After the Sun by Jonas Eika

Author:Jonas Eika [Eika, Jonas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593329115
Google: rLMPEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B09BLJ56S3
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-08-23T23:00:00+00:00

ME, RORY AND AURORA

It was me, Rory and Aurora, back then they lived in a flat smack up against the tracks. Crawling back and forth between their living room and bedroom was like taking the train, Rory had punched a big angry hole in the wall one day while Aurora was at church, like the tunnel on that train line. Well, one day Rory said he didn’t love Aurora anymore, and looked at me with eyes I think I’d call turned around, I mean they were looking as much into his own brain as at me, and seeking affirmation both places. I said why and didn’t feel like talking about it when she wasn’t home, and in a way I was their child, so how was I supposed to talk to him about it anyway? My main interest, besides running away with Aurora, and I would never get her to agree to that, was to keep being their kid. She’s always out and about, he said, she’s not interested in our life anymore. Kiss my ass, I said, and went to bed with a rancid taste in my mouth because of what his our implied, that something like a his-and-my life could exist without her.

Luckily she came home and threw her puffy jacket on the floor. I could tell from the sound of fabric collapsing and the way she sighed, a drawn-out, useless whistle like electric signals moving through a burnt-out computer. Where have you been? Rory asked. At the church, Aurora said. What’d you make? Enough, she said, and dumped all the money on the table in the kitchen, where he was making leek soup. I could smell it by the sweet, oniony steam seeping toward me in bed. The room was nearly dark, bundles of warm light poked through the hole in the wall. Headlights slid over the ceiling that was shaking from the trains. Does it really take all day to sell your shit to the faithful? Rory said. Does it take all day to steal vegetables for your soup? Aurora replied. Who’s the one with a baby in their belly? I was lying halfway down the gap between the two mattresses, my shoulder blades against the wooden pallet, which I had found out walking one day and dragged back home—like how a cat brings in dead birds, Rory had said, and it was fair enough: I was quiet and cuddly and almost never in the way, I registered everything that happened in the flat. A little food was all I needed but I could easily go a day or two without. And every once in a while I’d come home, guilty and proud, with some sort of junk they hadn’t asked for but had to accept: a wooden pallet, a board game, a lump of amber. Ceramic shoulder pads Rory would put on when he got drunk. There wasn’t any shame in letting them take care of me, it was hot and sometimes turned us on, but it would have hurt if I couldn’t return the favor.

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