Kjersti Skomsvold - The Faster I Walk The Smaller I am

The day before his vacation was over Epsilon finished the box. It couldn’t have been nicer. He’d even varnished it and when I opened the lid I saw that he’d burned “To my beloved Mathea” on the bottom. Usually, I only hear him say “I love you” when we’ve already gone to bed and he thinks I’m asleep, and I say “ich liebe dich von ganzem Herzen” back to him when I think he’s asleep, so I blushed when I read the words at the bottom of the box, and Epsilon blushed even more, and neither of us mentioned it again.

It’s been an eternity since Epsilon set that box next to my chair so proudly, and I ceremoniously put my knitting things inside it. I wish someone else knew about this.

I take out all the earwarmers — there are probably seventy or more, some of them itty-bitty — and put them in the detergent box. Then I set the empty wooden box on the kitchen table. I’ll bury the box and inside will be things that say something about Mathea Martinsen and her life. It makes sense to start with earwarmers. I dig out the light green one, which has a small dark green pocket on it. That’s good for Epsilon to use when he goes to the grocery store, he can keep his change in the pocket. And if there’s ever a war, it’ll also be good camouflage in the woods. It’s white on the inside, so Epsilon can turn it inside out in the winter. Then he can use the pocket for gunpowder. I put the earwarmer on the kitchen table beside the box.

I go into the living room and stand on the green wall-to-wall carpeting we bought because we wanted to have the feeling of grass growing inside. I wanted to paint the ceiling blue, but Epsilon said no, then we might as well just go outside.

I’ve spent a large part of my life in front of the TV, you want to get your money’s worth, after all. Still, Einar Lunde won’t fit in my time capsule, and that’s a good thing.

On the little table beside the sofa I find the deck of cards we use when we play Old Maid. That doesn’t happen too often, because I’m impatient and Epsilon is cheap: Epsilon sits too long calculating probabilities before every draw and I refuse to play unless there’s something to play for.

Our wedding picture stands on the bookcase. I take it down and wipe the dust from the glass with my hand. I’m not easy to see because the background the photographer used was about the same color (just like a sunset, he assured us) as my dress (“a dream in apricot,” according to the ad in the classifieds). I’m gazing up at Epsilon, exhaling gently to puff out my lips, and wonder if he knows what he’s getting himself into.

The bookshelf can’t hold much more than Epsilon’s books. He has every issue of the Statistical Yearbook ever published. Except the one from 1880. They’re arranged in order and I don’t have the heart to take them down. “You know, Mathea,” he said a long time ago, but I remember it well, “that when it comes to violent deaths, men have greater or approximately equal chances as women in all the categories, that is, fire, poisoning, drowning, poisonous plants, murder, and so on, but when it comes to falling, women are in the majority.” “The penny drops,” I said. But Epsilon simply looked at me as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just read. Finally, I began to laugh, which is what I usually do when I don’t know how someone wants me to react. Epsilon said that it was no laughing matter, it was something I should think hard about.

All the books have to stay on the bookcase unless Epsilon is reading one of them, and even then he doesn’t like to see the empty space it leaves behind. Therefore, there’s never a yearbook on his nightstand. I keep a Bible on my nightstand, because Epsilon says statistically it’s what people are most likely to have on their nightstands and that’s reason enough.

We keep our clothes in the bedroom closet and that’s where I find my wedding dress. I want to put it in the time capsule. I wonder what will happen to all our things, they’ll probably be thrown out and all our memories with them. And I wonder what the deepest lake in the world is.

I looked at my long feet at the other end of me, by the water’s edge. My toes stretched toward the sun like hungry children toward the bowl of gruel. My feet had grown faster than any other part of me. They were already full-grown before I started school. Given the size of my head, though, I think this was just a clever trick on nature’s part: it kept me from losing my balance. Epsilon was on his stomach next to me, brushing sand off his book and squinting at the words. I looked at the tent, wondering if I should bother to get my knitting things. “If anyone comes by, you’ll have to put your clothes on,” Epsilon said. “Are you expecting anyone?” I asked. “Hikers could always turn up,” Epsilon said. There’s a first time for everything, I thought, so I covered myself.

“You remember the time I didn’t have eyebrows?” I asked. Epsilon turned the page. “It was hard for us to communicate back then,” I continued. Epsilon didn’t answer. “I talked about the electricity in the air, and hinted about what was going on between us,” I said, “but you thought I meant it literally.” I looked from the sun to Epsilon, but he didn’t seem to be listening. “Have you heard this before?” I asked. “I was there,” Epsilon said. I brushed a ladybug off his ear and continued: “You were so serious when you said that if I was about to be struck by lightning again, I should keep my legs together to prevent an electric charge building up between them.” “It’s a fact,” Epsilon said. “And it never occurred to me that we were talking about anything other than science.” “Exactly,” I said. “Lots of people think we have eyebrows to keep the sweat out of our eyes, but actually it’s so we can communicate with other people. Shall we go and cool off?”

I stood with the Lutvann Lake up to my navel and waited for Epsilon. He tiptoed out, almost sideways, just like a crab. I shook my head.

The kitchen table is filling up and it’s getting dark, I’ve been at this half a night and a whole day and Einar Lunde is ready with the news. Today he’s talking about someone who thinks our goal in life should be to leave no trace — neither when camping nor living in general — and I think I could be an honored member of this movement. But something tells me that they don’t put up statues, and besides, I’ve spent the last day and half the night trying to do just the opposite, to leave some traces behind. Here I have a whole kitchen tableful of traces.

I THOUGHT I WAS ASLEEP, but then I remember I’ve forgotten to check the desk for something worth burying. It might be nice to bury the phone, but think — what if someone calls? What if someone actually calls?

Epsilon only called me once. That was when we’d just bought the telephone and he called from the phone booth right outside the building. “This is a test, tango echo.

sierra tango, this is a test,” I heard him say before he hung up.

I go out into the hallway and sit on the floor in front of the desk. There’s a pile of old telephone books in the top drawer. If someone were ever to ask me if I had a hobby, I’d tell them, yes, I’m a collector. The photo album is in the bottom drawer and the stiff pages creak when I open it. Most of the pictures are from before I was born.

Before Epsilon, it wasn’t just me, I had a mother and a father and my father’s aunt and uncle, and maybe more than that, but no one bothered to tell me about the rest of them. I was eight when the girl next door told me my parents were my biological parents. And then she couldn’t resist — she just had to tell me how they went about it.

When my parents died, I lost contact with Great Uncle Hans and Great Aunt Asta. “It was the best thing for all concerned,” I said to Epsilon. Hans died a few years later from a long-dormant birth defect, and the week after the funeral Asta died for no apparent reason.