Conjuring boxes – Chapter 01

Max was late, again. No problem. The waiter was also late with her drink. “He’s new” she thought. “Look at him, just a kid, frustrated with the barman who was serving everybody else except the tray for the boy.” She tried to catch the bartender’s eye. Nothing. He was serving a young woman with very puffy blonde hair and a nearly there skirt. The waiter was looking at the short skirt now as well.

Max used to be like that, Sara thought. Well, Max used to be many things. But no more. At least not with her. She’d see him tonight, give him what he asked for and then never see him again. Let him become a long lost memory among the forgotten.

The waiter came with an apologetic look and her bourbon, one ice lazy swimming into the golden drink. She looked at him, picked her glass and with one move she drunk it all. The she put the glass down and pushed towards the waiter who was still standing there looking at her in amazement. She tapped the table with her long nail and let him know that she was ready for another one.
“The same?” He asked shyly. Sara nodded; he said he’d be right back.

“Right,” Sara thought, “it took you nearly ten minutes to bring the first one. The bartender was chatting the blond. “No way I’m ever coming back here,” she thought. The bourbon was alright though. And the right portion, no cheating here. “What a strange choice of words,” she thought and smiled.

She looked over towards the door direction to see if Max was somewhere in sight. Nothing. Perhaps he was already there looking for her. As usual she had chosen the darkest corner to sit. Is good to have the wall on your back. That was Max’s words, not hers but they had been imprinted in her mind long time ago. “It’s my favourite place nowadays,” he had said on the phone so she was sure he would find her.

She checked her watch and adjusted her scarf. Dark blue with some invisible to first look flowers. She got it in England long time ago and she bought it because it reminded her the scarves the Queen wears. Something like a memory souvenir she could also use. They had gone for business. Max and her. That was before Inger and Jessica and Maja …and thanks god her bourbon just arrived because she was ready to leave.

Peering out into the dark window a few meters away from her table and supposedly with view to the street, she saw her reflection. Droopy eyelids, soft jaw line, dark red lips and thick black hair. From this distance she could not see the crosshatching of wriggles around her eyes and under her mouth. “Mother Nature laying games on you as you age,” she thought.

She took the little pot of lip gloss out of her purse, dipped one finger in and refreshed the colour of her mouth while looking at the door way. He was late. Where the fuck was Max? She dropped the lip gloss into the small inside pocket and before closing the purse she touched it. It burned her fingers so she snapped the purse close and looked around with fear. Nobody had noticed.

She never realised that she had it and the damn thing was in plain shih all these time. A small black box on the shelf in front of Hugo’s Les Misérables. Thick book, she never read it. One of his. Max was a weird guy and he read weird books, some of them with foreign titles.

She thought of taking out of her purse; put it there on her napkin, where Max would be sure to see it. There was nothing to say, take it and go away. That would have been the message. If there was one.

She lifted her hand to catch the waiter’s eye. She desperately needed another bourbon. Why the hell to leave something so valuable to him in her house for so long? The kid reached with another glass of bourbon one eyes, no questions necessary anymore. By now they knew each other and he was there to keep her happy. Or at least that’s what he thought hoping for a good tip.

She took a deep breath a long sip of her drink and decided that putting the little box on the table was not a good idea. She wanted Max to feel at ease. A relaxed closure. Like good old friends. There was nothing to sign after all. It was over, it was Inger, Jessica, Maja and who knows who else and that was it. The end and all lived happily ever after.

Suddenly she smiled and turned back once more to look at her reflection. What difference Inger, Jessica and Maja make now anyway? Max didn’t want her anymore and nothing else really mattered whatever the name might be and Sara was fine with it. No going back.

Last communion – Chapter 01

Ms Alice Lundgren, full name Alice Margareta Lundgren, a great aunt and well in her seventies, knew that the end wasn’t far. She did not repine the hard lived and tiring life she had gone through and had only few regrets and sins to confess.

“Lord, forgive sins of seeing” the young priest whispered and she felt the oily fingers touching her eyelids. She had seen a lot of those, she thought. Small society and even smaller family attract and construct sins and sinners. Faces morphed into one another, some recognizable by names, some list in time and space.

She could see her older brother, may God rest his soul, sitting on the family’s patio, beer in one hand a cigarette on the other. A drunken bull with no good words for anybody. Married late in his life a woman younger than her, the younger sister. A woman constantly hitting herself in doors and falling in the toilet, sometimes with a black eye, others with broken arm or fingers.

Alice could see her hiding behind the curtain and watching her husband from inside the house to make sure his beer glass was never empty. Fear constant look in her eyes. What was her name? Frida. That was her name. She remembered once her younger brother, Gunner, had joked that she was definitely not Frida Kahlo, without further explaining what he meant even though Alice and him burst out laughing.

Alice and Gunner, Gun for his friends and Alice, always laughed when they were together. That was their sin as a team or everybody else thought of it as a sin. “So some respect the two of you,” her mother used to say. “You act like infants.”

“But we are infants,” her brother used to answer, “almost toddlers.”
“Or brats,” Alice couldn’t stay behind in this game of shrewdness.
“Spoiled brats,” Gunner would finish it with both of them start laughing again.

But there was absolutely nothing jolly and spoiled about any of the kids for the Lundgren family. There was only sweat, pain, weariness and occasional tears. No personal touch, no encouraging word, no attitude for Matteo Lundgren; only hard work and Sunday mornings in the church.

Did she smile? She didn’t know. She couldn’t see or feel anything. She was just lying in her bed, fully covered with blankets feeling the oily finger brushing softly her temple. Why priests have always so soft hands?

Father Lucas was the priest of her youth. Despite her father’s and mother’s disapproval he loved Gunnar’s and hers laughs. “When the two of you laugh, I hear angels laugh,” he used to say when all of them gathered in the churchyard after the service. When he laughed, Alice felt like hell was ringing but she never told anybody, not even Gunner. For long time and when she told him it was too late. “The sins I’ve seen,” she thought again.

The thought of father Lucas brought the face of Stig in her mind, Gunnar’s best friend. He was always there in the churchyard after the service but never inside. Her father always looked at him with a combination of disapproval and dismay but as he often said to her mother, it was not the boy’s fault who his father and his mother were. Poor Matteo Lundgren, little he knew how his firstborn will grow to be.

Stig was like a shadow. First to Gunnar and then to the rest of the world. Short and thin somehow blended with the background, especially when this background was people. He lived a life of nonexistence most of the time or to put it better, a life with or without Gunnar. While with Gunnar Stig spoke, laughed, existed. Without Gunnar he was a kid trying to survive in a house where violence and brutality was a pattern mixed with hunger and alcohol. A kid making sure nobody would see him or even notice his presence because that often turned him into the heart of all violence and heartless brutality.

Even though my mother was not happy for his friendship with her younger son, she always made sure that when Stig was around was fed enough. For my mother food was the essence of life. “If you don’t have food on the table there is no life.” She used to say and she actually meant it but not really mean it.

What she was trying to say was that dinner time with all the family at the dinner table was family time, was the proof that the family was together, united and healthy. It was also the place to short out conflicts and disagreements or explore possibilities. It was the place to plan, to ask and get answers. It was the only place father would speak. And for her that was family and life together.

And if a stray kid, like Stig lack all those she felt that she had the Christian right to give him a taste. That’s why Stig always joined the family after Sunday’s service for the Sunday meal. Because he had to see that the wise God was with good people, good families and take lessons for his future if he wanted to have one. Her mother’s relationship with the church and in general with religion was peculiar and in a way self-serving; her father from the other side was more straightforward, “believe and act as the good book says otherwise you are going to die and go to hell.”