at the opening of the Oxnadalur theme park. These were pretty powerful films. People who came to the country afterward had high expectations of being inspired or enthralled and often experienced severe disappointment. According to surveys there were two things that principally got on people’s nerves. Firstly, LOVESTAR could not always be seen twinkling over the peaks of LavaRock and, secondly, the birds people saw from the bus window were nothing to write home about. When guides pointed to a puffin and said: “That’s a puffin, the bird from the romantic poems, the bird from the romantic movies,” some grumpy voice would always call out from the back of the bus: “ Das ist nicht der Vogel in dem Gedicht. Drichf thef of in fluc! That ain’t the bird I came to see!” And without fail the whole group would chorus the final verse uttered by the poet when his true love had been crushed by an avalanche, the love star had fallen, and the poet had thrown himself in despair from LavaRock:
    O, black bird with the rainbow beak
    Wings of love and feathers sleek,
    So beautiful like babies’ hands
    Best of birds in all the lands
    O, Puffin, sing your song to me
    A dream of summer it may be
    O, Puffin, will you fly with me?
    Will you bring my love to me?
    Even as the poet recited this verse, the puffin was flying to him through the snowstorm with a message from his true love in its beak: she had not died in the avalanche but lay trapped in a farmhouse. But just before the puffin reached him, the poet threw himself off LavaRock, and his lover starved to death in the snow.
    In the movies about the poet, Wings under the LoveStar and The Boy from Deep Dale, CGI was used to recreate the puffin as it should have looked in the poet’s time. The audience gasped with delight as the puffin hurtled through the storm and wept when it fluttered around the poet with the letter as he fell, and even the hardest-hearted were reduced to tears by its mournful song when the poet was crushed on the rocks.
    The locals found it desperately humiliating when tourists asked repeatedly: “Oh, is that a guillemot?” Ornithologists (sponsored by a tourist authority interest group) opined that the puffin had repeatedly mated with guillemots or even razorbills or some other such lowly bird. There had been sightings, and photos were published in the papers. And of course there was no way of knowing what the puffins got up to in their overwintering grounds.
    It was seen as a symbolic and patriotic act when LoveStar bought up the Coke factory and converted it into a puffin factory. The Puffin Factory scientists worked tirelessly for four years on improvements to the puffin until it would meet the approval of the most exacting tourists. The puffin was as big as a turkey (in fact it was 73 percent turkey, but that was