When I was a baby, my mother would cover her eyes with the palms of her hands and disappear. I’d hear her voice somewhere in the distance, Where is Mommy?, and I’d sit there, staring into the abyss until she inevitably removed her hands from her face and appeared in front of me again.
“Tupid baby”, my brother would remark sourly, still too young to say his s’s properly. He’d let my hand curl around his finger and every time my mother disappeared he’d feel my grip tighten in fear.
Once I finally understood this crucial concept, that things still existed even when you couldn’t see them, a world of hidden magic opened up for me. In my mind, I could now construct vivid fantasies, I could understand invisible things like love and hope and freedom, and I could become whoever I wanted through the act of playing pretend. By learning that my mother wasn’t gone just because she covered her face behind her hands, I could become God.
That was the first rule I learned, Things still exist even if you can’t see them, and I treasured this knowledge greatly for the powers of imagination it had offered me. When I realized there were more rules, I was enthused, assuming they would lead me to new, exciting explorations. My brother did not share my optimism, boldly claiming that only stupid kids needed rules. Without rules, the universe would become too big, too complex, and too hard to live in. “If they didn’t make everything so easy for you, your scull might explode,” he said, his s’s perfect now.
Stand up for yourself, was a commandment my father instilled in me early on. He was one of those lawyers who were appointed to you if one couldn’t afford one of your own, and he saw it as a personal calling of his, to stand up for those who were too weak to stand up for themselves. Mostly, it was kids caught with drugs, and mostly, they were guilty. This, however, didn’t seem to bother my father in the slightest. On the contrary, the defense of all people, guilty and innocent alike, was to him the greatest sign of a well-functioning democratic nation. The right to stand up for yourself was the difference between being free and being oppressed and exercising that right was the difference between being brave and being weak.
Stand up for yourself, he’d tell me and I had listened. Daughters were supposed to listen to their fathers, how else were they to make it in the big world?
Sitting in the sandbox, carving patterns in the sand with a sharp stick, I waited patiently for him to pick me up so that I could tell him of my bravery, my standing up for myself. It was the last day before summer and my yellow dress and pink shoes were stained in dots of brown. My hands had been similarly freckled before Ms. Kamiński had grabbed me by the arm, forced my hands under the ruthless hot stream of the sink, and scrubbed. The water had run pink like strawberry milk and it hurt. That day, my father was the first parent arriving at kindergarten and I felt smug in a way only a young child can. My daddy came to pick me up early because he loves me more than your daddy does. He stood and talked to Ms. Kamiński for a long while, so caught up in the conversation that he didn’t even see me waving at him with my white, clean hands. That’s when I got a funny feeling in my tummy, a feeling that only grew as my father wordlessly picked me up from where I was sitting in the sandbox, ignoring my cheery greetings, ignoring my excited smile, and ignoring my now shrinking sense of pride. It wasn’t until he had fastened me into the car and closed the door behind us that he finally addressed me.
”What happened today?” He asked in the same way he might a guilty client. But I wasn’t guilty, I had only stood up for myself.
”A hedgehog pricked my finger, daddy,” I explained truthfully, ”look!”. I showed him the brown hole in my otherwise clean finger but he didn’t turn to look at it. Instead, he closed his eyes and scratched his eyebrow.
“And what happened to the hedgehog?”.
It wasn’t the pain that had upset me, it was the deception. I was sure the little creature had wanted to be my friend. Its black pearl eyes and perky ears reminded me of my cuddle toys at home. The hands, however, tiny with soft, pink fingers, looked exactly like those of a baby.
When I stretched out my own hand for a greeting the hedgehog’s nose scrunched up all funny, like it was about to sneeze, and the sight made me giggle to myself. Then, a sudden pain shot through my body as the animal struck me with a needle. A perfect pearl of red pressed itself out of my finger and ran down my palm. The hedgehog had betrayed me, but I was my father’s daughter and I wasn’t going to accept defeat. I was going to stand up for myself.
Sensing my determination, the animal tried to run, but I was both bigger and faster, and after just one stomp, the hedgehog stopped resisting. I continued slamming down my foot until it threw up from its stomach, hedgehog-food spilling out all over the ground, some of it sticking to the sole of my shoe. I didn’t know animals could throw up from their stomachs and again, I started to giggle, having now forgotten all about my aching finger.
