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by A. Wendeberg

  I hate to be naked. I want to hide my skin, press my back against the wall, at least, or magically let my hair grow to waist-length to cover the worst.

  The doctor walks up to me and palpates my abdomen, her eyes raking over the scars on my arms, chest, and legs. Then she asks me to turn around. I set my chin and shake my head no.

  She places her hands on my shoulders and tries to force me to turn. I lock my knees and knock her hands off me. No one gets to see my back. ‘Pull yourself together, Mickaela,’ she hisses.

  ‘Piss off,’ I mouth.

  She gives me a cold stare and then nods to the nurse. My chin trembles when both whip me around.

  They freeze, cough, and pat my shoulder without a word or further examination. My stomach slowly settles back to its usual position. The cramp in my throat loosens.

  The two move on to the next girl, who doesn’t seem to have noticed anything out of the normal. My classmates aren’t completely blind or ignorant. It’s just me being…invisible.

  I cast a shy glance to my right where the other girls stand — waiting, smiling, looking pretty. I’m all bones with a scrubby mop of orange hair and freckles that look like fly shit all over my face.

  Anyway, here’s the deal: I see boobs. Seven beautiful pairs. Large ones, perky ones, apple-sized ones. I don’t need to look down at my own chest to know there’s nothing. Both the doctor and the nurse point it out for me, perhaps believing I’ve not noticed. When they ask everyone how regular our menses is, all I can say is, ‘Every fifteen years. Maybe.’

  The doctor doesn’t seem to approve of my humour. She eyes me over her brown-rimmed glasses as though she wants to strangle me with the stethoscope. But nothing happens. She turns to one of the other girls who holds her chin high, chest pushed out, stomach sucked in.

  Apparently, queuing up is the thing here; it shows some kind of order or hierarchy that, so far, hasn’t revealed its deeper meaning to me. I’ve lined up so often in my life I’m unable to count it. Line up for food rations, for examinations, for roll call, for community work. That I’m the last in line is normal, expected, just like snow in winter. I have no idea who decided this.

  We get dressed and, still in line, march to school to take the last two exams. It’s only a hundred metres or so, but I’m already soaked with sweat. My scalp itches from fear when we reach the classroom. Four teachers stand guard, one in every corner of the room, making sure we don’t cheat.

  Again we form a line, file in, sit down, and a number of sheets are placed face-down in front of us. A shrill whistle and everyone turns the first page. I can’t help looking up, wondering what’s going on in people’s heads.

  Constance’s head is right in front of me, her black braids parting her hair, a white line zigzagging along the middle of her skull, red ribbons resting on her shoulders. She’s so pretty, most boys are in love with her.

  Marreesh’s head is to my left, also black-haired. His curly bangs are hanging low over his forehead, almost touching his desk as he rubs his eyes and digs in his brain, desperate to find answers to the test questions. In all these years, I’ve rarely heard him speak. The sound of his name tastes of pear, slightly acidic, but sugary sweet with a soft grit on my tongue.

  A few months ago, I almost asked him to marry me because Marreesh seemed like a good compromise. I’m sure he’d be fine with never having sex.

  Everyone happily gets married when they are fifteen; most girls start popping out kids when they are sixteen. If there’s no unmarried man available for a girl, then she’ll be a second wife. No womb is left unfertilised — survival of the species crap.

  I’d be a second wife to one of Father’s old buddies, a guy with a hard face and hard hands. Out of the rain and into the gutters. It doesn’t concern me anymore.

  I wipe the sweat off my forehead and look up at the blackboard. “History Finals” is written there, in case it slipped our memory. The sun shines through the high windows, beams sharp and white, glittering with dust motes — beauty no one notices.

  Going to school is like switching off everything that makes me a person as soon as I enter the building. I’ve never been able to handle it. Everyone else seems to enjoy being part of the herd and repeating what the teachers say word by word. Baaah baaah. And I — even with my brain on full throttle and ready to race around the trickiest corners — rarely understand what precisely the teachers want from me.

