New Year by Juli Zeh

Author:Juli Zeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2021-03-22T09:24:12+00:00

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IT’S HIS FIRST plane trip. He’s so nervous. Where are Mama and Papa? They’re looking for a spot to stash their carry-ons in the overhead bins. Papa swears, as usual, when things aren’t going the way he wants. And there’s Luna, sitting next to Henning, almost jumping for joy in her baby seat. When it’s time to fasten her seatbelt, she starts screaming. Mama comes, and bends over him to calm Luna down. Her spicy, sweet smell, her long hair, her warm hands with colorful fingernails, he loves those the most. They have to switch seats, him at the window, Luna in the middle. Then up, up, and away into the sky. Henning couldn’t believe they actually went right through the clouds, he figured that was just one of those things grown-ups say. Now he sees it’s actually true. He looks down on the clouds from above; they look like a thick layer of snow you could run on top of. Henning imagines how he’d romp around in it, throw cloud-snow up into the air, swirl around in it, make a cloud-snowman. He likes imagining things, to while away the time. The stories in his head are endless. Mama always says he should be thankful for that.

He asks out loud whether they’re going to fly to the moon, and his parents laugh.

“You’re not entirely off,” Papa says. “The island actually does look a little like the moon.”

Henning likes making his parents laugh. They like it when he says clever things. Once he said: “The time we have on earth is as tiny as a pebble.” Mama hugged and kissed him, and Papa wrote the sentence down and put it on the first page of a photo album. The bit about the pebble came to Henning because he thinks so much about time. He can’t read a clock yet, but he often looks at the arrows. You can’t see them move, unless you look away and then after a while look back at them. The thing he finds most disturbing about time is that it always goes by too fast or too slow. It never seems to be just right. Henning doesn’t believe time is his friend. He said that out loud once, too, and Mama caressed him and hugged him awhile.

In the airplane, time is definitely too slow and too long. They can’t get up and run around, and Henning can barely stand staying put anymore. He and Luna bicker. She wants the little fire truck that he got for his birthday and always carries around with him. She tugs on his sleeve and yells, he pushes her away, until Mama tells him he should be nice to his little sister. It’s so awful when Luna pokes at him and wants all his stuff and ends up making him angry. She’s still mostly a baby, she wears diapers and drinks milk out of a bottle. When she’s tired she can be so annoying. But usually she does what Henning says, looks at him in wonder, and is proud when he praises her.

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