That night I learned another rule, a rule added on as an asterisk to the first one; Stand up for yourself but never do so using violence. Violence meant kicking, or stomping, or biting, or ripping, or pushing. It wasn’t nice, my mother explained to me, and it went against her own favorite rule, Always be kind.
I slowly found that the guidelines I once treasured had now become an intricate maze. As soon as I thought I had mastered a practice, accomplished a goal, perfected a rule, there was always another asterisk. I tried to bribe my brother with pieces of candy to tell me his trick. He often got himself into trouble but our parents never looked at him with the same destain they now did me. I’d watch as they brushed away the ruffled hair on his forehead and planted a kiss on his clean skin. Me, they never touched anymore. They handled me, maneuvered me into car seats, pulled me away from trafficked roads, zipped up my dresses and tied my shoelaces. But they wouldn’t kiss my cheeks anymore, they wouldn’t tickle my armpits, or blow bubbles against my tummy, or cuddle me when I couldn’t fall asleep. Something in their eyes was gone, something I hadn’t even thought to take notice of until it had already disappeared.
My favorite moments became picking fights with my brother. It technically went against the rules but my brother assured me that violence between siblings wasn’t real violence, it was just playing around. It didn’t count. So I’d steal his toys and I’d stick out my tongue just so that he’d grab my hair, push me to the ground and twist the skin on my arm in two opposite directions. Indian burn, he called it, and it would leave my skin aching and blushed. It hurt like scalding hot water, but I was happy to be touched.
I thought a lot about the hedgehog, wondering why it was more important than me. Why my parents hated me more for stomping it than they did the hedgehog for poking my finger. Sometimes I covered my eyes with the palms of my hands and remembered the way I had made the little creature screech and throw up. I covered my eyes and pictured myself doing it again and again and again. Sometimes it made me feel better. Sometimes it made me feel worse.
I went back to the place where it had happened. Behind the big, red slide, under one of the aspen trees. There was still throw-up on the ground, pink spaghetti and brown sauce, but the hedgehog was gone. I searched in between the roots of the tree, in the grass, and behind any large rocks I could find. There was nothing. The hedgehog had ceased to exist. I had broken a rule and now the world was moving in reverse. Now, things stopped existing when I couldn’t see them. Now, everything I touched would eventually disappear.
The hedgehog was but the first victim of a long string of disappearances. After it, there was my mother’s keys, my heart necklace, the neighbor’s bunny, the other neighbor’s dog, grandma, and the pack of ice cream in the fridge. Once on the TV they even said that the world itself had crashed and, as a result, lost two trillion dollars. I didn’t even know trillion was a real number, I only knew that it had disappeared.
I started conducting studies in regard to these strange anomalies. In my notebook, I documented the exact spot in the lake where I dropped my heart necklace. Ten regular steps forward, one small step to the left. The necklace swirled to the bottom, its golden chain shimmering in the light, and I watched as it reached the muddy bottom. The next day, just as I had predicted, the necklace was gone.
I thought of things that were infinite; God, The Milky Way, two trillion dollars, and wondered if any of them could be the culprit. Whatever it was, this thing that made things around me vanish, was big and very hungry.
When I turned ten, I received a digital camera as a birthday gift from my parents. The packaging said the battery lasted 150 minutes at a time and so the very next day, I prepared for a new project.
I sat by the lake again, my skirt turning wet while I waited for a fish, when suddenly another girl appeared from in between the trees. I recognized her from school but she didn’t go to my class. She had a bright freckled face concealed by the hoodie of her dirt-green jacket.
“What are you doing?” she wondered and I told her the truth, I was trying to catch a fish.
“My dad says you can get hurt by the scales because they’re so sharp.” Her voice was whiny and her eyes refused to focus on me. They vibrated, her blue irises desperately trying to jump out of their white prisons.
“I have an illness,” the girl explained, “Nys- stag- mus”, she sounded out.
When I asked if she could see, she let out an irritated huff. “Blind people have canes or service dogs. Do you see me walking around with a cane?”
I asked her if she wanted to know a secret and her eyes bounced excitedly at that. Everyone loves secrets. I told her that if she put her head in the lake and inhaled hard three times, her lungs would fill with water and her body would adapt and make her part sea creature.
