Fish in the Sky by Fridrik Erlings Read Free Book Online

my cereal with sleep still heavy in my eyes. Mom butters bread. She hums the tune but doesn’t sing the lyrics; maybe she has forgotten them. She doesn’t sing any words, just “dah dah dah” or “bah bah bah,” and harmonizes with the chorus. It’s only in church on Sunday that she knows all the words and sings her heart out. She sings louder than everyone else, and I just wish she wouldn’t force me to go with her every time.
    She’s been manically slaving for two days, arranging the little room. I was adamant I wouldn’t help her. But then she didn’t even ask for my help and ignored me while I lay in bed reading.
    Mom found a cardboard box full of books my father had left behind. There were novels, poetry books, biographies of old ships’ captains, crime stories, and pulp-fiction paperbacks. I took the box into my room and started to read a book about a wife who hires a drunk private investigator to spy on her husband, but then she falls in love with the investigator and tries to save him from the bottle and wants to start a new life with him. I find at least two really hot descriptions of copulation, which I don’t entirely understand because my knowledge of words regarding this act are as limited to me as knowledge of the act itself.
    The morning outside the window is gray, wet, and windy, the splashing raindrops lit up by the yellow streetlights. Sometimes I take a long detour into the neighborhood where Clara lives in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. Maybe I’ll follow her or appear suddenly from around a corner, quite coincidentally and talk to her for a while, although I have no idea whether I would be able to say anything — or what to say, for that matter. But I never see her. In my mind, I act out our conversations where I talk eagerly about this or that. She is full of admiration and a little shy and timid; I am bursting with self-confidence and manhood. Little by little I turn the conversation toward my feelings for her; I place my hands on her shoulders, look deeply into her elfin eyes, and confess my love to her. She blushes, searches for my hands, and squeezes them, and finally she is in my arms, giving me the most honey-sweet of kisses.
    But when I finally arrive at school, boiling hot all over from my fantasizing, I see her standing with all her friends, laughing, chatting, and so sure of herself in her unworldly beauty, and I fall apart. My temperature drops to zero. My fantasy is as far from reality as the east and west borders of the universe. I don’t exist in her eyes. I’m just an invisible shadow, passing by silently in the darkness of the morning and disappearing into the classroom and into my seat. And since she is sitting in the back of the middle row, I’m just like any other back and shoulders in her eyes.
    It’s that idiot Thomas Magnus who has all her attention whenever he wants. Tom, the soccer and gym hero, has everything needed to get girls’ attention. It is unbearable how shameless and disgustingly free of low self-esteem he is. He can turn in his seat and look any girl in the class straight in the eye, do some rude gesture with his tongue when the teacher isn’t looking, and the girls just beam at him. He is so funny! Then the girls go crazy and giggle together while Tom just smiles a confident smile. At recess, he’s out on the soccer field and doesn’t give the girls a second look. They stand and stare at him playing, all hanging on a thread of excitement, waiting for him to give them an eye. But Tom has nothing to do with them at recess. They’re just an exciting pastime in the classroom when he’s bored. At recess it’s the serious stuff: soccer.
    Nothing in the world is as meaningless to me as sports, soccer in particular. The only time I went to Tom’s house, he didn’t talk about anything but soccer, and his room was covered in posters of sweaty, muddy guys with their shorts on their heads, screaming for joy just because one of them had been able