Elements
Flash fiction
The night I quit drinking, I dreamt of looking for an open off-licence. All were closed. The snow tasted of ash. The neighbourhood was all blocks of flats and snow-covered lawns and deserted playgrounds, and stretched endlessly. In that dream, you followed me in silence, always at the edge of my vision, and smoked cigarette after cigarette, your lipstick leaving bloody traces on filter after filter.
The cramped blue box of the rented car is filled with the smell of new upholstery and the quiet purr of the engine, barely audible among the growls and shrieks. Away from their husbands and now adolescent children, J and K seem to have let go of all inhibitions. They’re finishing off a second bottle of red wine, drinking it from plastic cups, ignoring my remarks about the deposit, my complaints that white wine might have been a better choice, singing our school song at the top of their lungs, replacing random words with curses and finding it hilarious.
They grow silent for an instant when we approach a long, windowless building: the steel-structure chicken farm built when we no longer lived here. Entering the ghastly quiet village, I wonder what happened to the chickens. Probably nothing that wouldn’t have happened to them anyway.
All doors are open. There’s no point locking them anymore. We enter the garden through the rusty gate. The times when J and I lived here together before she moved out to our grandma’s seem pale like an old photograph. The garden is now littered with clothes, papers, and pieces of furniture left lying among the wild vegetation: a tangled living mass of weeds and bushes and garden flowers, bristling with pollinating grass stems and penetrating every nook.
Remember how, inspired by that cartoon, we would spend hours here saving the planet? We wore rings of acrylic glass (freebies that came with a shampoo) pretending we had the powers of the elements at our whim. You were fire, of course. J chose wind. K water. I, due to lack of numbers, had to be both earth and heart (what kind of element is that?). Now it seems one of us would have to take over your fire.
I watch the empty street from what used to be my room. Its walls are painted once-vivid pink, but the paint is flaking, uncovering the familiar blue. J smokes weed, resting on a bunk bed, beige fabric over the curves of her body. The bed’s frame is also painted pink and speckled with glittery stickers depicting princesses and fairies. She laughs and asks if I remember the hideous porcelain dog that used to sit on your doorstep. Then she says it’s funny the three of you would shun me to discuss girly stuff like making out with boys, when stories about boys were all I wanted to hear. K enters the room, holding another bottle of wine in her skinny hand, and says we should move on.
‘Airlifted with injuries after crash.’ Bad things happening to popular weather forecasters always draw attention. I kept reading the headline over and over, tried to call K, she wasn’t answering (she shut herself off after that fire), managed to get through to J, but we mostly stayed silent.
The neighbours’ gardens and houses. The pond, now overgrown with reeds. A deserted supermarket built in place of the playground where we learnt how to smoke. The five-floor block of flats where K grew up. The school and the elm trees blown down by a gale. Finally, your home: the spacious villa of red brick, its roof lacking some tiles, some windows broken, the ceramic canine still proudly on its doorstep.
I think about the time in college you and I lived together, in that flat on the fifteenth floor overlooking countless blocks of flats. About that summer evening we spent on the tiny balcony, drinking cheap wine, smoking, fantasising about our future careers as a writer and as an actress, laughing, saying no one could stop us, just let them try, flicking ash towards the distant ground.
Once they detonate the dam, it will take minutes. The wall of concrete and water, dozens of meters high, will fall heavy on the valley, cascading down the fields and meadows, breaking fences and stealing roofs, stretching above the village a turbulent, translucent sky. The water will claim the houses room by room and stay there forever, making them home to perches and eels, transforming furniture into slimy, bloated lumps of wood and fabric, eating away plaster, helping wallpaper and carpeting become as delicate as a snail’s skin. Before long, water plants will take over the streets.
Remember how, after you moved, we would call each other almost every day? You’d tell me about your disastrous castings and hatred for the city, and I’d complain about my odd jobs, jerk boyfriends and rejection letters. When we visited you at the hospital, half your body enclosed in a cast, it was almost as if we could talk like that again, save the planet one last time. That said, I wasn’t too surprised with your reply when I invited you on our trip.
From the backseat comes K’s snoring. J’s drunken ramblings about the cheating bastard, her husband, grow less and less coherent until they fade into the sound of the engine. The darkening fields seem covered with grime. The sky is the colour of steel. When we drive past the chicken farm, I have this absurd feeling that you are here with us, watching us from above, gliding behind our tiny blue car like a buzzard.
The piece was originally published in The Chaffin Journal Issue 2018. Edits by Emily Nemchick. Read more on Łukasz Drobnik’s website: drobnik.co.
