Astrid by Nikita Eismont

The walls of Astrid’s room contorted,

their beige statures moving in to surround her and ridicule her even further. She thought lying down on top of her made bed quietly would help, but at this point the recollection of what happened in the morning wouldn’t feel as horrific only under the sheets. Quick and shallow breaths. Warm air feels sharp on the inhale and tingly on the exhalation, same as it did after she ran out of campus after group introduction ended. Why did they act as if you were the pen with which he signed all those lives off? Why did they consider your dream to protect him in court someday to be a sign of support? Those cold-hearted idiots can’t even abandon their morals for family. The letters on the covers of her law textbooks go into a sacrificial dance around her. The pills she saw her mother take every time they saw him talking about his projects on television made it really challenging to get up for some reason. Struggling to take the bed covers off, she lifted her pillow for the first time in a long while, thus revealing a little cloth wrapped around itself. Astrid has all but forgotten about it recently, and now her fingers, each half a meter long, held this cloth as cautiously as a fresh parent would a newborn. Inside the wrap was a charm from the national park she visited as a child. A small reconciliation she bought her at the park’s gift-shop after shooting an arctic fox despite her loud objections. Over the years, nearly all the paint has dried off it and the faded likeness of a mouse, the country’s national animal, wasn’t easily recognizable at first glance even to her. She tracked the grooves of the carving with her now relatively normal-sized fingers, her breaths returning to normal. And as Astrid’s lashes started opening at an increasingly slower rate, she squeezed the charm tightly but carefully, and didn’t recall the way the arctic fox looked at her all those years ago.