Winter Stories by Ingvild Rishøi

Author:Ingvild Rishøi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Press UK

SIBLINGS

Now is when we run away. We are standing between the buildings. I tell the kids to take off their rucksacks.

“Why?” Mia asks.

She’s wearing a quilted parka and her back is to the sun. That hair of hers is far too red.

“Because you must listen to your big sister,” I say.

Mikael pulls off his rucksack and gives it to me.

“You too,” I say to Mia. “Give me your rucksack.”

But she just stares, and we don’t have time for this. I turn around and push my way between the recycling bins. It’s dark here, I blink hard and then I see our plastic bags, I pull them out and bring them with me into the light. There is frost on the asphalt.

“Are those our things?” Mia asks.

“Take off your rucksack,” I say.

Nobody can see us here. Nobody from school and nobody from daycare, but all the same my pulse is hammering, it’s hammering fast. Because somebody might come by, somebody might be standing at the window in a building and people remember me, they always do, you have charisma, Cecilie said, but it’s dangerous now, because it’s true, old ladies remember me, and all the teachers, and everyone who works in a shop and the kind of people who watch from behind curtains, I can’t do a bloody thing without people staring and remembering whatever I do.

“Mia,” I say. “We’re just waiting for you, now.”

She pulls off her rucksack, slowly. Then she drops it right on the ground. But I don’t have time to yell, I just turn it over and shake everything out.

“But the books!” Mia says.

I open Mikael’s rucksack and turn it upside down as well, I shake the things out, the juice bottle and the Spiderman lunchbox, two rolled-up drawings and there is the boat pen he got from his father.

Then I pick up Mia’s schoolbooks from the ground and open the hatch in the dustbin and push the books inside.

“What?” Mia says.

I bend over again and pick up the homework folder and pencil case. I lift the hatch and push everything through the opening, Mikael’s drawings and the juice bottle, the lunchbox, I push it all in, then I take the plastic bags full of clothing and put them into the rucksacks and pick up the boat pen and give it to Mikael.

But now he has that look.

And I don’t like it.

He has those frightened eyes.

And I can’t bear it that my brother’s eyes are like that, because I have wondered about this, about whether fear grows with the body, like other scars, like our mother’s caesarean section, how when she got fatter, the scar just grew larger.

I pat his head through his cap.

“I’ll explain later,” I say. “We just have to catch a bus. Is that okay?”

He nods.

“Fine,” I say. “Now let’s put on our rucksacks.” They put on their rucksacks.

I stand behind Mia, I lift up her hair and quickly braid it, I put the braid down into her jacket and pull the hood over her head.

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