The Antarctica of Love by Sara Stridsberg

Author:Sara Stridsberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maclehose Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The crowns of the trees above are moving; it looks as though they have come unmoored and are drifting on the white surface of the sky, as if the sky itself were an immense lake in which the treetops are being drawn irresistibly to its murky depths, leaving the roots floating on the top like massive black hands reaching for heaven. I think it must be the birch trees tinkling like a thousand tiny bells and making a speckled dance of light that stipples his freckled hands. And now the numbness comes, spreading through my body in swirls of gurgling silver, it comes when there is no more chance of escape and I feel as though snowflakes are falling inside me. A feeling so raw, so pure, so cold, transcending anything I have ever known.

*

A tremor passes across the lake, an invisible wind ruffing and scuffing the mirrorlike surface. When I try to say something, blood spills from my mouth. It doesn’t matter, in any case it is too late to say anything now. This is death’s vantage point, the hunter’s angle. My body is lying on the grass, a leather glove turned inside out. The eyes of the person lying on the grass are half-closed but there is still a glimmer of light beneath the eyelids. Why does that not go out, if it is all over anyway? And where is the blood coming from? Bright red foam at my mouth and he hasn’t used the knife yet. And now the world is finally slipping away, like a ship, or a sandcastle swallowed up by the tide. Just as Eskil slipped from my hands so long ago. Brown water flooding the world, running into my eyes, death filling my veins and everything else, the layers of tissue in the orbs of my eyes, the ragged membranes in my lifeless womb, a mounting black slime slowly smothering my vision. Retina and sky merge into one, black ink overflows from the glass that is the world. His face is still suspended above me like a mirage, an image that jumps and shudders and shakes, as if someone has cut into your gaze with a knife, or sliced into the very perspective. I will pray to anyone at all now, I want an angel to come and devour me, I want darkness to surround me, for light and time to vanish from my eyes. I see everything slip away, the grass and the trees and the little slope down to the lake and the firmament above me with a scattering of clouds sliding slowly past in the opposite direction. Now his face is my entire universe, the only thing filling my eyes. The intense grey of the gaze, the prominent bridge of the aquiline nose, lips that are flat and half-open and saliva dripping onto my naked face, water coursing from the openings for his eyes and the dark hole of his mouth. I wish my last picture could be something other than this, a tree or a flower or Raksha’s face from long ago, but it is too late for wishes now.

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