As the moon began to rust

It was the early morning of a freshly hatched winter’s day when it happened in the thick cloak of fog. Perhaps it would have been visible, if anyone had been beside her. With her, between blankets that smelled of loneliness, and suddenly damp of tears that kept dripping from her lashes, as if waking were the most horrible dream. Her heart was still beating when she opened her eyes. But how? She could feel it fade. It didn't fall apart like rotting branches, or splinter like bones that are weak. Instead, it atomised like a bomb in an explosion. Prior to this day, it had broken in every possible way. Slowly. Suddenly. Violently. Bluntly. Into two pieces and into ten, hundreds, thousands of them. Oftentimes it broke on its own, other times it had been shattered: through carelessness or cruelty, and thrown against the wall, it had left stains, alm

Two days after Helen’s heart atomised in a cold February night, its splinters felt ever heavier in her chest. She hadn’t really gotten sleep. At dawn, she had trudged past muddy hoofprints in empty donkey pastures.For the second day in a row, she was in front of the Brandtner house now, where the children were still playing in the garden. Where the blond widow was still empty-eyed: unlike yesterday, not on the patio, but in the spacious kitchen, next to water that kept boiling on the cooker and fogged up the window panes.It was cold. The firm grip of dawn kept shaking Helen’s limbs. Shivering, she'd been standing there for an hour, and was almost frozen to the spot. Not even her breath was warm any longer. Maybe she was no longer breathing at all, but only waiting to collapse beneath the first rays of the sun like a thawing snowman.

How did you damage your car? What happened to your face? Did you have an accident? Where were you at 3 am on Sunday morning? Were you under the influence? Drugs or alcohol? Have you ever been to Master Alley before?Flies took off. In breach of social distancing regulations and speed limits, they crashed in front of the tarnished windows. A fatal accident right above Tom’s window sill. Seconds later they were hailing down, dead, and Tom was wondering why no one cared about it. Neither one of the policemen outside his open door. Wouldn’t that be their job? Weren’t they supposed to take care of misfortunes? Such as the flies that had suddenly stopped flying?Tom didn't like change: not even the smallest. Disappointed, he kept staring at their suddenly useless wings, as silent as the gr

 What the news would say in the morning every day. Everything that would be talked about on the open road out loud. What his family had seen of it: divorces, deaths, and everything that strangers drowned in brown whiskey around 3 am. Tom hadn’t heard much more than this about the world. He’d hardly seen more of it than what was visible from right where he was at, and none of what he had seen had ever made him want to discover any more.To be honest, the world sounded terrible. Maybe even worse than hell. At least, by the time you go there, you're already dead.‘It's a pile of shit, this world,’ his father used to tell him when he was growing up, and his mother would only nod. ‘A stinking swamp, and if you're not careful it will swallow a baby like you in one piece.’S

“Tom Roehn confessed.’Annika looks at the policemen in silence. After those words, it’s perfectly quiet. On the opposite side of the fence, the snowdrift has stopped its drift, and is now only snow: white, and cold. She feels guilty. For not responding, and letting the officers down. To her, they look disappointed.Should she fling her arms around their necks? Shake their cold hands? Perhaps shower them with kisses? Even a ‘thank you’ would sound strange, because the truth isn’t a gift. Annika has never asked for it, and might be better off now, if they had kept it to themselves.What do you do with the truth? Does it have a purpose? Or do you merely receive it, take it to the attic, and bury it underneath old photos, in the creaking drawer of a dusty shelf, where you forget it u