Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh

clear blue sky was hard to take. Marek saw it as emptiness, a place with no heaven in it. He preferred the clouds because he could imagine paradise behind them.

When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn’t know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.

These memories made his heart feel warm. But when he detached from the memories and looked around at the morning grayness and the looming height of the mountain before him, the rising sun, his heart felt cold, like a sweat chilled by a sudden wind. It was a terrible feeling, the boy’s first experience of nostalgia: the pain of his past.

‘What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.’

The worse he behaved, the more God loved them.

Strange, he thought next, that fire hurts to the touch. Fire gives light. Shouldn’t the darkness hurt instead? Hell ought to be pure darkness. Nothingness. The thought chilled him. There was nothing to see there.

Children are selfish, she thought. They rob you of life. They thrive as you toil and wither, and then they bury you, their tears never once falling out of regret for what they’ve stolen.