  But my brain on full throttle is still only a Micka brain. I wish I could get out of my head. But on it goes, my funny little brain, never focussing on one task only, always playing with lots of things simultaneously, drifting in and out of past, present, and potential future. Sending me flavours where there are none. What a useless organ. I wonder if a large bird stole me from somewhere far away and dropped me here, wrinkled and screaming at the top of my newborn lungs.

  A soft squeaking pulls my attention to my right. The history teacher paces the aisle and looks down at our desks. My pencil hovers over an empty page. He stumbles when he passes me, his sandals singing a quiet and sour squee squee when rubbing across the floor. I hope I’ll never see him again. The homework he made us do was so bland, I never did it until a minute before class began. He always asked us to underline the most important phrases in specific chapters of our history books. I don’t think I ever read any of it. I took my ruler and went rrrrish rrrish rrrish with my pencil, quickly, randomly, until some kind of meaningful mark-up pattern adorned the pages. And he never read it either, he always walked past, nodding. The same man teaches art.

  To me, history is pointless. It’s all about learning phrases and numbers by heart and then being able to recall them whenever someone shakes you awake in the middle of the night screaming, ‘HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED IN THE GREAT PANDEMIC?’

  My index finger softly brushes the scar on the inside of my left arm, just below the elbow bend where the skin is really sensitive. I guess one could say I’m cheating, because the number there equates what’s left of humanity: 1/2986. It’s a small scar, not much bigger than my pinkie. The two thousand nine hundred eighty-sixth has no flavour. I’m wondering about this lack of sensation since I etched the numbers into my skin a few years back. Blinking the memory away, I try to pull myself together and focus on the test.

  Humanity is now a little short of 3.5 million, so if this is 1/2986th of what was before, an original population size of ten billion is more or less correct. I write down the number, noticing that it took me too long to answer only one of the many questions.

  Once, a few days after we buried my brother, I asked the teacher what had been done with eighty million tonnes of contaminated flesh — assuming that every corpse weighed eighty kilograms on average — and since, a bit more than sixty years later, we see no traces of any of them. Where are they buried? Why are there no graves?

  My teacher had sent me to the dean, who sent me to the doctor, who sent me to my parents.

  Now I know that so many corpses can only be burned, left to rot, or dumped in the oceans. Do the mighty seas stink of our ancestors? The air doesn’t. At least not up here in the mountains. I wonder if — once we return to the vast lowlands in ten or fifteen years, and the soil is fertile from all the dead — we can eat our harvest without the taste of corpses on our tongues?

  When the bell rings a few minutes later, a shockingly naked page stares up at me.

  ———

  My throat is so dry, I can barely swallow. We are in the same stuffy room, the same teachers circling our desks. Math finals.

  I’m almost overjoyed to see that a large portion of the exam is dedicated to functions. It’s hard to admit, but my parents effectively taught me how to calculate them two years ago, precisely one year before our teacher did.

  Whenever I see the slanted f, I think of the one night my father said, ‘What did you learn at school?’ He’s always saying this. It’s his only way of saying hello. But that night took a different turn and now my left arm is decorated with thirteen parallel line
s, pale red and a bit thick at the centre. I made no plan to snap tendons or open blood vessels. Back then, I was convinced there must be more to life than this.

  My pencil drops from my slick hand, pulling me from past to present. The paper in front of me sways and tilts. The room is hot. My abdomen cramps.

  I’ll be lucky to scrape by with a C.

  But I’m not.

  ———

  I arrive at home and quietly place my certificate on the kitchen table. Vomit burns in my mouth. Mother looks at the blood seeping through my pants and hands me a wad of sheep’s wool. ‘Now you are a woman,’ she says.

  I wonder where boys have to bleed from to be considered men.

