The Fire Witness

22

Pia Abrahamsson knows she’s driving over the speed limit. She’d hoped to get on the road a bit earlier, but the meeting in Östersund for pastors of the Church of Sweden dragged on later than usual. She glances at her son, Dante, in the rearview mirror. His head is leaning on the side of the child seat and his eyes are closed beneath his glasses. His little face is calm, and the car seems softly cloaked by the morning fog.

She reduces her speed to eighty kilometers an hour, even though the road heads straight through the spruce forest. The highway is hauntingly empty. Twenty minutes ago she passed a lumber truck filled with logs, but since then she hasn’t seen a single vehicle.

She screws up her eyes to see the road properly. Tall fences flash past her on either side. They are meant to keep wildlife off the road. They’re not meant to protect wildlife but to protect people. People are the most frightened animals on the planet, she thinks.

She glances again at Dante in the child seat.

She was already a pastor in the parish of Hässelby when she found out she was pregnant. The father was the editor of the newspaper Church Times. She found herself standing and staring at the results of the pregnancy test, realizing that she was thirty-six years old. She decided to keep the baby but not the father. Her son was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

The sleeping boy’s head has fallen to his chest and his security blanket has slipped to the floor. Before falling asleep, he was so tired that he cried at the slightest frustration. He cried because he didn’t like the way the car smelled like Mamma’s perfume; he cried because Super Mario had been eaten up.

Pia Abrahamsson realized she had to pee urgently. She’d had too much coffee at the meeting. It’s at least twenty kilometers to Sundsvall and more than four hundred to Stockholm. There has to be an open gas station soon.

She tells herself that she shouldn’t stop the car in the middle of the forest. She shouldn’t and yet she finds she is stopping anyway.

Pia Abrahamsson, who often preaches that there is a reason for everything that happens, is about to be the victim of chance.

She turns onto a logging road and stops at the boom that prevents traffic from entering. Behind the boom, a gravel road stretches through the forest to a storehouse for lumber. She thinks she’ll walk just beyond the view of the road and she’ll leave the car door open in case Dante wakes up. Which he does.

“Mamma, don’t go.”

“Sweetie,” Pia says. “Mamma has to pee. I’ll leave the door open so I can see you the whole time.”

He looks at her with sleepy eyes.

“Don’t leave me alone,” he whispers.

She smiles and pats his sweaty cheek. She knows that she’s overprotective, but she can’t help it.

“Just an itty-bitty minute,” she says.

Dante grabs for her hand, but she pulls away. She ducks under the boom and walks along the gravel road. She turns and winks at Dante.

What if someone sees her with her bare backside and films her with a cell phone? Pia envisions the clip circulating on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter: “The Pissing Pastor.”

She shudders at the thought, then steps off the road and into the trees. Heavy forestry machinery, harvesters, and bulldozers have torn up the earth.

As soon as she’s sure that no one can see her from the main road, she lifts her skirt, moves her underwear to one side, and squats. She’s tired, and she steadies herself with one hand in the soft moss that grows at the base of the trees.

Relief fills her as she shuts her eyes. When she looks up again, she sees something incomprehensible. An animal has come out of the forest on two legs. It’s walking on the logging road, bent over and stumbling. A tiny figure covered in dirt, blood, and clay.

Pia holds her breath. It isn’t an animal after all. It’s almost as if a part of the forest has freed itself and come alive. As if it’s a little girl made from twigs.

She gets up and follows it. She tries to say something but can’t find her voice. A branch breaks beneath her foot. Rain has started to fall.

She moves as if she’s in a nightmare. She can’t make her legs run.

She sees between the trees that the creature has reached the car. There are dirty cloth bands hanging from the strange girl’s hands.

Pia stumbles up the gravel road and watches the girl sweep her purse off the driver’s seat onto the ground. She gets in and shuts the door.

“Dante!” Pia struggles to say.

The car starts up and drives over her cell phone. It scrapes the guardrail as it turns around and onto the road. Then it straightens out and roars away.

Pia is crying as she reaches the boom. Her whole body is shaking. How could this have happened? The twig girl appeared from nowhere, and now the car and her son are gone.

She bends down under the boom then walks onto the long, empty road. She is not screaming. She can’t scream. The only sound she hears is her own breathing.