Finland: fables

In the forests there were swamps that swallowed the violence of horses, the whiteness of their eyes familiar to the end, speaking of the unholy, of souls.

In a kitchen there was a man who drank the worlds contained in bottles, but who could never find the strangers he had killed in the war, whose blood had melted with the snow.

In the forests there were elk that appeared in the frail twilight, their antlers dreadful revelations of the divine.

In a kitchen there was a woman slicing bread, thinking of her dead first-born, while one of her surviving children — there were thirteen of them now — slept in the warm bricked space above the oven.

In the lakes there were the shadows and reflections of the trees, except in winter when the cold covered their mirror surfaces like the faces of the dead.

In a sitting room there was a man who stood by an upright piano, watching the ebony and ivory patterns on the wall, while outside the window the fields bristled with summer.

In the lakes there were reeds, stirring in silt, in which pike, eels and ghosts hid from the trawling hooks of men.

In a sitting room there was an old woman who knitted socks for the winter exile, remembering only that magical word, Karelia, and how her feet had ached in the snow.