Little Star

pane, hurling their bodies against the hard glass in their quest for a gap, a way out. All Teresa had to do was lift the catch and open the window.

But the flies belonged to her now, just as everything in the house belonged to her. She folded her arms and looked at her flies. Then she sat down on a chair and looked at her flies. Waited. Sometimes a fly left the window and took a turn around the kitchen, but it was soon back, banging against the glass.

The fridge gave a rattle and stopped humming. The flies carried on buzzing. The faint thuds as they gathered themselves and made another onslaught on the glass, a fleeting higher note from one individual fly, like a disappointed question before it once again fell back into the collective note that filled Teresa’s head.

She sat there as if she were nailed to the chair, her auditory perception hypnotised by the humming and buzzing, just as the TV screen’s white hiss can draw the eye if you’re not careful. She was erased and recreated.

With a sudden movement she got up from the chair and went to the bathroom to fetch her mother’s hairspray. She found a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. She carefully folded the curtains back from the window until she had two clear rectangles of glass with the helpless little bodies flying around.

She struck a match and held it in front of hairspray’s nozzle, pressed the button. A cone of fire spurted towards the window, sweeping across the flies. She took her finger off the button. Four flies dropped onto the windowsill, their wings seared off. She pulled up her chair and sat down to study them.

One of the flies had lost only one wing and was spinning around on the spot like a propeller; it managed to get to the edge and fell on the floor. Teresa stamped on it. Of the remaining three, two were walking around like clumsy beetles, and one was lying on its back waving its legs in the air. Teresa pressed her thumb down on that one until it stopped waving its legs. When she had finished looking at the other two, she squashed them with the matchbox.

Two more sprays, and she had cleared the window. She rearranged the curtains and swept the corpses into her hand, threw them in the bin. Then she made herself a peanut butter sandwich. As she was eating, another fly appeared and started banging against the window. She left it alone.

She felt quite still inside, apart from a slight feeling of shame in her stomach which was not dissimilar to vertigo. She quite liked it. It was something to hold onto.

As she was putting the hairspray back she caught sight of her mother’s make-up. She made an attempt. Mascara and kohl around her eyes, concealer on the pimples on her cheeks, pink lipstick. She had no idea what to do with blusher, so she finished off by teasing up her hair with spray.

It looked bloody awful. The concealer, which should have brought about a straightforward improvement, was the wrong shade and showed up as dark patches on her pale skin. Apart from that, she looked like an ugly girl with colour on her face. She quickly got undressed and took a shower, scrubbing her face with soap several times.

She pressed the shower head against her pubes. It felt quite nice. She tried rubbing herself with her index finger, but felt nothing. She had watched Sex and the City a few times and realised it was possible to do things to yourself. But it didn’t work for her. Maybe she was doing it wrong.

She squatted down and rested her head in her hands as the warm water flowed over her back. She tried to cry. Only dry sobs emerged. She visualised how sorry for herself she was, and had almost succeeded when she decided she’d had enough, and turned the thermostat until the water was ice-cold. She let the cold water pour over her until her face was stiff and her skin covered in goose-pimples. Then she turned off the shower, dried herself and got dressed.

When she came out of the bathroom the house was just as silent, but her chilled body now felt like a crystal in the silence, an element of clarity in the still fuzziness. She went and sat at the computer, launched Google and typed in ‘poems’.

The result surprised her. It had just been an idea, because her head felt so clean and pure. She would read poems. But the top results were pages where people who weren’t poets had posted stuff they had written. She opened a page called poetry.now.

She read one poem, then another. She found a girl called Andrea, fifteen years old, whose poems she liked; she did a search using her name and found several more examples of her work. They were called ‘Loneliness’, ‘Is it just me?’ and ‘Black angel’.

Teresa read on, open-mouthed. She could have written those poems. They were about her. Andrea was a couple of years older than her and lived in Vasteras, and yet they were almost exactly the same. She clicked on another page and discovered Malin from Stockholm, sixteen years old, who had written a poem called ‘The Bubble’, in which she described how she lived inside a bubble whose walls were impossible to break down.

That was exactly how it was. Teresa felt the same, but hadn’t found those particular words. Nobody else could see the bubble, but she was shut inside it all the time. Malin had put it into words.

Teresa scrolled down and saw that some people had left comments about the poem, saying it was really good and well written and that they felt the same. A shiver ran through Teresa’s body and she felt as if she had a fever. She clicked on the box that said ‘leave a comment’ and was asked to log in.

She got up and walked around the living room, then went into Goran and Maria’s bedroom, where she lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Then she rolled herself in the duvet and curled up, whimpering like a puppy.

I’m too small.

Almost everyone writing on poetry.now was a girl. The youngest she had found was Matilda, fourteen years old. Teresa thought her poem, ‘Tears’, was childish. And she was twelve, almost thirteen. She tossed and turned in the bed until she started sweating and relaxed. All these other girls who were older than her but felt the same, where were they? What did they look like?

She got out of bed and a feeling of restlessness she couldn’t pin down drove her all over the house. When she got to the bathroom she picked up the hairspray. The box of matches was still on the kitchen table. Five flies had appeared since she was last here. She brought them all down with one circular spraying movement. She looked at them as they crawled around on the windowsill.

In her mother’s sewing box she found a pack of pins. She nailed the flies to the windowsill, one by one. They remained alive, waving their little legs. The feeling of shame in her stomach grew until she could almost see it, touch it. A sticky, orange jellyfish floating just beneath her ribcage.

She took a deep breath and tried to get rid of the jellyfish. It didn’t go away, but it shrank. She took another deep breath. The jellyfish disappeared. She looked at the skewered flies.

That’s how simple it is, she thought. It isn’t you who makes the decisions. It’s me.

She fetched a small wooden chopping board and transferred the flies. One of them who had tiny bits of wing still attached to its body buzzed feebly when she picked it up, impaled on the pin, but fell silent when it was secured to its new base. She took the board into the living room and placed it next to the computer.

She spent a while sorting out an email address, which was a requirement for creating an account at poetry.now. When the registration page for Hotmail asked for her date of birth, she made herself three years older than she was, just to be on the safe side. She gave the same date when she registered with poetry.now.

From time to time she looked at the flies. They were all still alive. She would have liked to know what kind of food she could give them so they would stay alive. But who knows what flies eat?

Using her grandfather’s surname and her own middle name, she became Josefin Lindstrom from Rimsta, fifteen years old. She was in.

She couldn’t get to sleep that night. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, she got up and put on her dressing gown. The house felt even more silent and mysterious with the darkness outside the window. She crept cautiously down the stairs.

As she approached the living room, she started to feel afraid. She had the feeling there was a creature in there. A huge, insect-like creature with slime dripping from its jaws, just waiting to grab her. She took a deep breath, and another. Then she switched on the light.

Nothing. The chopping board was where she had left it, next to the computer. She padded over and looked. All the flies had stopped moving. She pulled out a pin and removed the fly. It was dead. It had suffered during its final hours of life, but now it was dead.