| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
FLASH FICION
Burlap
by Barry Yourgrau
With terrible effort, a man manages to twist and curl himself into a shape that could hide from the world inside a burlap sack.
Showing posts with label Flash Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flash Fiction. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
I Don’t Need Anything from Here by László Krasznahorkai
I Don’t Need
Anything
From Here
by László Krasznahorkai
I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquillity, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.
Translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.
László Krasznahorkai is the author of “Seiobo There Below,” “Satantango,” and the collection of stories “The World Goes On.” In 2015, he won the Man Booker International Prize.
THE NEW YORKER
The Door Between Us By Mieko Kawakami
My apartment’s in an old wooden building, built who knows how many years ago, just one story, with two separate units, side by side, stuck between dilapidated houses no one lives in anymore. Imagine three old shacks that would have fallen down already if they weren’t holding one another up, and you’ll get the idea. My living space consists of one tatami room, a tiny kitchen with a single-burner stove, a leaky shower. There’s no storage. Out back, the space for drying clothes is all but taken up by the A.C., and it feels as though the wall of the house behind me is closing in.
Monday, August 12, 2024
To My Younger Self by Cora Frazier
| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
FLASH FICTION
To My Younger Self
by Cora Frazier
16 August 2018
Don’t cry so much. Don’t bite your mom’s nipples when you’re breast-feeding. Pee in the toilet. Grow teeth. Don’t hit your younger brother on the head with a hairbrush. Learn to read. A, B, C, etc. Practice. Don’t draw on yourself in black magic marker and walk around naked when your parents have friends over. Don’t tell your cousin about vampires. Don’t eat an entire thick paper magazine subscription card. Don’t throw your clothes in the bubble bath. Be confident in yourself.
Don’t tell your younger brother not to lick the pole when it’s freezing outside, because then he will do it—otherwise it never would have occurred to him. Don’t lie to your parents and say that a first-grader saw a mountain lion on the playground, causing your school to go on lockdown, and the secretary hid under her bulletproof desk in such a way that her butt stuck out. Don’t cry when the boys drop your elephant pencil into the hollow fence post in the alley. Tell someone what’s happening at school. Say “The boys are beating me up.” Say “I got a bloody nose because Parker threw me against the fence.”
Don’t lie to Lily and say that your parents got mad at you for letting her borrow money to buy a red tank top from Wet Seal, only because you’re jealous of how good her boobs look in it. Try to enjoy yourself with Jordan. When he calls you from college, say things other than complaints about your friends on the Mock Trial team making backhanded comments.
Don’t die. There’s no reason to. Why would you die? Be confident in yourself. With age you’ll learn that you shouldn’t. You’ll like being alive. You’ll look back at your younger, dead self and say, “She’s so beautiful. She didn’t know what she had.”
Don’t haunt Jordan. What did Jordan ever do to you, besides say that he wanted to “pursue other friendships,” a.k.a. “date other women,” the night before you flew to Morocco by yourself? I feel like it would be healthier not to apologize to him when you run into him at Grand Army Plaza. Like, maybe the apology led to regrets and desires to haunt him.
Don’t roam the earth looking for your wishbone necklace. It’s probably somewhere between the floorboards of Corey’s studio. Though maybe not, because he keeps the floorboards so clean, and you only met him a short time before your death. Don’t howl and moan, making gusts blow and trash fly and beams shake. I know it was a nice, simple necklace, of a flattering length on your clavicle, but wasn’t it only $30? And could you even wear it anymore?
Don’t lie beside Jordan and his new girlfriend, watching them sleep, imbuing their bed with a subtle chill, making them alternatingly get up to close the window, only to discover that the window isn’t open. Don’t breathe on the blankets, covering them with a frost imperceptible in the darkness. Don’t fall asleep yourself on their floor like they’re your parents and later wake up to the smell of coffee and the echoes of a podcast.
As your mom waits for the train in Penn Station, reading the Times on her phone, held up close to her face, her eyes narrow and her hand tucked neatly beneath her black purse, sit beside her if the seat is free. Slide your fingers between the strands of her long hair until she closes her eyes blissfully, no matter how terrifying the article she’s reading is. When she’s replanting the azalea bush, barely sweating, because she never sweats—unlike you, before you were ectoplasm—try not to weep. It won’t make a difference, and you never know when she’ll catch a sense of your grief.
