Free Shutterspeed by Erwin Mortier

meekly, but the whole time I was jamming my toecap against the table leg to feel how much it hurt.

 
     
    I CHERISHED THE NIGHTS IN THOSE OVERLY LUMINOUS weeks of June. For me the darkness held so much more than merely the absence of illumination. In the early days of that summer, the very last, the unforgiving light could be unspeakably crass.
    Thinking back to those June days, I see the cracks between the flagstones in the back yard and long columns of ants lugging grass seeds, dead flies, caterpillars and grains of sand on their shoulders, black ants like Negro slaves, red ones like Arabs dwarfed by minarets of country lilies or beanstalks, and the oriental business of caravanserais, there, against the south wall beneath the drainpipe, but far too hurried and too tiny to grasp in the delicious indolence of those endless afternoons.
    Night-time was a repository of everything that had ever existed. Sundown set the solid objects of daytime throbbing and seething in slow motion. Molecule by molecule they shed their contours and unfurled. The night was a vast ocean filled with all the movements ever made by arms, mouths, heads and legs, a primeval soup of gestures gently lapping my body and making my head swim.
    I had stopped believing in ghosts by then. Death was among us, a megalomaniac collector who kept his treasures in cigar boxes buried in the earth. There was no swapping, ever. As God’s faithful warehouse steward, he dispatched his six-legged minions to pillage all that lay motionless and haul it underground, where he would spread out his booty on the tabletop to study each item with a magnifying glass for the purpose of classification, in readiness for Judgment Day.
    Whenever God was minded to create a new person He took a stroll through the caverns of death and cast an amused eye over the fruits of His steward’s acquisitive obsession. He slid the graves open as if they were drawers, holding His measuring tape to a leg here, noting the dimensions of a chest or shoulder-blade there. Cupboardfuls of lips were at His disposal, tiers of double chins. On the walls eyebrows and moustaches were displayed like butterflies mounted in frames; elsewhere nipples and warts were stored in sweet jars.
    He was at liberty to pick and choose, was God. Nor was He a stingy type by any means, as Uncle Werner was wont to say, because the old goat had been far from sparing with the titty-meat when He fashioned Aunt’s elder sisters.
    I was keen to believe him, but there was a niggling feeling of doubt at the back of my mind. Mr Snellaert, too, had once told us about people getting children from a shop, but also that they had to place an order for them with Our Lord first. And say a prayer or two, he hadadded, half under his breath. He wouldn’t tell us where the shop was, not just yet – we’d have to wait until we were a bit older and had a bit more money in our savings accounts.
    ‘We never bought any babbies,’ said Uncle when I pressed him to tell me more. ‘Your aunt and me, we got one free, gratis, for nothing. That was you.’
    He removed the stopper from the decanter of port wine, because it was Sunday, and poured himself a generous drink. Then he took a smaller glass and poured a dram for me – after all, I had taken my First Communion and was no longer in short trousers, so to speak.
    Aunt came in from the kitchen. ‘Oh, Werner,’ she wailed, ‘do you really think that’s the first thing you should teach him?’ Shaking her head, she took the soup plates from the dresser and set them on the table.
    Uncle Werner gave me a knowing wink, and when Aunt returned to the kitchen he topped up my glass. ‘A feller has to learn to drink, so he can have a few on Sunday …’
    Having a few drinks meant that the world spun around and you felt like a lord. The port had a cloying sweetness that stuck to the roof of my mouth and left a warm trail through my gullet down to my stomach.
    ‘Mind you, we did do the odd bit of