The Sky above the Roof by Nathacha Appanah

Author:Nathacha Appanah [Appanah, Nathacha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The day cut in two

All three of them are sitting there at the dining room table, one at which they never have lunch or dinner, it is used for homework, papers, DIY, storage, clutter. There is even a cloth on this table, just look at that, a real linen tablecloth, probably new, that gives off a vague smell of plastic and things stored away, and on this tablecloth there is a single motif, a basket of fruit, repeated all along the edge to form a border, apples pears cherries bunch of grapes in a basket apples pears cherries bunch of grapes in a basket apples pears cherries bunch of grapes in a basket. Like that, twenty-six times.

There in the middle of the table that is covered by the new tablecloth is a cake, a Black Forest cake to be precise, waiting to be cut up and shared, but nobody is moving a finger.

There may still be time for this day not to break their hearts, those three.

If there were such a thing as magic, a glass bell could perhaps be placed over the house and yard, and beneath this bell, which would be the opposite of a prison, and which would function like those covering terrariums, they might find the means to grow, to blossom, to respect one another. Their dreams at night might be transformed into oxygen, the words they speak might lay foundations, they might be forever sufficient to one another in love.

If people and hearts could be transformed in an instant, one of those three might perhaps have performed some action there at the table that caused all other actions to be forgotten, or uttered words so sincere and gentle that, at a stroke, all words previously spoken ceased to exist.

If only such things were possible those three would not have been sitting there waiting for something finally to happen that would disrupt the onward course of time.

But it is too late for invoking, begging, wishing, for leaving the effort to change the course of one’s own life to other people. On this day in winter, this day when the yard has been so nibbled by hoarfrost as to turn it into a white and spiky terrain, what each of the three of them needs to do is to reach out beyond themselves, to uproot themselves, unaided, out of their own interior prisons.

When Phoenix got up that morning, her head as heavy as that bottle of cheap wine she had finished the night before, she knew she had to do something. She had noticed the suitcase in the corridor and was immediately seized with a violent impulse to throw up. She looked away, went into the kitchen, cut a lemon in two and squeezed the two halves into her mouth, just like that, tilting her head backward. The juice trickled over her face, several drops went into one eye, she said oh shit and some tears flowed, but it should not be thought that this was for the suitcase in the corridor.

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