Penny Walker, 2026 story writer-in-residence, weaves a flash story as she walks through Copenhagen.
12th – 14th February 2026
22 miles
We walk from the station to the hotel. I use the map on my phone. The distance is so short that it surprises me. I am good at maps. I can read street names, triangulate, identify directions both cardinal and relational, but scale is something which, it seems, needs to be walked into my body.
The folds in the tourist map bisect silhouettes of castles and museums, yellow pedestrianised streets, coloured lines for bus routes. There is a suggested walking route of red dots which we do not follow. We use an app to find the light festival. Glowing pink and green pins stand in for illuminated frozen waterfalls and curling neon tendrils.
Walking back from the Little Mermaid we stumble upon the Museum of Danish Resistance – a place we hadn’t seen on app or map. Pinned behind glass is an ‘escape and evasion’ map drawn in black on white silk, and I wonder where it has been in the eighty years since it was created, and whether it helped its carrier find their way home.
We walk overlapping circuits, out and back from the hotel, recognising more each time. We loiter and drift, change our minds, fall in and out of step.
In the centre of town, we climb the Round Tower. Instead of stairs, it has a ramp of brick paviours curling up like the inside of a snail shell. At the top is the observatory where astronomers mapped stars and planets, and discovered, through their discrepancies, the hesitancy of light. Etched steel panels tell us what we can see from the viewing platform: churches, chimneys, The Bridge.
Bead by bead, we thread this city onto a yarn which twists back on itself. When we recall the map we have knotted together, ephemeral landmarks mean as much as solid ones: the unexpected convergence of cosplaying teenagers; the impeccable English of the armed guards outside the synagogue; the trodden paths across Radhusplads, widening as the snow melts.
APA style reference
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