The Last Goddess by Tučková Kateřina

Author:Tučková, Kateřina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2022-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Father

She’d assumed that after what happened, she would never see him again. Following his arrest, she tried so hard not to think of him, and he dropped out of her memory completely. It was as though he had literally ceased to exist. It never crossed her mind that it might be otherwise. But a few months before her graduation, he came back.

That afternoon when she and Jakoubek got off the bus, the square in Hrozenkov looked just as it did every other Friday. Standing around the stop were a few neighbors waiting for the bus to Bojkovice. On the bench near the co-op store sat a few old men smoking pipes and basking in the afternoon sun; on the nearby playground, boys were playing football.

Dora entered the co-op with her pack on her back and Jakoubek in tow. They needed supplies to take up the hill. As always, she picked up a basket in the corner of the store. Dora greeted loudly and received the usual greetings in return. But something wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t have said what this thing was, but she sensed it. It was hanging in the air and revealed itself when everyone in the store looked at her at once.

She took pasta and two tins of vegetables from the shelves and a loaf of bread from a plastic bin. She leaned over the cooler for milk in a bag printed in blue. She went to the meat counter and asked for an offcut from a roll of salami.

“Could you wrap it, please?” Her voice echoed through the quiet store. Embarrassed, she turned to leave. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Janková.”

The greeting was part of her attempt to get past her stooped neighbor, whose long, bony flank was thrust into the narrow aisle as she looked significantly at the half-empty row of fruit syrups.

“Hello, Dora. Heading home?”

“That’s right.”

“Take care, my girl. And make haste. It’ll be dark soon.”

Dora smiled. It wasn’t as if she was going up to Žítková from Hrozenkov for the first time.

“Just so you know,” said Tichačka, as she reached from the till for the contents of Dora’s basket, “your father’s back.”

The bag of milk slipped from Dora’s fingers and landed with a plop on the striped linoleum. Tichačka looked up at her, and Dora saw her mouth tighten with embarrassment.

“My father?”

Tichačka nodded.

At the end of this day, when dusk fell on the Koprvazy pasture opposite, a light really did go on in their old house. In the darkness interwoven with thick threads of rain, a shy, barely perceptible little light emerged and shimmered; it was a signal for her, telling her he was there, that he really had come back.

She sat in the middle of the dim room, in which the only sounds were Jakoubek’s regular breathing and the tap-tap-tap of rain on the roof, and watched that faint light through a narrow slit of window. She sat there until she realized she was surrounded by darkness, by which time nothing would have made her get up and switch on the light, thus reciprocating his signal to her: I’m here.

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