Free Breathless by Anne Swärd Page A

frostbite in the process.
    â€œOkay, but I’m doing it myself,” he said dismissively. He jumped onto the freezer, frowning with pain, and accepted the packets of mushrooms.
    It was probably the thought of amputation that helped him to endure—that and shame and ignominy, as well as pain. The cold appeared to aggravate his suffering instead of relieve it. Like cures like, was Rikard’s standard response when something had to be remedied. He had for a long time wanted to be a boxer, but he had such thin skin, his eyebrows couldn’t take it. The boxer knows nothing of the dancer’s pain and the dancer knows nothing of the boxer’s discipline, he claimed; you should respect what you don’t understand. Like now, how it was feeling for Lukas. I could see that it was hurting, diabolically, but perhaps that was a good sign, if Rikard’s cure logic was correct. We didn’t have time to think it over, we just had to try and see.
    Time passed and still nothing happened, and then, to speed up the proceedings, Lukas pulled down his shorts and put the deep-frozen bags of mushrooms right on his crotch.
    With that, Marina arrived.
    She was suddenly standing there in the cellar doorway, carrying an armful of hammock cushions rescued from the unexpected cloudburst, staring at us. The rain had made her mimosa-yellow cotton top see-through—one of her breasts was larger than the other—and I was struck by how remarkably like Papa she was, apart from the breasts. I’d never noticed it before, but with her medium-length hair now wet and pushed back off her face she was so like him that I gasped.
    Mama was upset when Papa left, but his sister Marina was the one who was angry. How she shrieked at him in the kitchen. Marina’s screaming was the most terrifying of all the things that happened at that time.
    Now with a violent push she threw the cushions aside and snatched for a weapon. That turned out to be a vacuum cleaner wand, an old-fashioned chrome model, lethal. Without a word she raised it up toward Lukas, in attack or in defense, it was impossible to say. The bags of frozen mushrooms slipped from Lukas’s hands onto the stone floor with a muffled sound. His shorts were still hanging around his ankles as he sat and tried to take in what was happening: the chrome wand, the expression on Marina’s face . . . If I could have moved, I would have pulled them up, but I was just as transfixed.
    All the evil energy in the room was directed toward Lukas. She didn’t even look at me, just made a vague gesture that I should move away from him. But I couldn’t.
    â€œI haven’t done anything,” he said. You only put soap on hands that are dirty, as the saying goes in my family. Marina . . . I saw the chrome pipe gleam in the light from the fluorescent strip when she swung it around in the air to build up speed. She was going off the rails, she must be. Hyrrokkin had drawn herself up to her full height.
    Instead of covering his penis, which was still standing straight up, Lukas raised his arms to cover his face. As if he seriously did think that she would hit him. She would never do that. Even if she
was
losing control.
Not Marina
 . . . The thought ran through my head the second before she did it. Hard. Right at Lukas’s face with an awful thud. A shrill sound like the call of a bird of prey escaped from my lips. He groaned softly. If he hadn’t been so used to protecting himself at home, the blow would have knocked him to the floor. The sound of the metal against his forearms was excruciating.
    While she was reloading her chrome pipe he finally seemed to grasp the seriousness of his predicament, jumped down from the freezer, pulling up his shorts on the way, and, crouching, started to move toward the open door, to the garden and freedom. The torrential rain outside almost drowned his voice as he rattled off what sounded like a stream of