The Ice Child

FJÄLLBACKA 1975

The knives scared her more than anything else. Sharp and shiny, they would suddenly appear in places where they didn’t belong. At first she had merely picked them up and put them back in the kitchen drawer, hoping that her exhausted and beleaguered mind was just playing tricks on her. But then they’d turn up again. Next to the bed, in the chest of drawers with her underwear, on the coffee table in the living room. Lying there like some sort of macabre still-life, and she didn’t understand what it meant. She didn’t want to understand.

One evening while sitting at the kitchen table, she felt a knife stab into her arm. The blow came out of nowhere, and she was surprised by the pain. Bright red, the blood gushed out of the wound. Mesmerized, she watched it for a moment before jumping up to dash to the worktop and grab a dishtowel to stanch the blood.

It took time for the wound to heal. It got infected, and when she cleaned it, the pain was so bad that she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. The gash needed to be stitched, but she simply taped it together as best she could. They had decided to avoid going to the doctor here in Fjällbacka.

But she knew there would be more such wounds. A few days might pass peacefully, but then all hell would break loose, and an anger and a hatred that defied description would surface. She felt paralysed and powerless. Where did such evil come from? She suspected she would never find an answer to that question. And to be truthful, there probably was no answer.