Author: Asko Sahlberg

Brighter than darkness

Issue 2/2002 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

An extract from the novel Eksyneet (‘The lost’, WSOY, 2001). Interview by Markus Määttänen

It was a white tiled wall. Too white. Sterile. He wondered how long he had been looking at it. In any case long enough to have forgotten it was a wall. It had changed into a vacuum opening up before him and then shrunk into a tunnel through whose irresistible suction he had hurtled toward the painful images of the past. The past. Yesterday. Almost yesterday. He had stared at the nocturnal entrance, clearly divided in two by the street lamps, and not just that, but now saw only a lifeless and, in its lifelessness, repellant wall. He sighed, rubbed his numb face, pushed himself off the floor and stood up.

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