The Laws of the Skies by Grégoire Courtois

Author:Grégoire Courtois
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781770565951
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2019-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

IV

The sun had come up, revealing a cloak of damp fog that had risen from the ground and gotten tangled in the trunks and the branches, gently cooling them to let them know that a new day had arrived, filled with the quiet savagery so typical of natural spaces, where plants try to develop faster than animals can consume them, and where animals try to draw on the plants’ energy to avoid the fangs of their brethren for one more day. Except for Enzo, who was still sleeping, all those whom this tale has so far spared had seen the sky grow paler, and then the first rays appeared on the horizon, because their sleep had been light, punctuated by fretful wakefulness, stifled sobs, startled awakenings that dragged them out of nightmares in which trees, beasts, and monsters grabbed them to bring their travels to an end. Like a litter of bunnies emerging from a burrow, Hugo, Lilou, Mathis, Jade, and Raphael exited the old log, one by one, in the light of day discovering surroundings they thought would be familiar.

‘Where are we?’ Mathis asked Hugo, who was scanning the area, looking worried.

‘The dirt road shouldn’t be far,’ Jade said.

‘We were wrong,’ Hugo confirmed. ‘The dirt road we took wasn’t the same one the bus did. I don’t know where we are.’

And before his friends could panic, he added, ‘But if we follow the dirt road in the other direction, we’ll arrive back at camp.’

‘I don’t want to go back to camp,’ Lilou said, staring into the distance.

The little girl was trembling, her arms crossed against her torso, her mouth distorted in permanent sadness. When she closed her eyes, over and over she saw Fred’s blood spattering by the campfire. So she hadn’t been able to sleep, hadn’t even wanted to, huddled in the body heat of her slumbering classmates, but had stayed fully awake, eyes wide open to the dank darkness of the log. She couldn’t get the horrific episode she had witnessed out of her mind, or understand it, or learn the slightest lesson from it. An adult, the only adult who was supposed to take care of her, had been killed, obliterated, destroyed, and this initial trauma reverberated in her, and its power destroyed every part of her budding personality. Dolls, princesses, sparkly dresses, pink strollers, a plastic stove, the ‘my darlings,’ the ‘my loves,’ life as she knew it, all the carefully constructed images of her future, assembled in miniature in her bedroom like a seed, like a fetus, that would grow, the stove becoming a real stove, the stroller a real stroller, and the dolly in it a real baby, on this stage, in this scale model that was the beginning and the end of her existence, none of it featured a smashed skull or spurting blood, and that was as it should be, but for Lilou, this posed a metaphysical problem. The event had infiltrated her, like a pebble in the gears, like a

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