Autumn Killing

12

What do you want to know about me, Malin Fors?

I can tell you everything, if you listen carefully enough. I know you’re good at listening to voices that can’t be heard, to the soundless muttering that contains certainty and possibly even the truth.

I’m not a harsh person.

I never have been, but I still had faith in harshness, I’ve seen all it has given me. Certainly, it made me lonely, but I chose to believe that my loneliness was a matter of choice.

I don’t need anyone. I can’t live with anyone. I’m not scared of loneliness.

That’s what I told myself.

A car door closing.

A zip was pulled up over my face and for a moment everything went black, but then the world opened up before my eyes again. Simple and beautiful in a way it never has been before, and suddenly my faith in harshness felt like a mistake.

I’m wrong, I thought. You’re wrong, Jerry Petersson.

And now we’re rolling forward, the ambulance and me, and I curse myself as I lie there in that black plastic on the stretcher, bouncing up and down as the wheels try to get a grip on the gravel leading into the forest.

I’m in here.

In the cold black plastic.

I’m up here.

High up in the sky and looking down on Skogsa, on Malin Fors and Zacharias Martinsson walking across the courtyard, wrapped up in themselves, on their way to Malin’s car where Howie has stopped barking, his tongue hanging thirstily out of his mouth.

On that old bastard Fagelsjo in his apartment.

Where are they going, all these people? From now on?

I can see that if I want to.

But instead I glide away to other spaces, I see myself, travelling the same way I am travelling now, the same way yet so endlessly different, a body on a stretcher, a pain that I can’t feel in this present now.