When the Cranes Fly South

by Lisa Ridzén

At dinner one day, I snapped and asked what the hell the point of life was if I was too old for a dog. Were we just supposed to sit around, waiting to die?

I wanted to get up, to bring my cane down on the desk and ask how the hell it could be normal to have hands that can’t even open the lid of a herring jar. To have to choose between that and dropping down dead. But the words I was looking for floated away and out of reach.

Why doesn’t he just work less? If it’s really so stressful, that is. He says a lot of people at his company get burnt out like that, but I spent forty-seven years at the sawmill and it never happened to a single person. That was real hard work, so I don’t know what they’re doing wrong these days.

His new electric car is so quiet that I didn’t hear it pull in to the driveway. So clean, too. How could we have raised the kind of man who takes his car to the automatic carwash?

Abandon her? Which of us has been abandoned, I want to ask. You’re not the one stuck with a lifetime’s worth of memories in a body that’s slowly withering away.

I’m glad I’m not the one who has to do all this app nonsense. Can’t understand why there isn’t more of an outcry about the fact that you can’t even park your car without having a mobile phone nowadays.

Ture thinks I’m being pigheaded and whiny, but I genuinely don’t see what’s so interesting about all these gadgets. That’s because I haven’t tried, he tells me. But that isn’t true. Ellinor has shown me all the things she can do on her phone, and I think it is ridiculous.

I was just taking my damn hound for a walk in the woods. The same woods I’d been exploring for half a century before any of these people were even a twinkle in their old man’s eye. I want to say all of that, but all I can manage is yet another: “Report?”

I don’t know when it happened, but we’ve switched roles. He has never come close to being as big or as strong as I was, but he has all the authority now. He’s the one in charge of my life. I’m the reason he’s even alive today, but I’m also the one who has to bow down, who has to go along with his decisions. He’s the person people listen to, not me.

“It’s funny,” Ture goes on, exhaling so deeply that it makes the line crackle. “Don’t you think it’s funny how they’ve got us clinging on to life?”

It’s always there, the Sixten-shaped hole. A nothingness that has amplified the emptiness you left behind. It’s strange, but when Hans took Sixten I started missing you even more. Almost as though it were you he’d taken.

Johanna spent a long time trying to convince me to eat it earlier, one trick after another. She said that me being stubborn won’t bring Sixten back. That not eating isn’t going to help. But what she doesn’t understand is that refusing is all I can do.

I peer over at the coffin. Next time, it’ll probably be your picture there, and a strange mix of heaviness and anticipation settles over me. The thought of burying you feels surreal, absurd, but the idea of just getting it over and done with grows and grows. I’m ready to be done with everything now.

I’m lying here, about to die, and I just don’t know.