Sleet: Selected Stories

And yet that’s just what happens. Still with his back to us, the Stockholmer brushes off his hands, like they’re dirty from taking hold of us. It makes a sound we will never forget. And then we catch sight of something else we will never forget. Sitting up front in the car is a girl, about the same age as us, but otherwise different. She is pale and delicate, the way people probably look when they ride in a car every day. She is wearing a white hat. We notice suddenly that she is looking at us. She’s probably sitting a little higher up than us, but not as high as we think. It feels like we have to crook our heads back a good deal to get a decent look at her, which of course we all need to do. There is a pane of glass between her and us and a great deal of distance. One time we were taken to the market town, and we got to look around in all the storefront windows. There was so much beautiful stuff for us to look at, but we weren’t allowed to go inside. And now it feels sort of like it did then, with us standing there looking on but not really being there. Now, like then, the only thing that really seems to be there is the window.

Then the Stockholmer goes around and climbs in behind the wheel again. He doesn’t look at us — he just turns the engine over and lets it hum for a bit. But before the car starts to pull away, the really white girl rolls down her window. We think maybe she wants to get a better look at us, but we’re wrong about that. Her eyes aren’t focusing on us anymore. She sticks her arm out and empties an ashtray on the road, and then the car pulls away. It’s only then that we notice how badly the sharp ends of the stake fence are biting into our backs. We pull ourselves off them and in the back our shirts are dotted with little pricks of red. In the road a cigar lies smoldering in the gravel. It smells like town and dress clothes, like the parsonage or one of those big houses that’s got its own name. We stand for a while in the road circling around the cigar, as if it was a campfire, letting the smoke tickle our rough, thick noses. And still we’re not really there — only the cigar is there. In the distance we can see another car appear on the road. Before it reaches us, we kill the cigar in turn with our bare feet, me first because I’m the oldest, and Siri last of all because she’s a girl. Then we walk back into the yard. It’s not a Stockholm car, this one. It has an “X” on the plate, so it’s just another car from Gävle.

Rosa is back in the yard now, over next to the hay wagon, rubbing her muzzle against its wooden slats. We get our hands on an old link chain and start to beat her and beat her with it until she bolts off, clomping down toward the row of lilacs. We don’t run after her. We drop the chain, and it slinks into the burnt grass with an empty rattle. We’ve discovered one thing anyway: that we don’t get anything out of beating Rosa like that. And actually we’ve discovered another thing: that there’s no remedy for what we know, that we can only ever be what we are — three, grubby, poor kids in other people’s hand-me-down, cut-off overalls, three dirt-farmer’s kids, the lowest of the low.

Still together, sure enough, we walk back to the barn. Up in the loft we squirrel away in the hay, each of us digging out our own separate caves. And we lie there in the dark, sucking on salty braids of hay as the noon hour passes, as the day passes, as the cows bellow from thirst in the pasture, as one after another the grown-ups fling open every door, scythes at the shoulder, shouting our three miserable names over and over. But to these things we’re insensible. All we can see, all we can hear, is a Stockholm car hurtling down a long straight road, bearing on its roof a great silver trunk that holds all our longing and our shame.

The Midsummer Night’s Chill Is Hard

A boy and a room. The room is hot and small, with a single narrow window facing out on life. Through it the boy sees the sky as a thin margin wedged between the tops of tall buildings and his eyelids. He is young, and in his impatience, he thinks his eyelids keep him from seeing all that he might otherwise. The window opens onto five adjacent courtyards of masonry and asphalt. In one stands a lone poplar. In the other four perennial laundry hangs yellowed and drooping like wilting leaves. At night he cannot sleep. He keeps the lamp lit on his table, even though this is forbidden, so that he can read the books he has borrowed. But they are never the right books. In the mornings, once he has fallen asleep at long last, his father pounds on the door until he answers.