Animal game

This is the last evening before the Animal Game will begin. Kattis doesn’t know, but then, Kattis doesn’t know much. Kattis isn’t the mother of Darling’s children. She isn’t anyone’s mother.

Darling says it does not matter. That he does not care. He has J, P and T, anyway.

Kattis finds it hard to call them by those first letters, abbreviations left over from when Darling was still married to their mother. In the messages Darling and the mother send between them, the ones Kattis sees, they use those initials. The mother also has an initial, all her own, in Darling’s phone.

So, this is Kattis: calling Darling’s children by their full names, up the stairs. Conspicuous in her precise pronunciation, a tourist ordering an unfamiliar sounding dish in a new town, self-deprecating eye contact over a sticky menu, traffic noises and oily smells on the nighttime breeze, skin hot and tender from too much sun. Their three full names, and a superfluous message — no other reason to speak — « time for dinner! »

She waits, she stands, one ear cocked upwards. Silence is the wrong word for what fills the stairwell, but she doesn’t have enough nuance of language to describe this absence of sound, she can only name the concrete objects as they appear, as if tracing line and space.