Här är mina två senaste bilder. Båda med tillhörande flash fiction.
Portrait of Kettil Daun
Kettil Daun was a hero in the most classic sense. He had saved more people from a gruesome death than he could remember. He read fires to peace, lulling the flames with words, until they flickered out
He sat down on a wooden chair by a blazing three-storey building, feeling the heat on his face, the weight of a book on his lap. Firemen in white helmets ushered the spectators out of earshot. Flames can only be reasoned with in solitude, as Kettil would later tell a journalist.
Fifty pages into Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies the fire was confined to the first floor stove where it had begun.
What more could you ask of a hero?
Afterwards, there were expressions of deep gratitude from tearful husbands, wives, lovers, their terrified children, grating grandmothers, childhood friends, dull colleagues and obnoxious drinking buddies, who declared their loyal friendship, only to quicken the arrival of their own deaths with another round.
Once more, there were medals put on Kettil’s lapel.
But nature always strives for balance. A debt piled up that he would have to pay back for the rest of his life: with every fire he extinguished, he had to light a new one later. A tit-for-tat to keep the world from falling apart. After twenty years as a hero, he turned into a fire starter.
He sold the medals, packed his few belongings and moved to the desolate Norder Archipelago. Every night, he sat reading by the shoreline in the vast lightfield he had erected, igniting the lamps one by one with his words. After a while, he lit anything that came his way.
He imagined the futures of those he had not been able to save, slipping them into the stories. They emerged from the fires to wade among the light poles, telling him of wars and famine, love found and then lost again, moments of stillness and journeys to stars’ end.
[
Slutet saknas än så länge]
