Perhaps I couldneverhave.
I told myself it was natural, healthy, and good for Linnea—even if it stung to see her moving on without me. Just another way I was left out...and behind.
Their desperate groping behind the schoolhouse resulted in a clandestine coupling in an ice shack on a nearby frozen pond. It seemed Linnea, like Isak, was impatient for a proper fuck. Although I’m not sure howproperIsak’s three gasping shoves beneath her skirts were whilst Linnea peered wide-eyed and bewildered and faintly dissatisfied over his shoulder.
Such was the anticlimactic nature of carnality. At least from what I had observed. Few women ever achieved a release equal tomen. A vastly unfair balance. Those who did were often not in bed with the men they ought to be—not their husbands, but illicit lovers. That made me, in my bounty of time, ponder the nature of desire.
Was one’s desire heightened when it waswrong? When forbidden? Certainly, Linnea had been more satiated from the forbidden gropings behind the schoolhouse. Once they were married, a certain tedium developed in their conjugal trysts.
Linnea bounced a squalling baby on her hip today—like on most days. Her unkempt hair poked out from her headscarf while her two toddlers banged their dishes against the table, more food on their faces and between them than what made it into their mouths.
“Good thing you two are cute,” I murmured, twirling a finger at the twins.
Stefan flaunted his chronically snotty nose, and I wasn’t certain if all the mess on him was strictly his meal of stewed apples and oats.
They squawked loudly, their eyes almost seeming to fix on me.
Sometimes I wondered if theycouldsee me. The animals I encountered recognized me. As with animals, perhaps there was something within the very young, an unfiltered innocence, a lack of cognition, that saved them from a witch’s spell and made them immune to its magic.
“Stefan and Ulrika,” Linnea chastised the twins, “stop playing with your food.”
The two toddlers, the result of Isak’s three thrusts in an ice shack, hesitated only a moment at their mother’s reprimand, glanced at each other, and as though through some implicit agreement went back to flinging their soggy meal at each other.
Ulrika, the spitting image of her mother with her enormous dark eyes, grabbed a fistful of apples and oats, the yellow-gray mush escaping between her chubby fingers as she raised her hand and launched the contents at her harried mother.
“Ulrika!” Linnea sputtered, oats and bits of apples speckling her face and headscarf.
The toddlers shrieked with laughter, banging plump fists andrattling the crockery on the table. I shook my head, marveling at the destruction such tiny people could wreak.
The babe in Linnea’s arms went still, her head bobbing back as she watched the spectacle of her mother in gape-mouthed wonder. I felt my own lips twitch.
Linnea was a sight. She did not appear to find humor in the moment as I did. She blinked long and hard, as though willing herself somewhere else—or at least willing this situation away. She released a long huff of breath. Her eyes grew wet and red-rimmed. Her head drooped, clearly overcome. She looked down, averting her face, not even reacting when her baby tugged hard at her scarf, pulling it from her hair with a crow of triumph.
I winced. “Come now. You’re doing fine,” I soothed my friend, stepping closer and catching a whiff of her. She smelled ripe, and I wondered when she had last bathed. The hair now exposed was oily and in need of washing. “This will pass,” I said, pretending I knew the first thing about rearing children. “They’re only babies now. But not forever.”
Of course Linnea couldn’t hear me, but that didn’t stop me from talking.
She lifted her head and stared bleakly at her children, taking them all in as though they were something alien that she had never seen before, strangers that had arrived uninvited into her home.
I continued, “Soon they will be babies no more. They will grow, and before you know it, they will be staring you in the eye, talking to you...their own people that love and help you through your day, that ease your burdens.”
At least that was the thing I always heard parents say over the years. It felt the thing to say to her in this lowest of low moments. Not that she could hear me.
I always talked. It kept me grounded. Steady on the days when I most felt like I was unraveling. The sound of my voice was usually formysake. My words ringing in my ears served as a testament, proof that I was still here. Not gone. Not a ghost. Even if unheard and unseen and unremembered.
Except today the sound of my voice was forher. For my friend. Even if she did not know it.
Linnea stared with a glassy-eyed expression that I could not read, appearing very much like the one who needed to be saved from unraveling.
“Come now,” I clucked. “Ulrika will be wearing your clothes and itching to leave this place and your overbearing rule soon enough.” Like all children chafing against the authority of their parents.Like me.I had been so eager to leave I’d run headlong into the prison I now found myself trapped in. Forsixyears. I swallowed against the thickness in my throat. “When that happens, you will miss these days.”
I sat down at the table in Isak’s spot, his breakfast plate and cup still sitting where he’d left it, picked clean with nary a crumb on it, unlike the rest of the mess littering the table and floor.
With a mutter, Linnea finally moved, spinning around, moving to the little annex room where she did their laundry and kept all their cleaning supplies. I watched idly from Isak’s seat, elbows on the table, crossing my legs and swinging a booted foot in the air, awaiting her return.
In the absence of her mother, Ulrika slid down from her perch on the bench, the belt strapping her in place coming loose. Or maybe Linnea had not fully secured it? I wasn’t sure, but I sat up straighter as the child slid free, her stockinged feet landing silently on the wood planks of the kitchen. A mischievous light glinted in her eyes, a warning to be heeded.
“Where are you going?” I glanced toward the annex, willing Linnea to return before—
