Calendar of Regrets

June

January February March April May June July August September October November December   & & &195' A lake somewhere in Finland inventing a slightly out-of-focus afternoon above itself. Two children on their way home after church. Wordless, hands in pockets, they are following a deserted road. Low grayblue hills lope along the far shore. Clusters of white flecks against dark wet earth. Sami, the hatted one, thinks about the chuffing sound his feet make. Jarmo, his older brother, the one in the too-small brown jacket, thinks about the fish soup his mother is preparing this very moment back at the farm as she does every Sunday afternoon. Both boys approach the edge of not thinking, though Sami is infinitesimally closer to that edge than Jarmo. They have walked this stretch of road too many times to notice it. To them, it simply represents an instrument of agency. They are, that is, imagining the end rather than the means of their journey. They thus fail to hear the scattered birdsong, the wind exhaling continuously across the lake, the suck and gurgle of the soggy ground around them. The air busy with a frisky chill and the damp loamy greenness of early spring. They fail to notice these things, too. Fish soup or ham, Jarmo thinks. How, when you reach deep into the barrel of salted meat at the end of the season, right down to the 196 b & LANCE OLSEN ' grainy bottom of it through the crystals like warm ice, you extract leather slabs alive with maggots. As if someone had sprinkled the meat with squirming rice. You have to scrape it off with a knife before you can boil the leather into something edible. Only then do you discover what the slab will turn into: ham or fish. Sami kicks a rock and listens to it snap and die. On the very edge of not thinking, he sweeps his grimy-knuckled hand down and whisks up another as he passes and chucks it as far as he can into the meadow to his right, trying to plock it into the lake. The rock clumps short. A family of heel-sized dun birds agitate from the grass into the blurry sun and dart into invisibility. They are there. They are gone. At that instant, for no reason he can articulate, Sami discovers himself wondering how much God weighs. If he stopped in his tracks just now and listened carefully, he would hear the stream behind him sloshing and clicking over pebbles like a bag full of marbles. The continuous drypaper crinkle of last year’s leaves rubbing against each other on spindly bushes. Mosquito whir. Fly buzz. The rush of his own breath inside his head for what will amount to decades without cessation. But he doesn’t listen. Instead, he discovers himself wondering, fleetingly, if he might be a little on the chunky side. Sitting in the outhouse, deep into the disagreeable daily business of passing gas and nightsoil , he has on occasion let his gaze fall upon the bluish white skin of his thighs and noticed a cheesy patchwork of dimples spotting it. What, he wonders, zeroing in on another rock in the road, might this portend about the complexion of his adulthood? Sami lets his left foot thrill. Approaching the very edge of not thinking, hands in pockets, wooden bowl of fish soup hovering in the middle of his consciousness , Jarmo happens to glance up and see her lying in the meadow & calender of regrets ' b 197 thirty or forty meters away. Initially, he believes he is looking at the remnants of a thawing snowdrift. But the shape is completely wrong for that. Nor are there any other swaths of snow in view. So he convinces himself that he must be looking at an enormous bird. Yes. A swan, perhaps, shot recently by a hunter. Yet the truth is he has never seen a bird this big, he has heard no gunfire this afternoon, there exist no hunters in the vicinity. No. That can’t be it. That can’t be it at all. Hence, still walking, although not quite as quickly as before, Jarmo squints. He tugs back the corner of his right eyelid to press his cornea into obedience. He ducks and bobs his head, trying to pull the object of his sudden interest into...