You will fly next to Corey as he rides his bike across the Brooklyn Bridge, something you could never do when you still had solid legs. That’s O.K. You will perch on his desk at work and poke him in the ribs so he yelps and his co-worker looks over from a solitaire game. You will sit on his chair and wrap your legs around him like a barnacle on his body, and when he gets up, you won’t slide down to the floor. Instead you will hover. You could follow him into the men’s room, but maybe you’re feeling lazy. You will sit on his bookshelf when he’s doing calisthenics in his studio, in shorts and no shirt, making loud, audible exhalations. You will spoon him every night. When he’s cooking, you will hand him things. You will make sure the stove is off. When he’s thinking, “What was that called?” you will shout the answer into the studio in your loudest phantom voice. You will wish he could hear you, even if he still says that you gave fake apologies. You will ride in the passenger’s seat as he is driving home, but, just in time, you’ll switch to the couch in his studio so you can remember what it was like to see him walk through the door.
And then one day you’ll know you have to release your tight grip on phantasmagoric consciousness, and when you do, you’ll float up into the ether—or is it down? Or sideways? Are you spinning or tumbling? Are you moving or staying still? Is it infinitely large or infinitely nonexistent? And what would the difference be? And would you be O.K. with not remembering enough to miss it all, to miss them all, to miss yourself?
Let’s Say by Linor Goralik
| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
Let’s Say
by Linor Goralik
Translated, from the Russian, by Maya Vinokour
. . . Let’s say the leader of a children’s book club is discussing Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” with a group of nice, smart little seven-year-olds. They’re talking crime and punishment. “Just imagine,” says the teacher, “two kids are beating up a third, whom you don’t know, right in front of you. What do you do?” “Say something! Get a grownup! Run for help!” “Good,” says the teacher. “Now picture one of your classmates, someone you really don’t like. Ready? So you’re walking along, and you see two kids beating up that unpleasant child. What do you do?” A moment of silence. The teacher’s heart begins to soar. Someone says timidly, “Well, um, shouldn’t you still, like…” Someone else notes confidently that the girl in question probably “deserves it.” And only one little girl, sitting ramrod straight, says firmly, “You have to get in there and chase them away, of course!” And, before the teacher, brimming with joy, can open his mouth, she adds, “And then you finish her off yourself!” Once he’s caught his breath, the teacher asks: “Katya, but you wouldn’t have hit that girl in the first place, right? So why now?” “Well, she’s strong, usually,” says clear-eyed Katya. “But now she’s probably tired herself out!”
. . . Let’s say X., an engineer and a fantastic Israeli father, decides to make his two-year-old kiddo some traditional Hanukkah doughnuts from scratch. Not those floppy, enormous store-bought doughnuts with all that crap inside, but cute, chubby little doughnuts with homemade jam and handcrafted powdered sugar. He works his ass off in the kitchen for like twelve hours. The kiddo looks at the dish of doughnuts and, without touching them, says firmly: “I don’t like it,” then goes off to do her own thing. In his mind, X. says some strongly worded things about girls as a concept, eats two platefuls of chubby little doughnuts, and succumbs to several hours of moral and physical melancholy. The next day, he goes to pick up the kiddo from the Hanukkah party at her day care. He finds her sitting on the floor next to another kiddo. That kiddo is licking damp powdered sugar off some crumbly store-bought doughnuts and handing them off to our kiddo, who consumes each one with great enthusiasm. X. tries to convince himself that the issue was the powdered sugar, but his wounded soul cries out for justice. “Why is this happening to me, Mama?” he asks his mother that evening. “It’s because of the dumplings,” his mother says. Turns out that, in early childhood, X. refused to touch the homemade dumplings that his mother spent all night lovingly preparing for him. But, at other people’s houses, he was perfectly happy to eat crumbling store-bought dumplings from a cardboard box. He’d bite into them, pick out the meat and nibble at the dough, then carefully eat the grayish meat with a specially requested spoon, gazing at his dear mother with innocent eyes.