  Once I return from the bathroom, I see my parents looking down at the certificate as if it soils the house. They say nothing. My mother is breathing heavily. Father produces a grunt. This is the shittiest certificate of the year, yet, they don’t say a peep. Full wrath would have been a normal reaction.

  Before they boil over, I sneak away to celebrate the end of hell and the beginning of my first and only menses. Maybe celebrating doesn’t quite describe what I’m doing, but two life-changing events and one life-ending event in a single day have to be acknowledged somehow, and as turbines and solitude are my favourite companions, one might even call this a party.

  Rays of sunlight caress the reservoir. Lazy ripples throw dark-golden sparks in all directions. I open my mouth wide and stick my tongue out to catch all scents, aromas, colours, and flavours. Pollen, sunlight on water, wet grass, earth. I press the soles of my feet deep into the soil until mud squeezes through the gaps between my toes. I feel so alive now I could explode. Here, with no one else to be compared to, I’m enough.

  Half of the sun is hovering above the mountains — one big fat orange slice, its bottom sawed off by a line of firs and rock. I think of an overripe peach and juice dripping down my elbows when I take a bite. It’s almost harvest time.

  Loud rattling behind me tickles my eardrums. Chain links are pulled in, the reverse-vents open while the forward-vents close — a process set in motion by the waning solar energy. Air hisses through small leaks in the piping, forming a pocket of bubbling noise. I love sitting up here on this massive, energy-generating system, watching the lights flicker on down in the village.

  When the first wave of water from the reservoir hits the turbine blades, it sounds like an avalanche of rocks banging against metal. A moment later, it’s only a soft rushing noise that mingles with the low hum of the generator. The earth beneath me vibrates — subtly and easy to miss, but it’s there. I can feel it in my feet and in the small of my back.

  And then the vibration lessens. Something’s wrong. I prick my ears. The noise of water pressing against blades grows limp. The swoosh is less than a trickle.

  Puzzled, I stand and gaze along the wall into the reservoir. Kind of stupid, because I can’t see down to where the water enters the ducts anyway.

  The quickly approaching night dictates my moves. I hurry to the control cabinet and open it. A small red warning light is blinking, indicating a resistance somewhere between the upper and the lower reservoir. The security gate that blocks all water from surging downhill is now automatically lowered and the safety brakes are engaged. As soon as the gate and the brakes are in place, I flip the main switch to keep all moving parts locked. Only a few minutes, and people in the village will sit in the dark.

  I press the button for the emergency underwater lights, yank off my shirt and pants, and…damn, the wool pad. The bloody thing has to stay here. I take it off together with my panties, and run to the dam, stark naked. Sucking in as much air as will fit in my lungs, I jump. Cold compresses my chest. I clench my teeth and strain my eyes. My surroundings grow darker with each additional metre of water I leave above me. I make a semi-yawn at the back of my throat, letting my ears pop. It’s now pitch-dark except for the four pale-green dots in the deep. I keep kicking until I see the stainless steel bars to the turbine’s mouth, illuminated by a pair of dim lights on either side. The entrance is clear.

  I turn and push hard with my arms and legs. Down here, I’m heavy. A few metres farther up, when buoyancy grabs me and lifts me higher, my lungs are ready to pop and my vision begins to flicker. And finally, my head breaks the surface. The air and the blackbird’s song taste sweet in my mouth.

  I push out on a bank, shake the water off me, and walk back to my clothes. While shimmying my wet legs into my underwear and pants, I think of chucking the gross wool pad far away. But that would only worsen the mess. I put on my shirt and climb the stairs to the top of the low-pressure turbine housing, unlock the hatch and peek into the power duct. The sun stands too low. All I see is black, with the occasional metallic reflection.

  When I gaze down towards the valley, darkness already conceals the high-pressure turbine at the very end of the narrower piping. The steel artery is a massive six feet in diameter up here and four feet wide where it spits water into the lower reservoir, but only white-and-red stakes are visible, marking the water’s path down the hill. The pipe itself is buried at two metres depth, so it won’t freeze up in winter.

