by Willow Rose
“Could you please just settle your differences?” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said, diplomatically and emotionlessly to her children in the back. She didn’t even bother to get really upset with them anymore. The arguing went on, day after day, hour after hour, and she had learned to block it out, to simply stop caring in order to survive.
They didn’t hear her and kept arguing. It was the oldest, Jacob, and her middle child (always the troublemaker), Christian, who were discussing something, and had been all morning. Mrs. Sigumfeldt had no idea what the discussion was all about, but she seldom did. She rarely cared enough. It might have been a Minecraft discussion, it might not. At that point, she didn’t care anymore. She was late for her work as a lawyer at Morch & Partners, a highly esteemed law firm where they expected her to arrive early and leave late, if she wanted to keep her position, for which there were hundreds of applicants out there just as experienced as her that would kill for her job if she didn’t want it. (Her boss, the company’s senior partner Mr. Morch never hesitated to tell her when he wasn’t satisfied with her work-ambition, as he liked to put it.)
Mrs. Sigumfeldt looked at her cellphone and checked her emails while driving down the street of Blegevej in the nice neighborhood in Stoholm outside of Viborg. She grumbled when she noticed an email she was supposed to have answered on Friday, before the weekend. Now, Mr. Morch was going to have a fit.
Oh, how she loathed Mondays.
“Mom! Watch out!” Jacob screamed from the back seat.
Mrs. Sigumfeldt looked up just in time to spot the car approaching from the side, just in time to avoid it crashing into her. She lost control of the car and hit the brakes, causing the tires to squeal. The car skidded sideways and ended in the hedge of Mr. and Mrs. Bjerrehus in number six, who had invited the Sigumfeldts for dinner once, but never again after their boys broke their very expensive Ming-vase bought for twelve thousand kroner on auction in Viborg.
Mrs. Sigumfeldt screamed as the car slid sideways into the bush and the airbags were deployed.
“Is everyone alright?”
The door to the car was opened and a woman looked inside. “I’m so so sorry. I didn’t see you.”
Mrs. Sigumfeldt pushed herself free from the airbag and stumbled outside. “Are you alright?” the woman asked again.
Mrs. Sigumfeldt grumbled, annoyed, and blinked her eyes to better focus. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.
The woman that had hit them in her Toyota Corolla was Mrs. Jansen from number five across the street. It was well known in the neighborhood that her husband, Mr. Jansen, who was a truck driver, was beating her. To cope with the abuse, Mrs. Jansen, a nurse at the hospital in Viborg, numbed herself with strong sedatives that she stole from the hospital and flushed them down with cheap gin.
Usually, Mrs. Sigumfeldt, like everyone else in the neighborhood, had the highest amount of sympathy for the poor Mrs. Jansen, well, except when she was crying and screaming like a crazy person in the street at night and ringing their doorbells, drunk and high on pills. But her goodwill towards her and empathy for her situation disappeared right at that moment.
“My children!” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said, and pushed Mrs. Jansen aside. She pulled the back door open and looked inside the car.
Six eyes looked back at her, and she breathed with relief. “Is everyone alright?” she asked.
All of them nodded. Their eyes were wide and anxious. There was no blood, no bruises. They were all in their seats still. Shaken, but not stirred, Mrs. Sigumfeldt thought to herself. She didn’t know why. This was hardly the time for witty comments.
Mrs. Sigumfeldt looked at her youngest boy, Frederic. “Did anyone get hurt?” she asked.
They all shook their heads. “We’re alright, Mom,” her oldest, Jacob, said. “Just shocked, that’s all.”
“Mommy?” Frederic said.
“Yes, sweetie. Are you okay?”
He swallowed hard, and then reached out his arms towards her. She took off his seatbelt and held him in her arms. “I was scared, Mommy.”
“I know. It’s okay,” she said, and stroked his hair. “You’re fine. It could have been really bad, but it wasn’t. We’re all fine.”
3
IN NUMBER SEVEN, David Busck was sitting on the bed. It was his brother’s house. His feet were on the wooden floor, his elbows leaning on his knees, his face hidden between his hands.
It was morning once again, and David hated those more than anything. A new day was beginning, the sun rising on the horizon. David couldn’t see it, since he hadn’t bothered to pull away the curtains. In the kitchen, he could hear his brother and his wife talking. Their four-month old baby was crying. Once again, they were probably discussing whether David would get out of bed today or not.
He couldn’t blame them.
He had lost track of the days, but it was more than two weeks he had spent in this room that was one day supposed to be the nursery. They had taken David in when he needed it the most, and for that, he was eternally grateful.
David sighed and looked at the gun on the table by the bed. They didn’t know he had it. No one knew. He had bought it once he returned to Denmark…from some guy on the streets of Copenhagen. He didn’t care that it was illegal. That was before his brother asked him to come to Jutland and live at his house until things got better. Till everything settled down a little.
So far, they had only gotten worse.
He hadn’t bought the gun for his protection. He knew that he was safe now that he was back in his old fairy-tale country, where people could walk the streets safely and where a journalist could report his stories freely.
The gun was for himself.
