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Maybe it wasn’t the house, but me that was porous, I thought. Maybe I had to grow a thicker skin in this town.
What we call biology is the study of the living, and after I had said it, it was almost as if I heard the words continue to move between the concrete walls, as if I stood in the wild between two cliffs listening to the echo. Did the beetles, the larvae, and the spiders hear it?
When she chewed I could hear the sound of the fruit’s flesh dissolving into foam.
Carral chitchatted and leafed through a glossy magazine while chewing on her thumb nail. The apples rubbed gently against each other in the cupboard and in the bowl. The glass shards in the chandelier clinked.
And all the while I could hear this hiss and bubble that I still didn’t understand, as if we were far down on a quiet seabed and listening to wind howling on the surface.
But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores. I dream of white flowers blossoming under my nails, as if under ice. Then my nails break, opening up like clams and in the finger flesh there are little sticky fruit pearls.
As winter settled in outside, we were set upon by summer inside the brewery, as if the walls separated not only the inside from the outside, but divided two different climates.
I kept going to lectures, and every time I left, it felt like I crossed a threshold between dream and reality, sleep and wakefulness. Outside was cold and clear, and returning to the flat at night was like entering a vast warm cocoon. Carral seldom left anymore. Increasingly she had become part of the damp brewery heat.
Björk’s Vespertine album,
Outside the house the world was dry and sharp and normal, and it didn’t quite correspond with what seemed to grow between the brewery walls: something moist, skinless and quiet.
The roof of my mouth felt normal and cold. But the mirror shook in front of me, and all around me everything was moving; thin rings were forming on the water surface in the sink. The honey fungus rocked by the bath’s rim. The grass tufts between the floorboards swayed gently. I turned off the tap and listened. There was a thump that sounded like it came from inside the concrete. When I put my ear to the wall, I heard a soft knocking sound, through the cistern rush.
Then everything starts rushing around me, as if I’ve pulled a plug, as if all the saltwater is being drained out of the beer barrels, the bathtub, the house. Carral doesn’t open her eyes.
When I write this, I think that there are two versions of myself and just one managed to get out, first out of the brewery, then out of the town, out of the country, back to Norway. The other is still there, with the other ghosts in the house, shut in while the storm and the sea tears at the walls outside. I bend over this white sheet and pull her out, the one who is left in the brewery, pick her up from the bottom: Arms, swollen fingers, broken skull, burst lungs. Her face is white, covered in lime, algae skeletons, beer froth, and sea foam. I
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