“Mamma,” screamed Mia. “Mamma!”

She tried to insert her fingers into her mother’s open mouth, but her hands were trembling dreadfully. Saliva mixed with bread crumbs was trickling from the corner of her mother’s mouth. Bluish lips. Without lipstick, bare.

Mia pushes off from the dock and calmly slides into the pond. She swims with large, measured strokes.

Mia rushed down the stairs, stumbling, falling raced across the front yard, and screamed at the door to the dugout cellar:

“She’s dying, choking on bread, dying, choking …”

Her father followed Mia, leaping across the lawn like a frenzied wild animal.

Her mother’s lips had turned more blue.

Her father pulled her up into a sitting position, pounded her back. Her mother wheezed and Mia began to cry. Her father screamed angrily at Mia, turned her mother on her side and tried to get the stuck lump out from her throat.

Her mother’s lips had turned yet more blue.

Mia heard the last gurgling sounds of her mother’s body.

Her father helplessly was shaking her mother by the shoulders.

“It’s over, over!” Mia sobbed through tears.

Her father threw her a savage look and tried once more. This time the congealed lump of bread was in his hand. Her mother was not breathing.

“Heart, pump her heart!” her father shouted at Mia.

Mia placed palm on palm and, crying, rhythmically pumped her mother’s chest. Her father blew air into her mother’s mouth with a force that would have moved the clouds. The air gurgled in her mother’s chest cavity like a steaming lake in the mountains.

One more time, once more, again.

Her mother rasped and then drew in air herself.

Wheezing, her breathing returned.

In the middle of the pond Mia once more turns over and calmly floats on her back.

Her father put pillows behind her mother’s back. She was gasping for air. Her eyes betrayed that she was still wandering from nowhere towards his arms. Wine, sleeping pills, coma …

“It’ll be OK,” her father kept repeating. “All will be fine.”

Mia pressed her wet cheek against her mother’s breast. Her mother’s heart was pounding like mad. Fast, loud and hollowsounding. Her father slumped beside her. For a brief while they sat thus and listened to how life revives. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

Mia, crying silently and painfully, rested her head in her father’s lap. Her father gently stroked her hair.

Mia floats slowly on her back. Following the calm drifting clouds. When Mia returns from her swim, she sees that her father has carried a mass of blossoming branches into her mother’s room. Tomorrow she will come home.

Amaryllii

Ella will soon be unable to manage the spiral stairs. She should have settled Francis in down here, in the kitchen. It is cosy here. A glazed tile stove. Its brick inglenook on which she can dry beans, teas and mushrooms. Everything is close at hand – water, trash pails and her ironing board. Here she chats with the post mistress, who brings their two pensions and occasionally the neighbour woman stops by, who on her old German-made Erenpreis bicycle delivers milk to well-to-do homes.