. . . Let’s say a little boy, hanging on his mother’s arm right in the middle of Moscow’s Rizhskaya Station, says in a confidential whisper: “Mama, I don’t wanna be the person you’re raising me to be anymore. I want to scream in the metrooooooooo-aaaaaaaaaaa!”
. . . Let’s say that in the home of F., a prize-winning poet, lives an aged nanny. The nanny has been with the family through thick and thin, surviving famine, terror, German occupation, evacuation, thaw, stagnation, and perestroika. She raised the poet’s grandfather, father, uncles, the poet himself, his sisters, children, and grandchildren, and is even now shouting affectionately at the poet’s small great-grandchildren from her seat of honor. This saintly woman was always exceptionally attentive to the lives of others and willing to listen to any kind of story: about famine, terror, German occupation, evacuation, thaw, stagnation, perestroika, and so on. But, at the end of every story, she had only one question: “So, did he get away?” This greatly impressed the guests of prize-winning poet F. “It’s the whole story of the Russian people in a single question!” said K., an artist. “Why just the Russian people?” objected Z., a choreographer. “It’s the whole story of the Jewish people in a single question!” “Oh, please,” answered the artist K. “The whole story of the Jewish people is contained in the question: ‘So, did anyone get away?’ ” The nanny, who had survived famine, terror, German occupation, evacuation, thaw, stagnation, and perestroika sat in her corner and was silent.
. . . Let’s say G., an anxious writer, periodically becomes convinced that he has wronged his loved ones in some terrible way, and that, as a result, they now hate him. So writer G. occasionally calls his loved ones to say something like, “Please don’t hate me because I forgot to return your pen yesterday,” or, “Please don’t hate me for eating the last apple three days ago,” and so on. Meanwhile, it’s November—seasonal affective disorder and all that—and pretty soon G.’s friends are getting several of these calls a day. On and on, until G. receives a letter from his loved ones: “Dear G.! Don’t worry, we don’t need a reason to hate you.” Sixteen signatories, two anonymous.
. . . Let’s say C., a translator, found an excellent way to solve his children’s problems. Or, rather, to get his children to solve their own problems. Anytime they started whining and trying to foist their issues on him, C. would say, pensively: “Why should I, an adult human, pick up the Legos scattered all over the floor?” “Why should I, an adult human, struggle to get a plum out from under the tub?” “Why should I, an adult human, watch ‘Up’ for the fourth time?” (Actually, this was a separate problem, because translator C. actively fears “Up,” a film about death and loneliness—but why should he, an adult human, have to explain all that to some little pissants?) And so, in the couple of months since he enacted this strategy, his children, to translator C.’s delight, have not only stopped harassing him so much, but have actually evolved (in his opinion) into much more independent people. They stuff their Legos into the bag of rice all by themselves; whatever’s rolled under the tub stays there, smelling great; they stream “Up” all by themselves and non-consensually tell Daddy all about it by themselves, too. So translator C. starts recommending his system to everyone he knows. Then, one day, he walks into the bathroom, and there’s his seven-year-old son P., lying in the empty tub with his eyes closed, mumbling: “Why should I, an adult human, have to think about any of this? Well, why should I?” And translator C. starts to feel a little sick—but it’s too late now, isn’t it.
Linor Goralik is the author of numerous works in Russian. A collection of her writing, “Found Life,” was published in English in 2017.
Sun Dogs by Dorthe Nors
FLASH FICTON
Sun Dogs
by Dorthe Nors
July 26, 2018
It’s a long time ago now, but once I lived in a cabin in Norway. It was Olav who mentioned the place to me, at the start of our relationship. He told me that it’d been the summer cottage of the Norwegian author Knut Terje Aasbakken. Now it served as a writer’s retreat, and a narrow lane led up to it from the village Olav was from. As a child, he’d spy on the writers. They seemed so secretive, he said, and dived into me.
After our relationship began to get complicated, a friend suggested I go away somewhere. So it was that I remembered Aasbakken’s cabin. The one on a mountainside, in a forest.
I applied, got the cabin, and left at the beginning of September. A woman from the general store drove me from the village. She talked about the area as we crept up the mountain in her little Golf. On the way, we passed the community center. She said it was customary for whoever was in the cabin to give a reading in the center. I gazed down on the river in the valley, and then she dropped me off with a key to the woodshed.