David picked it up and felt its weight. A tear left his eye and rolled across his cheek when he thought about all the times they had held a gun just like it to his head, yelling and screaming at him. Then they called his family on Skype and told them they would shoot him if they didn’t bring them the money.
He still remembered his mother’s screams and cries. She hadn’t been herself since, either. None of them had.
“Why did you have to go anyway?” his father had yelled at him, once he had landed and set foot on Danish soil. They had taken him back to their house, sneaking him out of the airport, with a little help from the police, to avoid the many reporters and photographers waiting for him at the arrival gate.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put us through? Your mother is a wreck.”
“I’m sorry,” was all he could say. And he really was sorry. He felt truly guilty for ending up in this situation. For causing all this distress to his own family. Unlike most of the journalists who went to Syria to cover the war, he didn’t have a big TV station or a newspaper sending him there. No, he had gone on his own. As a freelancer. He had followed two Danish kids travelling from Denmark to become holy warriors in a war that had nothing to do with them. He thought it was an important story to tell. That was how he worked. That was what he did. But his father was right. He didn’t have to go. It was entirely his own fault that he was captured.
He couldn’t blame his father for being angry.
“Do you have any idea what we had to do? Three million dollars. That’s how much money they wanted. We had to sell everything. We had to ask the bank to help us; we had to ask all of our friends for charity. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to have to beg your friends for money?”
“Mogens, don’t,” his mother had said. “The important thing is that he’s back. He’s safe. It’s all that matters now.”
That was the part that had hurt David the most. The look in his mother’s eyes. The pain, the hurt that he had caused her could still make him cry while sitting alone in the room in his brother’s house.
David’s hand was shaking heavily as he lifted up the gun and put it in his mouth. It felt cold on his tongue. David was sweating and crying as he said goodbye to this cruel world and moved his finger to pull the trigger.
4
MARTIN BUSCK HE
ARD the loud sound coming from his brother’s room and looked at his wife.
“What was that?”
She looked at him with anxious eyes. They were both so concerned about David and his state of mind ever since he’d returned from Syria, where he spent ninety days in captivity. He hadn’t been well. They all knew it, but no one knew what to do. All he wanted was for them to leave him alone, he said. There was no way Martin would ever leave his beloved baby brother alone. He loved him way too much for that. Yes, he had been stupid for traveling into a dangerous war-zone like that on his own, but Martin understood him. He knew he had only followed his passion…to tell the important stories that no one else did. And Martin admired him for that. It wasn’t sensible, it wasn’t smart, it wasn’t a choice Martin would ever make, but still he respected his brother’s choice. Martin’s wife, Mathilde had been amazing through the process. She hadn’t even been angry at the fact that they had been forced to sell their house in Aarhus to help pay for his release. They were now deeply in debt, and would never be able to pay it off for the rest of their lives, based on the living they made.
Still, Mathilde never said a word.
“Do what you have to do,” she had said when Martin had told her.
He had never loved her more.
“Go see!” Mathilde said. The baby was crying in her arms.
Martin’s heart was in his throat as he rushed towards the door to David’s room. Many pictures flickered through his mind of what might have happened. He knew David was fragile. He knew he didn’t sleep at night and that he dreaded the day.
What have you done, baby brother?
Martin imagined a whole lot of things as he opened the door to his brother’s room, but he could never have imagined what he saw.
The entire room had sunk into the ground. The bed was sticking up in the middle of it; the dresser was slowly being pulled down.
And so was David.
“HEEELP!”
David hollered and screamed while being pulled down into the huge hole. “Help me. Help me!”
Martin jumped inside the hole and grabbed David’s hand. He was still being pulled into the middle of it. Everything around him was sinking, disappearing into a vast darkness underneath.
Martin held onto his brother’s hand, screaming, pulling it. But his hand was slippery. It was slowly sliding out of Martin’s grip.
“No!” Martin yelled. “Hold on, baby brother. Hold on to me. Don’t let go!”
The force pulling David was strong. The two brothers stared into each other’s eyes, thinking of all the times they had spent together, all the fights they had, all the pranks they had pulled, all the things they had gone through and survived.
Was this the way they were supposed to say goodbye?
No, dear God. Not like this. Please. Don’t let the ground swallow him!
Voices were screaming behind Martin and he felt hands on his shoulders as someone tried to pull him up. David’s hand slipped further, and now they were only holding on by their fingertips.
“NO!” Martin screamed.
“Help!” David said, half-choked as his fingers finally let go, and the hole sucked him down with a large slurping sound, along with the desk, the dresser, and the bed.
“NOOOOOO!”
Martin screamed as a set of strong hands pulled him backwards, hands he would later learn belonged to his neighbor from across the street in number six, Mr. Bjerrehus, who had been walking his dog in the street when he heard the screams coming from inside the house.
5
AFRIM BERISHA FROM number four kissed his mother at the door, then sprang for his bike when Buster, his Golden Retriever, came running for him in the yard.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “You can’t come. You know they won’t let dogs inside the school.”
