A Blessing on the Moon Read Online Free PDF

pigs, these are things they think a normal child should be doing.
    “You’re too sensitive, Ola!” her Papa shouts. “Couldn’t stand to see a goose lose its head. Your mother spoils you, it’s true! Filling your brains with such useless rot. Until not even a good thrashing will help. With the others, yes, but not with Ola! No, with you, it had the opposite effect. Each thrashing only made you more sullen and resentful.” He tromps down the stairs in a blue cloud, annoying thoughts buzzing about his head like flies. “But it’s a brutal world, God knows!” If only he could be indifferent, he probably tells himself, and soon enough he will attempt, through drink or lovemaking or a good solid fight, to make himself so.
    “Life is too short, Ola, too short and too hard to care about such things,” he thunders at the bottom of the stairs, throwing his arms this way and that in a flamboyant despair. There is something annoyingly theatrical about the family Serafinski, it’s starting to grate upon mynerves. “Blubbering over some silly people who’d do the same to us—yes, Ola, to us—to your mother and to your father and to you—given half the chance!”
    No sound emerges from Ola’s room to answer his petty grumblings, and although I tell myself it is none of my business, the girl concerns me, and so I lay out my handkerchief before her door and am on my knees once again, peering through her keyhole. She’s not well. She needs looking after, this Ola, not taunts and threats and the blistering reproaches they pour upon her head. My brow presses against the cold metal of the doorknob plate and for a moment I have the dizzying impression of staring into the center of a whirling cyclone spinning in a green-grey sea. A pink curtain drops across the image and it disappears. The cyclone reappears almost instantly and I understand that I have been looking not at the sea but directly into a human eye. She’s on the other side of the door, peering out.
    The door opens before I can rise from my knees and hobble away, even though I have my stick to hoist me. I was a large man, with a heavy girth, and nearly sixty besides.
    “So it
is
you,” she says, standing over me.
    I confess I’m unprepared for the sound of her voice. It enters my ear oddly, as though I were a traveler or an explorer who left his home long ago and meets by chance a countryman who now addresses him in their native tongue. This is the first time since my death that a living person has spoken directly to me. It’s impossible that she can see me, and yet the sorrow in her grey-green eyes, as she gazes over my face,bending down now on one knee and pressing my hands into hers, is enough to break my heart. Embarrassed, I straighten my coat.
    “I am sorry to have troubled you,” I say, attempting to stand, not knowing where to look. “You’re ill. Allow me to apologize and to help you into bed.”
    But she strokes my raw cheek with the back of her stained hand.
    “Look at you,” she says. “So this is what we’ve done.”
    “It’s nothing,” I say. “You’re ill. Let me help you to your bed.”
    But before I know it, she has collapsed and is weeping in my arms. I rock her, like a baby. She’s burning with fever. I sit, my legs folded, on the threshold to her room, murmuring and stroking her softly.
    “Sha, sha, kind,” I say. Hush, hush, little one.
    If only I could remember a lullaby, a nice little tune, then I would sing it to her.

10
    I carry her to her bed. “I must strip the sheets,” I tell her, searching for a clean spot to lay her down. Unfortunately, there is none, and so I carefully place her into the rocking chair. I hang my coat on a peg behind the door and roll up my shirtsleeves to get to work. She is shivering uncontrollably. The winter sun presses its chilling light against the room’s windows, offering little heat. Despite this, Ola’s brow is flushed with sweat. I can almost hear the bones of her knees clanking