Karin Tidbeck: Sing

He fell to his knees in front of me and wrapped his arms around me, squeezed me so tight I could feel my shoulders creaking. He was shaking. The soundless weeping hit my neck in silent, wet waves. All around us, the others were very busy not noticing what was going on.

I brought him to the backyard. He calmed down and we sat leaning against the wall, watching Saarakka outrun the sun and sink. When the last sliver had disappeared under the horizon, he hummed to test the atmosphere, and then spoke.

“I couldn’t stand being in the village for Saarakka. Everyone else talking and I can’t … I’ve started to understand the song language now, you know? It makes it worse. So I left, I went up to that plateau. There was nothing there. I suppose you knew that already. Just the trees and the little clearing.” He fingered the back of his head and winced. “I don’t know how, but I fell on the way down, I fell off the path and down the wall. It was close to the bottom, I didn’t hurt myself much. Just banged my head a little.”

“That was what made you upset?”

I could feel him looking at me. “If I’d really hurt myself, if I’d hurt myself badly, I wouldn’t have been able to call for help. I could have just lain there until Saarakka set. Nobody would have heard me. You wouldn’t have heard me.”

We sat for a while without speaking. The sound of crickets and birds disappeared abruptly. Oksakka had risen behind us.

“I’ve always heard that if you’ve been near death, you’re supposed to feel alive and grateful for every moment.” Petr snorted. “All I can think of is how easy it is to die. That it can happen at any time.”

I turned my head to look at him. His eyes glittered yellow in the setting sun.

“You don’t believe I spend time with you because of you.”

I waited.

Petr shook his head. “You know, on Amitié, they’d think you look strange, but you wouldn’t be treated differently. And the gravity’s low when closer to the hub. You wouldn’t need crutches.”

“So take me there.”

“I’m not going back. I’ve told you.”

“Gliese, then?”

“You’d be crushed.” He held up a massive arm. “Why do you think I look like I do?”

I swallowed my frustration.

“There are wading birds on Earth,” he said, “long-legged things. They move like dancers. You remind me of them.”

“You don’t remind me of anything here,” I replied.

He looked surprised when I leaned in and kissed him.

Later, I had to close his hands around me, so afraid was he to hurt me.

I lay next to him thinking about having normal conversations, other people meeting my eyes, talking to me like a person.

I’m thrifty. I had saved up a decent sum over the years; there was nothing I could spend money on, after all. If I sold everything I owned, if I sold the business, it would be enough to go to Amitié, at least to visit. If someone wanted to buy my things.

But Petr had in some almost unnoticeable way moved into my home. Suddenly he lived there, and had done so for a while. He cooked, he cleaned the corners I didn’t bother with because I couldn’t reach. He brought in shoots and plants from outside and planted them in little pots. When he showed up with lichen-covered rocks I put my foot down, so he arranged them in patterns in the backyard. Giant Maderakka rose twice; two processions in white passed by on their way to the plateau. He watched them with a mix of longing and disgust.

His attention spoiled me. I forgot that only he talked to me. I spoke directly to a customer and looked her in the eyes. She left the workshop in a hurry and didn’t come back.

“I want to leave,” I finally said. “I’m selling everything. Let’s go to Amitié.”

We were in bed, listening to the lack of birds. Oksakka’s quick little eye shone in the midnight sky.

“Again? I told you I don’t want to go back,” Petr replied.

“Just for a little while?”

“I feel at home here now,” he said. “The valley, the sky … I love it. I love being light.”

“I’ve lost my customers.”

“I’ve thought about raising goats.”

“These people will never accept you completely,” I said. “You can’t sing. You’re like me, you’re a cripple to them.”

“You’re not a cripple, Aino.”

“I am to them. On Amitié, I wouldn’t be.”

He sighed and rolled over on his side. The discussion was apparently over.

I woke up tonight because the bed was empty and the air completely still. Silence whined in my ears. Outside, Maderakka rose like a mountain at the valley’s mouth.

I don’t know if he’d planned it all along. It doesn’t matter. There were no new babies this cycle, no procession. Maybe he just saw his chance and decided to go for it.

It took such a long time to get up the path to the plateau. The upslope fought me, and my crutches slid and skittered over gravel and loose rocks; I almost fell over several times. I couldn’t call for him, couldn’t sing, and the birds circled overhead in a downward spiral.

Just before the clearing came into view, the path curled around an outcrop and flattened out among trees. All I could see while struggling through the trees was a faint flickering. It wasn’t until I came into the clearing that I could really see what was going on: that which had been done to me, that I was too young to remember, that which none of us remember and choose not to witness. They leave the children and wait among the trees with their backs turned. They don’t speak of what has happened during the wait. No one has ever said that watching is forbidden, but I felt like I was committing a crime, revealing what was hidden.

Petr stood in the middle of the clearing, a silhouette against the gray sky, surrounded by birds. No, he wasn’t standing. He hung suspended by their wings, his toes barely touching the ground, his head tipped back. They were swarming in his face, tangling in his hair.

I can’t avert my eyes anymore. I am about to see the process up close. The bird that sits on Petr’s chest seems to take no notice of me. It pushes its ovipositor in between his lips and shudders. Then it leaves in a flutter of wings, so fast that I almost don’t register it. Petr’s chest heaves, and he rolls out of my lap, landing on his back. He’s awake now, staring into the sky. I don’t know if it’s terror or ecstasy in his eyes as the tiny spawn fights its way out of his mouth.

In a week, the shuttle makes its bypass. Maybe they’ll let me take Petr’s place. If I went now, just left him on the ground and packed light, I could make it in time. I don’t need a sky overhead. And considering the quality of their clothes, Amitié needs a tailor.

Copyright (C) 2013 by Karin Tidbeck

Art copyright (C) 2013 by Greg Ruth

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