Evenings, I’d take a chair out in front of the cabin and try to stay there till I was shaking from the cold. In the mornings, I read, wrote zip. Late in the day I’d take a walk. And then one day I found myself at a standstill in front of the community-center notice board. “bunads,” the heading read, and under it was the name of Olav’s mother. She was called Halldis and taught the locals to sew their own folk costumes.
The days lasted an eternity, and at night the cold moved in. I walked around Aasbakken’s house and picked paint from the cabinet doors. Out in the forest, the mushrooms poked up, and it was impossible to escape the reading event in the community center. One evening in October, I positioned myself against a large loom-woven tapestry. During the coffee break, a woman with short dark hair and a face like an Inuit’s came over. She said, “I think you’ve met my son. He lives in Copenhagen.” I must have stared. “I’ve got an article he’s written about you,” she said.
In that way, I became sort of friends with Olav’s mother, Halldis. We agreed to go on some walks together. Later we also went out riding on her Fjord horses. She talked about the landscape, the kinds of tracks animals left, and how the winter we were entering would feel. We never spoke of Olav. It was my impression that she was a strong person, but at regular intervals she’d worry about whether I’d write about her.
One day in early November, we took the horses into the forest. When we came to a clearing, I said that the vista would make for a good opening scene. She said, “Yes, that’s what I’m so afraid of.”
I thought of Olav, his face and hers, and that might’ve been the day she invited me home for coffee. In any case, I remember that we let the horses loose in the pasture and sat in the kitchen. There were pictures of Olav and his wife on the bulletin board, and I’m sure that I gave Halldis a hug when I left.
Despite the awkwardness in our relationship, we kept seeing each other. One day when we were in the kitchen, Olav’s father came in. He sat down at the table reluctantly, as we probably didn’t want to be disturbed. Halldis found him a coffee cup, and of course he was disturbing us. I recall him saying that he didn’t care for well-educated people. He was a carpenter, Olav’s father. Said that the hand’s labor was important and pointed to the table. I praised the table, and then I had to go and see his workshop.
***
We walked out to it, all three, and what I remember most clearly was that he’d stuck up a photo of a naked woman with a thumbtack. He’d pinned her up over the door to the room where Halldis worked on her costumes. That meant that Halldis had to walk under the naked woman anytime she went in and did her sewing. You never know about other people’s relationships, but I thought to myself that it was their marriage Halldis didn’t want me to write about. It seemed complicated to me, though I think it seemed healthy to her.
Every day she passed beneath the naked woman who hung over the door with her legs slightly spread, and she’d hung there so long that Halldis no longer noticed her. She was no doubt thinking of her son in Copenhagen. His wife was beautiful and industrious. He interviewed famous authors. And now one of them was living in Aasbakken’s cabin.
The cabin had no phone, so I ended up getting a letter. I have it still. He was angry, Olav. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you,” he wrote.
In that sense, he wasn’t like his mother. I can recall another time we rode out together. It was a clear fall morning. On the outward part of our route, we rode past a lake. To me, Norwegian lakes feel bottomless, the landscape unknowable. Such uncertainty must leave its mark on the locals, I thought. Later, we went in among the trees, where it smelled of fungus and rot.
As we rode, we talked about how the forest looked lovely in its decay. I told her she resembled an Inuit, and that Olav must have got his features from her. She smiled at that, and there were birds of prey aloft, and moss upon the massive trunks of spruce, and I drank in everything I saw.
Then one day, when we were drinking coffee in the kitchen and her husband came in, wanting attention, she actually began to tell a story. She looked at Olav’s father, asked him, “Do I dare to tell this?” and he said, “Yes, just tell it.”
At first I thought she asked him whether she should tell the story because it was his, or because he decided which stories could be told in their relationship. In any case, she began telling it, though at times she’d put a hand over her mouth. “No, I don’t know if I dare,” she said, glancing from her husband down into her cup.
The story concerned her cousin who had been married to a bad man.
It wasn’t until the man was dead that the cousin discovered just how bad he’d been. It came out from the estate and certain letters found with it. “But you mustn’t write this story,” she said. She shouldn’t be worried, I said. “Your cousin’s husband wasn’t so out of the ordinary.” She asked, did I know such men? I said that now and then I ran into one. She asked if I wrote about them. “Sometimes,” I said.
