Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel by Claire Fuller

Author:Claire Fuller [Fuller , Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781941040027
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2015-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

15

Although I loved the snow, every morning I hoped it had melted, so my father’s mood would lighten, but each time I woke I could tell from the muffled sound that more snow had fallen. My father and I re-counted our stored food and he reworked his calculations, his writing becoming smaller, filling in all the gaps on the map, so that undersized numbers even floated down the river.

“One thousand calories a day,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Or eight hundred? There’s no fat on a squirrel. How many calories in a squirrel? Two hundred? Two hundred if we’re lucky. Four squirrels a day each, for how long?” He threw down the pen and put his head in his hands. “How can I work out how much food we need if we don’t know what the date is?”

I stopped humming, my fingers still, on the keys.

My father looked up at me, his face white and drawn. “It’s not enough,” he said. Until that winter I had always thought my father had a solution for everything, that he had all the answers, but I learned soon enough that I was wrong.

We began rationing the food we had stored. Every day, packed into my father’s boots, I trudged through the snow to check the traps, but many days I came back with my rucksack empty. I never lost the feeling of being watched, but I didn’t see any more footprints except ours. When I stayed indoors, my father wore the boots down to the river to fish, standing with the falling snow coating his head and shoulders, until he said he could no longer see to cast. I wasn’t sure which was worse: tramping through the cold and finding nothing, or sitting by the fire with all the food surrounding me and not being allowed to eat any of it.

Within a week or two, any remaining summer plumpness had gone. My father’s face became gaunt and his ribs showed through his skin when he lifted up his shirt to wash his armpits in front of the stove. All I thought about was food and music. If my father had the boots and I was indoors, I used La Campanella to measure the time from one meal to the next. I calculated that playing the piece sixty times from start to finish would take me through from breakfast to lunch. I ate my food in morsels, sipping at our thin stews—a few scraps of meat floating in grey water—licking the spoon clean between each mouthful. We had smoked the squirrels without removing their bones, simply crushing them with the hammer, and so at mealtimes the room was full of the sound of crunching bones as we ate everything in front of us.

We were always tired, always cold and hungry; it became difficult to remember a time when it had ever been any different. I thought less often about Ute and our old life, but sometimes a particular memory would pop up out of nowhere to remind me.

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