The Weight of Things by Fritz Marianne & West Adrian

Author:Fritz, Marianne & West, Adrian [Fritz, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
ISBN: 9780989760782
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project
Published: 2015-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

“I WAS JUST DREAMING …”

Rudolf hung on the cross. Around him stood scattered groups of people, all of whom pinned him in their withering gaze. “Where’s my mother?” Rudolf cried from the cross.

“Your mother is in her grave,” a faceless voice answered him from the multitude, and Berta became conscious of herself lying under the earth, a few meters from the cross. She tried to shift her coffin lid and to cry out with all the force of her love:

“Rudolf! I’m still alive! I’m coming! Wait for me! Be patient! I’ll get you down from there! Rudolf!” The dreaming Berta observed this other Berta, as powerless and voiceless as a corpse in her fruitless struggle.

“Where’s my mother?” Rudolf cried a second time and looked down onto the nearby hillock where there was no cross and no flowers, only shoveled up dirt, as on a molehill. A figure without a face, a torso on two legs, pulled away from the group and said, “There she lies. Let her rest. It’ll be over soon. You’ll understand when the sun has reached its zenith.”

After the headless figure had spoken, the scattered groups merged into a single human mass. All of them had their heads at their sides, holding them in their hands and resting them on their hips. Each head was the same as the others. And all the heads resembled helmets.

“What did I ever do to you?” Rudolf cried. And since no one answered him: “Why am I hanging here on this cross? Why?”

One headless creature after another stepped forward out of the mass of people. The voices of women, girls, men, and boys drowned out one another in turn:

“You can’t catch a ball.”

“You can’t play an instrument.”

“You can’t even sing.”

“You always fall down.”

“Your nose bleeds.”

“You have two left hands.”

“You can’t do your sums.”

“You can’t even remember the Ten Commandments.”

“You can’t write on your own.”

“You can’t even copy things down.”

“All you can draw are animals, and houses, just barely—you can’t draw people with two hands, ten fingers, two feet, and a head. Your people have five eyes and monstrous mouths. Your people have seven heads or no head, twenty-three fingers or none at all.”

“You can’t catch frogs.”

“You can’t even make it to the bathroom when you need to go.”

“You’re a bed-wetter.”

“You can’t throw a punch.”

“You don’t know how to fight.”

“You’re a weakling.”

“You always have diarrhea.”

“You bite your nails.”

“You stutter when the teacher asks where you’re from.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You can’t swim.”

“You’re a crybaby.”

“You grind your teeth at night.”

Rudolf yelled down from the cross, “But I’m not a bad person!”

And the headless ones answered him in a chorus, “You are good for nothing.”

The people put on their helmets, now they had heads again, only one still stood there headless, then stepped forward and pointed at the sun, saying, “It is done. The sun is at its zenith,” and then it threw its helmet on Berta’s grave, and a tremor bore through Rudolf’s body like a bark beetle through wood. But the scream that Berta always waited for in the leafless season, that one definitive scream, never came.

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