I have the impression that during the time we spent together she managed to read my books. She mentioned one in particular. It had become winter, we were in the forest, and the surroundings creaked with snow and ice. She’d read the book but didn’t quite know what to think of it. She found the indecisiveness of the female protagonist especially hard to bear.
We crawled over an old stone wall. The sun was shining; my eyes hurt from all the whiteness. Recently, I saw an old photo from the gold-mining town of Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle. It was a picture of an Inuit and then the sun, and the sun wasn’t alone. It had company. It’s an optical phenomenon—the sun’s light is refracted by ice crystals and two bright points appear, one on either side. Under the picture it said that the sun had been joined by its rivals, the ones that in the language of the prairie were called sun dogs.
“What exactly are you afraid I’m going to write about?” I asked her. “I don’t know,” she said.
She stood there and the light went right through her, that’s the way I remember it.
How the sun caused her physical form to cease. On the broad white expanse she cast a sharp shadow and I stood opposite her, not alone.
“Halldis?” I said.
She tugged at her mittens, nodded.
Translated, from the Danish, by Misha Hoekstra.
***
Dorthe Nors is the author of seven books, including, most recently, the novel “Mirror, Shoulder, Signal.”
Sunday, August 11, 2024
Every Cried by Lydia Davis
| Illustration by Na Kim |
Every Cried
by Lydia Davis
4 July 2019
It is not easy to live in this world. Everyone is constantly upset by the small things that go wrong: one is insulted by a friend; another is neglected by her family; yet another has a bad argument with his spouse or his teen-age child.
Often, people cry when they are unhappy. This is natural. For a short time, when I was young, I worked in an office. Toward lunchtime, as the people in the office grew hungry and tired and irritable, they would begin to cry. My boss would give me a document to type, and I would push it away crossly. He would yell at me, “Type it!” I would yell back, “I won’t!” He himself would become petulant on the phone and slam it into its cradle. By the time he was ready to leave for lunch, tears of frustration would be running down his cheeks. If an acquaintance stopped by the office to take him to lunch, he would turn his back and ignore that person. Then that person’s eyes, too, would well up with tears.
After lunch, we usually felt better, and the office was filled with its normal hum and bustle, people carrying folders and walking briskly here and there, sudden bursts of laughter rising from cubicles. Work would go well until late in the afternoon. Then, as we all grew hungry and tired again, even more tired than in the morning, we would begin to cry again.
Most of us continued to cry as we left the office. In the elevator, we elbowed one another, and on the walk to the subway we glared at the people coming toward us. On the stairs descending into the subway, we forced our way down through the crowd coming up.
It was summer. In those days, there was no air-conditioning in the subway cars, and, as we all stood packed together, swaying between stops, the tears wet our cheeks, the sweat ran down our backs and legs, and the women’s feet swelled in their tight shoes.
Some people would gradually stop crying as they rode toward home, especially if they had found a seat. They would blink their damp eyelashes and contentedly suck on their fingers as they read their newspapers and books, their eyes still shining.
They might not cry again that day. I don’t know, because I wasn’t with them; I can only imagine. I myself did not usually cry at home, except at the table, if my supper was very disappointing, or if my bedtime was drawing near, because I did not really want to go to bed, because I did not want to get up the next day and go to work. But maybe others did cry at home, maybe on and off all evening, depending what they found there.
Break by Rabih Alameddine
| Illustration by Chloe Scheffe |
FLASH FICTION
Break
by Rabih Alameddine
6 September 2018
A few years after the break, I received an envelope from Beirut, from my brother, Mazen, containing nothing but a black-and-white photograph. Standing before the cadre of mailboxes in the dark lobby of my building, I tore open the envelope and tried to figure out why Mazen would send me a picture of himself and his bride. No note, not one word, just a cliché of a wedding portrait: the couple coming out of the church, a young Mazen, plump and fleshy, beginning to follow in his father’s footsteps, dark suit and tie, a beaming smile on his face, grains of rice stuck to his meticulously gelled hair. Clearly besotted, he was gazing at his bride, while she, coiffed hair streaked with highlights and gardenias, looked seductively at the camera, her leer proclaiming, I’ll give him the wedding night, and then all bets are off.
