Free Some Kind of Peace by Camilla Grebe, Åsa Träff Page B

also suitable for white-water rafting, hiking, and bar fights. I always keep it by the side of the bed.
    But not now.
    All I can feel on the spruce floorboards are dust bunnies. The room is completely dark, which is unusual this time of year, when a little lightwill find its way in from outside. I can hear rain drumming against the Eternit roof and at a distance an ominous rumble. The stifling summer evening will now have its inevitable sequel in the form of a real summer storm. This is not unusual here where I live.
    There is something special about thunder by the sea—I don’t think it happens more often, but the sound seems amplified. There are no forests or buildings around it that can serve as a muffler. Instead, the rumbling of thunder rolls back and forth over the surface of the water like a bowling ball on a stone bench.
    I try to turn on the bedside lamp. Nothing happens. Maybe a fuse has blown? After much hesitation, I force myself to sit up and tentatively set my feet on the worn wood floor.
    I can’t help but smile a little at myself. This is absurd, the situation is pathetic. A fuse blows and I become… incapacitated, irrational. I desperately search my memory for something to hang my thoughts on, a mental line to hold on to as I slowly lift myself off the bed. But the only thing that fills my awareness is the music I was listening to before I fell asleep.
    Ground control to Major Tom
    I shiver. An animal cries out in the distance and I feel a cold draft along my legs. Is a window open?
    Take your protein pills and put your helmet on
    The house is quiet. Too quiet. Slowly, I slip across the cold floorboards out of the bedroom. The only thing I hear is the rain and the waves regularly crashing against the rocks below the house, like a gigantic animal’s heavy breathing.
    Then.
    A sharp pain flashes through my shinbone, spreads along my thigh all the way up to my groin. I double up. Another crash and something lands on my big toe with a dull thud. What is going on? There is a chair in the middle of the floor. Why is it here? I can’t remember pulling it out. The chairs are always around the table in the kitchen. And now—my toe—what the hell is that? I bend over and investigate the object that fell on my toe.
    It’s the flashlight.
    Ground control to Major Tom
    I turn on the flashlight while I massage my shin, but nothing happens. Is it broken? Once again I feel the cold night air streaming toward me. Something is terribly wrong. And the whole time: the music in my head that won’t go away.
    Why is the chair in the middle of the floor? Why is the flashlight on the chair and not by my bed? I remind myself to stop drinking so much. Obviously, I must have moved the chair and for some strange reason put the flashlight on it. I just don’t remember when and why. But this sort of thing happens to me sometimes. Once I fell asleep on the rocks and woke up in the middle of the night, ice-cold, covered with mosquito bites, my back unbelievably stiff. In the dark .
    If I wasn’t so afraid of the dark, it could have been a funny story, or possibly embarrassing. Another time, I left the freezer wide open after a late-night ice cream raid. All the food was ruined. That wasn’t a funny story either, just expensive. No more wine this week, I tell myself, as I let go of my shin and get up unsteadily.
    A slight queasiness forces me to stand still a moment. I don’t know if it’s due to the wine or the fear, but I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, inexhaustible and twitchy like a Duracell rabbit. Carefully, I start moving toward the hall, one foot tentatively in front of the other—I don’t want to risk running into something again. Where is the fuse box? Distance and proportions become distorted in the dark, and although I have been in the cramped space that is my hall innumerable times, I can’t find the familiar little metal box.
    Sweat breaks out on my forehead, runs into my eyes making them burn, and I