Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

He still didn’t know what he was going to do or how he was going to do it, but one thing he did know: during that long look, Simon had given his approval. Do what you have to do.

Anders conquered his revulsion and cupped his hand over the box. The insect calmed down as it felt the warmth of his body, his presence,and he became aware of everything that flowed.

His body was an immense system of larger and smaller channels, where water ran in the form of plasma. He had learned about this in school: the plasma carried corpuscles, thrombocytes, but he could neither see nor feel those, he could see only cloudy water being pumped around by the heart, out into his arteries, and he saw and knew that he was a tree, all the way out to the most fragile twigs. A tree made of water.

He was also able to feel very clearly all the water flowing or standing still in the house, although this feeling did not have the same intensity of revelation. The network of water pipes was visible through the walls, just like an X-ray, and the bottles of water he had brought with him…

Now…now…

He curled his hand around one of the bottles on the floor as he held his other hand over the matchbox. Yes, he could feel the water in the bottle. But nothing else. It was just the same as with his blood: he could feel only the water, but he felt that all the more strongly.

He looked at the hand cupped over the box and a couple of lines by the poet Tomas Tranströmer came into his mind. He didn’t really read much poetry, but he had made a start on Tranströmer’s collected poems so many times that he knew the first one by heart.

In day’s first hours consciousness can grasp the world

As the hand grips a sun-warmed stone.

That was exactly how it was, with the reservation that the world his consciousness grasped was the part that consisted of water. He could follow it through the cold-water pipes, feel the drips from the leaking kitchen tap where he lost contact with it for half a second until it joined the thin film of water finding its way into the waste pipe and continuing downwards, out and eventually into a larger body of water that lay outside his range.

He let go of the box and the perception faded as he moved hishand away, centimetre by centimetre. When the hand reached his face and moved across it, the feeling was gone. He was a person, not a tree.

It would take less than this to make you lose your mind.

Once when he was about twenty he had been at a party and had ended up next to a guy who had just swallowed a blue pill. They were sitting at a glass table, and the guy had stared at that table. After a couple of minutes he had started to cry. Anders had asked him why he was crying.

‘Because it’s so beautiful,’ he had replied, his voice thick with emotion. ‘The glass. I can see it, do you understand? What it’s made of, what it really is. All the crystals, the strands, the tiny, tiny bubbles of air. Glass, you know? Do you understand how beautiful it is?’

Anders had looked at the table and had been unable to discover anything special about it, apart from the fact that it was an unusually ugly and clumsy glass table, but he had decided not to mention this. The guy might well have taken something else, because he was found later in a snowdrift into which he had dug his way. The reason he gave was that his blood had begun to boil.

You could lose your mind.

Perhaps a human being has the ability to see through glass, as it were, to experience water if we have a tool to help us use our brains and sensory perceptions to the full. But we don’t do it, because of the toll it takes. We refrain, so that we may live.

Anders took a couple of swigs of water and got back into bed. The powerful experience of becoming aware of the water’s secret life had made him feel exhausted but not sleepy, and for several hours he lay curled up, staring at the wall opposite where the pattern on the wallpaper formed itself into the molecular structures of unknown elements.

Only when the first light of dawn began to seep in through the window, painting the wallpaper grey, did he begin to drop off. As if from far away he heard the alarm clock ring in Simon and Anna-Greta’sroom, and he could see them in his mind’s eye, getting up and dressing for their short honeymoon.

Enjoy yourselves, my darlings.

There was a faint smile on his lips as he fell asleep.

Those Who Have Turned Away

Staircases that go upwards although in fact they’re going downwards…

KALLE SÄNDARE

Maja

‘Let go of me! Let go of me!’

I don’t like him. He looks horrible. I scream. The other one comes and puts his hand over my mouth. I bite him. It tastes of water. Why don’t Mummy and Daddy come?

They’re carrying me somewhere. I don’t want to go. I want to go to Mummy and Daddy. I’m too hot. My snowsuit is too hot. We’re going down some steps. I scream again. Nobody can hear me. That’s when I start crying. There are a lot of steps.

I try to look so that I can remember the way back. There is no way back. There are only steps. And they don’t work.

I’m crying. I’m not as frightened anymore. I don’t want to scream any more. Just cry.

Then it gets warmer and something smells nice. They’re not holding me as tightly any more. I’m not struggling. I stop crying.

The moped

Anders was already sitting up in bed when he discovered that he was awake. His body