Of Darkness by Josefine Klougart

Author:Josefine Klougart [Klougart, Josefine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2017-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

There are so many layers in the landscape, the solemn trees closest to us cut up the picture like the cracks of an oil painting, a fracture in the wall in the corner of the bedroom. Is it worsening. It’s hard to tell from day to day. A translation—then, now. The past, continually collapsing like buildings behind us, becoming something else.

They have driven through the woods to the beach so they can watch the bonfire. There is no other way to get it said than this, the hard way. They have come to see the bonfire, so no one says anything until they reach the car park outside the beach hotel.

Her mother turns off the ignition and they sit for a moment in their coats, a dampness in the interior and under their clothes. They’re wearing lightweight summer coats, their skin is tanned and their hair bleached by the sun: it is the height of summer. She and her sisters, her mother, her father. They can see the bonfire from the car, but no people. It feels odd, the bonfire piled up like a peak on the empty beach in the rain—the summer of 2004 is a summer of rain. Up at the hotel the grey flagline slaps against the pole, beating out a weary rhythm familiar from the harbour almost any day in spring when boats are made ready.

Curtains of rain across the sea.

A man trudges past, a dogged angle in the wind. The car ticks. The air is not cold, more close and blustery at the same time. Her younger sister unclicks her seat belt. They are startled by the sound as the belt retracts, the metal clasp striking the window.

The unobtrusive sea, its waves are an unsettled band of greyish brown. The light is not the summer’s. Her sister shuts the car door behind her, they all get out and stand for a moment gazing in their different directions: their mother looks towards the woods, her sisters consider opposite ends of the sea; she stares blankly at the sand. There are candles in all the windows—it’s too dark for Midsummer’s Eve. There’s something unnatural that doesn’t fit in with the season, the time of day. At the water’s edge she veers off and follows the shore like a sphere rolling through the groove of a wooden board. Seen from above it looks like the shore and all its sand empty out into the sea; the undulation of waves, repeated extensions of green and white, fanning out as they break; the effervescent rush before retreat. The sound of—a sphere in wood, a very simple sound against the murmur of the sea, always the same—whether heard or not, it exists. The bonfire won’t be lit, her mother says definitively.

They are quiet.

They stand with their backs against the car, then walk past the boathouse, where the lifeboats are stabled, and down through the dunes. Her sister picks up a branch blown from the bonfire to lie like a bone in the sand.

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