“Why would I want to be a sea creature?”
Because being part sea creature meant you could be underwater for as long as you wanted. You could spend hours exploring caves and pirate ships, collect beautiful shells and pearls, or swim together with dolphins. The trick was to fight against the body’s natural reflex to force the water out of the lungs. I explained that she would likely have to try several times to get it right. Most people didn’t have what it takes.
“No problem,” she assured me, “my dad told me to never give up.”
When she’d fallen asleep in the bed of moss that surrounded the lake, spit slowly crawling down from her chin, her eyes finally calm as they looked up at the darkening sky, I turned on my camera. I took ten big steps away from the body, walking in reverse, and balanced the camera on top of a large stone. The green jacket covered her face and made her body blend into the moss, but the camera managed to pick up her general shape. She was visible enough to disappear.
I had planned to visit her the following day to see whether the camera had managed to catch whatever beast it was that continued to make permanent things un-permanent. My parents, however, did not approve. Something had happened out there, my mother explained, a girl was gone, lost. A girl just like me.
My experiment had followed the usual pattern it seemed. The girl in the forest had been chosen and consequently, she had been taken. I was disappointed that I couldn’t go back outside to review the evidence from the camera but still, I had learned something useful. I could make things disappear without even touching them. By the power of my presence and my words alone, I could bend reality.
Julie, I would learn later, was the girl’s name. They showed a picture of her on the TV and in the photo her eyes were still, just like they had been when I left her.
“It’s like she vanished into thin air,” a woman with pearl earrings sobbed, “sweetie, if you’re out there, please come back home. If you’re out there…” Then she started crying so hard she couldn’t get any more words out.
I wondered if ‘out there’ was the place where all the lost things in the world eventually ended up.
I picked a fight with my parents, begging them to let me go outside to retrieve the camera I had left behind when I was playing the day before. I tried crying but my face only ended up wrinkled and dry. “You shouldn’t be so careless with things you like,” my mother scolded me, another rule to adhere to.
My brother called me stupid for the whole ordeal but offered to sneak out and get the camera for me once our parents had gone to bed. “I’m not scared of him,” he said confidently, referring to the kidnapper rumored to be lurking on the streets, looking for kids to stuff into his white wan. Kidnapping was like stealing but with people and even though the concepts seemed to be easily confused, being kidnapped wasn’t the same as having disappeared. When you were kidnapped, you could still be found. When you were kidnapped, you still existed.
I drew my brother a map of where I had put the camera, marking it with an X. Starting from the edge of the lake you needed to take ten big steps backward and then you should see the rock. “Ten small steps for me,” my brother corrected me, pinching me hard on the knee to make a point. In return, I slapped his hand. In return, he flicked my cheek.
When the sun fell from the sky and the voices from the living room quieted down, my brother pulled on his black hoodie, pocketed the directions I had crudely drawn for him on a ripped-out page from my notebook and disappeared into the night. Only, of course, he didn’t really disappear. From the bedroom window I could see him mounting his bike and quietly making his way down the street, nervously looking over his shoulder for any white vans approaching.
While I waited, I laid down in my bed, crossed my arms over my chest, closed my eyes, and pretended I was inside of a coffin. The lid of my grandma’s coffin had been left open and I remembered at the funeral when it was my turn to say goodbye, I had tried to tickle her to see if she might smile for me one last time. She didn’t, and later that day she disappeared, her existence replaced by a flat rock and an array of flowers.
I laid in my make-believe open coffin and wondered if there was such a thing that would always stay the same. If there was anything that was really permanent. My mother and father had gone from loving me to hating me, from touching me to avoiding even looking at me. Everything I started, I had to end. Everywhere I went, I had to leave. Like a necklace at the bottom of a lake, life seemed to slip away as soon as I turned to look the other way. Even the house I lived in would one day be bulldozed, burned to the ground, destroyed in an earthquake, swallowed by a tsunami, or renovated into a shopping mall. The bed I now laid in would eventually become too small, or too old, or too ugly, and then it too, would disappear into the infinite darkness.