Had we been speaking, I would have warned poor Mazen. They divorced after ten hellish years.
At the time, I didn’t understand what he was trying to do. If he wanted to make contact, why send me a picture? Why not a letter, a phone call? Did he think this inanity would make me forgive him his duplicity? He was my closest friend always, my only friend. Co-signers of a covenant, we shared a bed till he was ten, pressed together against the same sheets of cotton, and he abandoned me.
I sent my reply, a photograph of my girlfriend and me. She and I were young and in lesbian love, and the picture reflected it. We were atop each other in Central Park, haloed by glorious sunlight and a furious cloud of gnats. I sported big hair and layers of early-Madonna tops over my budding breasts.
Ten years earlier, I had won a scholarship to Yale, a full eating-drinking-sleeping-studying scholarship, the prestige of which had earned me my family’s blessing. Leave, leave, young man, God be with you—leave and return to us with untold riches and a smidgen of culture to edify. I left Lebanon, and I transitioned in college, changing from a depressed young man to an angry one. The humiliations of my childhood, the don’t-do-this, the boys-don’t-do-that, the you-must-try-to-be-normal, all those sticks and twigs, dry kindling, burst into a furious bonfire. Everything was my family’s fault, of course it was. My cracked cup runnethed over with molten rage that no saucer could contain. My calls home became more obstreperous and less frequent. My side of the conversations consisted of various permutations of “I hate you, I loathe you, you never respected me, you never understood me, I’m unhappy and you made me so, I demand justice, I despise you.” Anger was the shape of my breath, outrage the sound of my voice. I cultivated indignation like a hothouse flower. My mother made sure to explain that I was giving the whole family a bad name, that they would be mocked and ridiculed because of me and the way I was choosing to live my life.
I don’t know which was the final straw: changing my major or changing my sex. I switched from pre-med to English at the beginning of my second year. I went out in public with kohl on my eyes and ruby-red lipstick in the middle of my third. My mother decided that I was dead—no one was to talk to or of me, not my father, not my siblings. She killed me.
Nothing hurt as much as being cut off from Mazen. When, as a child, I used to wake up terrified in the dark, so scared that I would sidle closer to him in our small bed and hug him fiercely; he poured comfort into my ears. The nightmare was not real, he would tell me. It couldn’t hurt me.
I was certain that I’d never forgive his betrayal.
But he sneaked back into my life, slipped into the water with a silent paddle. We sent photographs back and forth for seven years, but no words were exchanged; our relationship was reduced to a visual correspondence. It was only later, when he came to visit for the first time, that I learned that he’d sworn to the homunculus that was his mother that he would chop off his tongue if he uttered a word to me, that he’d saw off a finger if he wrote a single letter to the family freak. Instead, he’d send me a picture of himself on a Beirut beach, and I’d return one of my wife and me in matching skirts. I received a snapshot of his son and returned one of my cats. I refused to break. I immured my heart in iron. I was the strong one.
When I published my first book, I didn’t think anyone back in my cursed home country would even notice—small press, different name, poetry. How Mazen found it I do not know. I received a picture of him with his second baby boy cradled in his right arm and his left hand holding “Epistles,” my pride in paperback, the title stationed right where his heart was supposed to be.
He broke first. I received a four-by-six portrait of his son with a slightly bleeding nose, taken hastily, badly lit, likely by a bathroom bulb. On the ten-year-old face, a thread of blood trickled from nose to upper lip, curving an ogee around the corner of the mouth and down the chin. The boy was in no pain; he looked inquisitively at the camera, probably wondering why his father had had the urge to bring it out.
I held my breath for a beat or two or three when I saw the image. On the back of the photograph Mazen had written, “I keep seeing you.”
Iron is iron until it is rust.
When I was ten, a bully at school pushed me into a wall. My nose bled. Mazen, eleven at the time, took me to the lavatory and helped me clean my face. We missed two classes, hiding and holding each other in the bathroom. The boy’s face in the photograph is an almost exact replica of the one I saw in the mirror that day. Mazen’s son looks more like me than like his father. My response didn’t include a picture. Like him, I began with only one sentence, the incipit of all further conversation. In the middle of a white sheet, I wrote, “I have never stopped missing you.”