  During the summer months, excess energy produced by the black solar paint covering all roofs in the village, drives the pumps that gradually fill the upper reservoir to the brim. Every night a tiny fraction of that water flows back down, pushing through the turbines and making them turn so the generators can supply energy for people to switch on lights, for the baker to run his mill, for the wire heaters in the greenhouses’ raised beds to keep the crop growing in winter, and for the butcher’s storage to keep the meat below freezing in summer. Among many other things.

  Come winter, when all excess solar energy from the summer months is stored as hydro energy up on the hill, and no more water is pumped up because the reservoir is full and the sun stands too low, the village relies almost solely on wood and what’s in the reservoir. Then, piping and turbines will run at full capacity and the vibrations up here will be epic.

  Long and hard winters hit every three to four years, and they are a problem. When the sun is still hiding behind a thick blanket of clouds in April, or even May, and snow keeps falling, covering the roofs and the solar paint; when the reservoir, root cellars, and grain barrels have been emptied, people freeze, starve, and get ill. Then the ones too old and too young die.

  Any drop of water less in that reservoir and a hard winter will become even harder. The turbine has to be fixed before sunrise. I need a torch and tools — although I don’t know which ones yet — and I have to make sure the high-pressure turbine in the valley is clear before I fiddle with the low-pressure turbine up here.

  ———

  With a bang I enter my father’s workshop, but he’s not in. Weird. I grab a torch, a bunch of tools, and an extra pack of batteries — valuables only few families have in their possession, but an absolute necessity for the turbinehouse keeper.

  When I knock the dirt off my shoes and step into the house to tell my parents where I’m going and why the power will be off for a while, Mother greets me with a tense, ‘Hello, Mickaela.’

  I stumble to a halt. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Only…Father is running a high fever.’

  He’s never had a fever in his life. Maybe my certificate made him ill. I drop my gaze to the doormat, wondering if she might unleash her fury any minute now. ‘Something’s wrong with the upper turbine. I’ll fix it quickly.’

  ‘Be careful,’ she calls after me, and I’m shocked. The last time she told me to be careful was when I was ten.

  They are still fretting about my poor grades, but what makes them so unnaturally quiet? Will they boil over once I return? Or are they already packing my stuff so they can quietly leave it at the doorstep?

  No, they would never do that. Whatever is up with my parents, I’ll deal with it later. First, I have to fix the power supply.

  I take the few steps to the high-pressure turbine, unlock the ha
tch to the coupling chamber, then the one to the power duct, and shine my torch into each cavity. While pushing the blades in one direction and then the other, I watch the movements of rotor and shaft and listen to the oil-slick whisper of the bearings. The turbine is clean. The generator and the control cabinet look fine, too. I lock the hatch and make my way up the hill again.

  The sky shines in a hot purple slashed with pink. Dark blue creeps in from the east and the scents of earth and grass are changing to the heavier early-night aroma. Come midnight, this will change again to a crisper scent, and again early in the morning when fog begins to rise.

  I unlock both hatches and shine my torch into the belly of the low-pressure turbine. A huge yellowish-grey mess is wrapped around the rotor shaft, eating into one of the bearings. Squinting, I bend lower. I’ll need at least an hour to pick that out.

  The tiny hairs on my neck prickle. What’s wrapped around the blade shaft is hemp, not plant matter from the reservoir. Someone must have put it here. But how the heck could anyone have stuffed it into a running turbine?

  I sit on my haunches and think. I had my back turned to the turbine when it stood still for the two minutes the gears need to fully switch from forward to reverse. Only my father is quick enough to unlock the hatch, jam that much hemp into the turbine, make sure it blocks the whole thing, and lock it again before I notice. But he would never threaten the functionality of his beloved machines. Besides, it might be interpreted as humour, and having a good laugh is surely not his style.

  I have no clue who could’ve done this.

  ‘Okay, douche canoe. You can show yourself now!’ I shout at the tree line.