My newest theory was that a black hole was the thing responsible for all the disappearances. I’d learned about them during science class, these hungry space-beings with infinite stomachs eating everything they came into contact with. Usually, black holes lived up in space but it wasn’t improbable to think a piece of black hole had fallen down to earth like a meteor, latched itself on to me, and started swallowing the things around me. Black holes were infinite on the inside, an eternal out there, but maybe this one was so small on the outside that no one, not even me, could see it.
My brother was angry when he returned home, his sneakers soaked and his face scratched by the tree branches he couldn’t see in the dark. Nevertheless, he had fulfilled his mission, carelessly tossing the camera onto the bed as proof. My fingers fumbled instantly with the buttons, violently trying to shake life in the little machine when the screen refused to light up.
“You’re so damn stupid,” my brother muttered, taking off his hoodie and inspecting his ruffled hair in the mirror hung beside the door. I assumed he meant because of the rule I’d unknowingly broken; You shouldn’t be careless with things you like, so I didn’t bother answering. Since when did he care about our parent’s rules anyway?
“Why would you leave your camera next to that… thing?” He complained, crossing his arms and pouting with his lips. When I wouldn’t stop tapping at the camera screen, he jerked it away from me, “It’s out of battery. See? Totally dead.”
He tossed the camera back to me but this time, I didn’t pick it up. Instead, I sat still, wondering what he’d meant by ‘that thing’. Could he have seen the girl? Could she still be where I had left her? Could she have somehow avoided the black hole I had pushed her into?
When I asked my brother, he looked away, annoyed as ever, “You know what thing. Don’t play stupid just because you are stupid.”
I told him I really didn’t know what thing, promise, and he rolled his eyes at me.
“The girl on TV who everyone is looking for. That thing.”
We were quiet for a long time after that.
My brother sat down at the edge of my bed, narrowly avoiding knocking his head into the top bunk bed. Last summer there was at least a fist of air in between the top of his head and the upper bunk, but now there was barely a thumb. That displeased pout he always wore on his face was, however, the exact same. So were his oversized jeans and his socks that, no matter how clean they were, always smelled of brother-sweat. He was annoyed with me, huffing pointedly when he saw me staring at him. My brother was annoyed with me, and suddenly it dawned on me that he was always annoyed with me. For his birthday he had wished for a baby brother, a miniature version of himself, and just by the act of being born, I had annoyed him. From that day on, his face had remained sour, his words taunting and his touch ruthless. Even when I did something nice for him, brought him those sour candies he liked so much, or let him watch music videos on the TV instead of cartoons, he’d manage to say something nasty about it. He might have grown out of sitting on my bed, but he would never grow out of hating me. He would never grow out of being my brother. That was the only thing in the world that would forever be permanent.
I was sure now, more sure than I had ever been before, that my brother was the reason the girl’s body was still lying there, the tips of her fingers dipped into the lake, her eyes staring up at the sky as it changed colors. Whatever it was, that eternal power that forced everything into its hidden veil. Whatever black hole was swallowing the things around me. Whatever Godly hand that was ripping objects from this word and putting them into his pocket, my brother was their opposing force. Or rather, he was my opposing force.
I could make things go away, he could make them stay.
I put the palms of my hands in front of my eyes, softly at first, then pressing them down hard until the Milky Way appeared before me. I stayed there for a while, looking out at the black infinity, searching for glimpses of all the things that had been lost. But there was nothing but stars, specks of light vibrating in the darkness, dancing, swirling, jumping from side to side. Perhaps they too were searching or perhaps they were just looking for a way out.
When I removed my hands and opened my eyes again, my brother was there, sulking at the foot of the bed he was soon too tall to sit in upright. He was still annoyed, still smelly, still rude, and still rough. I offered him my hand, letting him decide what to do with me now. Would he let me hold on to his finger, squeezing it whenever I was scared, or would he grab my arm and twist my skin in opposite directions? As long as someone touched me, I thought. As long as someone stayed.
Maybe it was true, that when you were siblings it didn’t count. When you were siblings, it was permanent.
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Ninna Hultgren is a 24 year old writer based in Stockholm, Sweden, who is currently working on her first book while finishing her bachelor’s degree in media communications and psychology. Ninna has previously been published in 3Elements literary review. She can be reached on Instagram @hultgrenninna.
© 2024, Ninna Hultgren
Halfway Down the Stairs 