Wish by Linda Boström Knausgård
| Illustration by Icinori |
WISH
by Linda Boström Knausgård
I want you to give me what I’m asking you for. Sit down. You’ve come because I called for you. I’m grateful for that.
I’m having trouble with my faith. I’m scared all the time. I’m scared now. Can you tell? I’ll say this briefly. I want you to promise me that they’ll live. The children. My husband. I want them to live. Nothing must happen to them.
You know what I’m talking about. It has to stop. I can’t protect them anymore. I can’t stay awake like this. I need to lay my head down, heavily, the way I could if I knew there would be a new day tomorrow. The morning has to be clear and bright. The light stirring their little bodies from sleep. You must take away the darkness forever.
It’s not an easy thing to do. But it’s in your power.
Let me tell you about the children. Let me describe them to you, so you can see them. So you know who they are inside. You wouldn’t want to harm them if you knew them like I do.
There they are. There we all are, together. At the table in the kitchen. See how they struggle. They’re so small and already they struggle. See the darkness over them. They feel it. But they don’t know what it is. That’s our eldest daughter beside me. Can you see her thin arms in her nightdress? The way she holds the buttered bread in her hand?
Her sister’s sitting opposite. She’s drinking milk from her sippy cup. Her movements are filled with her very own joy. Often, she skips when she walks or runs. Her strong little body is bursting with energy. My husband is sitting next to her. He’s reading the newspaper. Drinking his coffee. Our youngest is just a year old. He’s eating porridge with his fingers. His pajamas are covered in it. Porridge, milk, and jam.
You must leave us alone. You don’t need us the way we need each other.
I’ll tell you their names. Malin is the eldest, then comes Anna and then Johannes. They look like each other. Can you see? I pour the cocoa into their cups. I want to warm them from inside. It’s raining outside. We’re scared in different ways. Malin pulls at her nightdress, sucks on the sleeve until it’s rumpled and wet. She has night terrors. That’s what it’s called when you wake up screaming in the night. There’s no comforting her. Her body turns stiff with fear. Her eyes stare, but she isn’t really awake. She wants me to lie beside her all through the night. I have to be next to the wall and she by the edge. Next to the wall is dangerous, she says. I tell her it isn’t. Yes, it is, Mummy, she says. It’s dangerous, Mummy. Don’t you know?
She’s only four years old. Everything shows in her face. When she plays, it’s like she isn’t doing what she’s doing. She isn’t drawing when she sits at the table with her crayons and paper. She’s playing at drawing. When her crayon draws a line, she’s pretending that she’s someone drawing. She plays at being a little girl drawing a sun, a boat, a snail. She’s always a step removed from the things she does. As if there were no way in for her. As if the world were closed and she were left outside. We all feel like that. We can’t find our way in to the things we do. Only in our feelings for each other do we stand in the middle with our arms around each other.
Can you see how straight she sits? The forward curve of her shoulders? She’s asking me a question with her eyes and I can’t answer. Do you understand how that feels?
Anna is sturdier. There’s no better word. She’s in charge of herself. You’d have your work cut out with her. But don’t try anything. Her happiness is her own. Everything she’s done, she’s done by herself. She instills joy in everyone she meets. Her laughter goes straight to the best in people. In everyone. That’s the way she is. I wonder if she feels like a stranger here.
Johannes is so small. His little body rolling about in the bed. Perhaps things are easiest for him. You know my husband, of course. You know all about him. His ambitions and his extraordinary will. The way he can persevere. He resists you in a way you never thought possible. Is he the hardest for you to abandon?
Look at each one of us in turn. All five of us around the table. Soon, the girls will slip from their chairs. They never linger at the table. They want to watch a movie. They sprawl on big cushions and watch the same movies again and again. They look at life and the families they see on TV. The way they hike in the woods, shake their mats, scrub their floors, swim in the lakes. It looks like life, but ours isn’t like that.
I don’t know if it can be changed. But I’m going to try. With all my strength, I’ll try. You’re not coming back here. You’re leaving us now, because I’m telling you to. This is goodbye. Don’t ever forget.
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