Buster answered with a loud bark. Afrim heard the school bell ring. He was late. There was nothing unusual about that. His school was a small school with only fifty students. One of Denmark’s smallest, they said. All were local kids living in the neighborhood or just outside of it. There had been talk of closing the school, Afrim had heard his mother say, but so far it had survived. Afrim hoped it would be closed, so he wouldn’t have to go to school ever again. He didn’t like school, and would much rather play with Buster all day and ride his bike. In that sense, Afrim was just a normal eight-year old boy.
“I’m late, buddy.”
Afrim was a neighbor to the school, yet always the last kid to arrive in the classroom.
Today, he wasn’t going to school at all.
He had pulled the bike through the yard and out on the other side of the fence when he heard tires squeal and turned his head to see Mrs. Sigumfeldt, who lived further down the street and whose boys were always bullying Afrim, just avoid being hit by Mrs. Jansen, the lady whose eyes were always foggy and who walked funny and always bumped into things and got bruises on her face.
“That was a close one,” he mumbled, as he watched Mrs. Sigumfeldt jump out of the car and Mrs. Jansen tell her how sorry she was.
The car had ended up in Mr. Bjerrehus’ hedge, and Afrim knew they would get in trouble for that. Mrs. Bjerrehus took very good care of her yard, and she liked the hedge because it kept people’s curious eyes out. What Mrs. Bjerrehus didn’t know was that Afrim could look into her yard from his room upstairs and see her as she walked around naked in her yard. He thought the world should be glad that Mrs. Bjerrehus took good care of her hedge.
Buster barked again, this time louder and much more insistent, when Afrim suddenly felt the ground rumble under his feet. Growing up in Albania, his father had known about earthquakes and told Afrim about them, and now Afrim wondered if this could be one. If this was how an earthquake felt. Only, he knew from his father that there were no earthquakes in Denmark. Denmark’s underground was all limestone. There were no mountains and, therefore, no quakes.
Afrim heard another sound and turned just in time to see a part of the school disappear into a huge hole in the ground. The building simply sank. Afrim stared at the hole it left where the school library used to be. He looked at Buster, then threw his bike on the ground and started running towards the house.
“MOOOM!”
Behind him, the street opened up and swallowed a car driving by, along with Mrs. Sigumfeldt, her kids, Mrs. Jansen and Mrs. Bjerrehus’s entire hedge.
Afrim and Buster sprang for their lives as the ground fell into the hole behind them faster than they could sprint.
They barely made it to the front door before the ground rumbled again and their yellow house came down in front of Afrim.
He shrieked.
“Mom? MOOOOM?”
The ground shook again, and Afrim fell; he grabbed onto Buster as the soil opened up underneath them and started pulling them down forcefully. Afrim held on to Buster with all his strength as they fell and fell into the deep massive darkness.
6
IN NUMBER THREE, Thomas Soe was staring at the white blank page on his screen. He wiped his sweaty palms off on his pants and sipped more coffee. He had been staring at the blank page all night, wondering when inspiration would come.
On the bed next to him lay the girl. She was whimpering and sobbing behind the gag. Thomas couldn’t focus.
“Could you be quiet for just a second!” he said to her.
The girl answered with another whimper. He looked at her. He blinked his eyes a couple of times to make sure she was real. Thomas never knew what was real and what wasn’t these days.
Stay calm, Thomas, he heard his late mother’s voice say. You’ll lose control. You’re losing touch with reality, my son.
He had thought the girl would give him the inspiration he needed, that he longed for so badly. But he had been staring at the blank page all night without being able to put down as much as a word.
The girl didn’t help much.
Maybe she needs a little motivation.
The way he remembered it, he had picked her
up last night in Viborg, the closest big city to where he lived. She had been waiting for the bus on a street somewhere. She’d probably visited some friend and was on her way back home. Thomas didn’t even bother to ask. He had simply driven by her and rolled down the window, showing off one of his handsome smiles.
“Need a ride?”
The girl was no more than sixteen, he would guess. He liked them at that age. The girl had said no thank you at first, but Thomas had insisted.
“Come on. I’m going that way anyway. I promise to be nice. Come on. It’s raining. You’ll catch a cold.”
The fact that he was only twenty-four helped seal the deal, along with the fact that he was a famous writer, a poet who had written a work at the age of only eighteen that had everyone talking about him. The newspapers called him the artist of the century and said his poems were explosive and that they were renewing the genre of poetry by adding the horror, and having blood dripping from every line and word. It’s like the entire book is burning between your hands, one reviewer wrote.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” the girl had asked.
“You got me,” Thomas had said, smiling again. “Don’t tell anyone.”
The fact that he was a celebrity had made her change her mind instantaneously. He could tell by the look in her eyes and her sudden giggle.
“You’re that writer, aren’t you? That poet?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“You wrote those poems that everyone is talking about…where you pretend to be molesting your girlfriend. We read some of them in class. I loved them. The way you declare your love for her and describe your pain by imagining you hurt her. Because she hurt you, right? The axe is a metaphor for your anger.”
“If you say so.”
“My teacher told us that. I’m not really good with the whole analyzing-a-poem thing. But with yours, I could really identify with the pain. I could relate.”