The Number 7 by Jessica Lidh

Author:Jessica Lidh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media

It was nearly two o’clock when the sanctuary finally fell still. Gerhard and Lasse sat in the front pew, teasing a pigtailed girl about the jultomte, the Christmas elf.

“You better hurry and put out some porridge on your front step! He’ll pass your house if you don’t, and then no presents for you!” Lasse grinned wide-eyed as the little girl stared doubtfully at the two older boys. He jabbed Gerhard in the side.

“Everyone knows the jultomte isn’t real,” the girl protested.

“Yes, but why take the chance?” Gerhard asked earnestly.

“He still puts out the porridge for the jultomte, and he’s seventeen!” Lasse laughed, pointing at a blushing Gerhard.

“I do,” Gerhard confirmed. “And the tomte’s always come. So hurry home and do as we say.”

The girl’s mother called to her from the back of the church and in an instant she was gone. Lasse and Gerhard gathered their coats and followed sleepily.

“It’s not silly,” Gerhard defended himself.

“Oh, come on,” Lasse groaned.

“It brings good luck.”

“It brings mice,” Lasse playfully shouldered his brother before jogging ahead.

The crisp night air smelled bitter, like rust or iron. The cold made their bones ache and their limbs numb. Lasse shuddered and hopped twice to help his circulation.

“Ready, Bror? We’ll race home.”

But Gerhard just stared at the sky. It was too wondrous to go back just yet. There was still something magical about these early hours. Christmas morning.

“Can’t we take the way by the shore?” he asked hopefully.

“Helvete!” Lasse cursed under his frosty breath, and then remembered he was in front of the church. “Oh.”

“It’s too beautiful to go back now,” Gerhard began, but Lasse held up his hand.

“We’ll race to the shore, then.”

“Let’s take our time,” Gerhard pleaded.

“Oy, oy, oy, Gerhard. You really are something. I’m freezing like a dog!” Lasse looked annoyed while lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, but his tone softened as he exhaled. “Well, come on.”

The two brothers rounded the path by the shipyards and strained to hear a low hum breaking the silence of the evening. Drums? Motors? No.

Stallarna. The stables.

Down near the docks sat a squatty old barn with a rotting wood door. The old horse stables. It’d been sitting there for two hundred years, and in the summer, the seamen could still smell manure when they walked by. Old barn smells had a way of lingering for centuries.

“Should we?” Gerhard asked, but Lasse was already headed in that direction.

A sign in the window read STÄNGT, CLOSED, but the penetrating sounds from within alluded to something else. Lasse reached for the latch, and the boys stepped inside.

The room was warm; a fire blazed behind an iron grate. A weary fiddler played sadly in the corner. Twenty shipyard workers, brutish men with biceps the size of ham hocks, leaned heavily on each other. Pontus, with his deep, baritone voice, stood near the fire on a footstool, leading the men in Bellman’s “Epistle 72.” The twins sighed at the sight of him. One of the men toward the back of the crowd wept somberly as he remembered a woman he once loved.

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