Nelly Shulman - Issue 37

Nelly Shulman’s prose was published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and she has authored four collections of short stories. She is a member of The Society of Authors (UK).

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Another Life

Their street breathed magic. Up to House Fifteen, the voices of locomotives hummed behind their backs, and the street smelled of a particular railway scent of dark railroad ties, the heated metal of rails and boiled eggs.

After House Fifteen, the railway smells gave way to sweet ones, and a sugary wind hit your face as it wandered between the brick buildings of the candy factory. The station stood by a canal, and on the gently named river with the name derived either from horse-drawn carts or confectionery spices chocolate flowed and marshmallows were blown into shape. Stories of the chocolate waterfall and the craftsmen making airy, fragile marshmallows were passed around in the courtyards between the station and the factory, in what had once been tenement buildings.

By the iron gates leading to the kingdom of molasses and cocoa stood a plywood kiosk, where in the mornings they sold broken chocolate candies and bits of marshmallow. Can you unwrap a truffle using only your lips, without your hands? Can you free it from its top transparent-colored wrapper and from its bottom silver-rustling coat? Do it and repeat it thirty times, according to the commandments of Brown, who had gained access to the sacred factory doors through vocational training, ate thirty defective truffles in his first hour, and threw them up all over the workshop, where chocolate truly flowed like a river.

The candy kids and the railway kids lived in the same buildings and went to the same school, with an abandoned observatory in its tower, where she, Brown, and Anderson first smoked weed, flinging open the dirty window into the white nights of their final school year.

Oh, those boys of the late eighties, in self-dyed jeans and Turkish sweaters, swaying on the dance floors to Status Quo! You are in the army now, as she said to Anderson, who enlisted in the autumn of 1989.

The day before reporting to the draft board, Anderson gave her and Brown a ride on a handcar through the industrial tracks and abandoned warehouses, under the azure sky and rust-colored schoolboy autumn.

“You’ll probably get married now,” Anderson said sadly, and then she kissed both him and Brown, because the dry leaves were light, the sea breeze tasted of salt, and life lay ahead.

The following year, Brown left for America with his parents, and eleven years later, a plane crashed into his office. Two years after that, Anderson returned from the army a drug addict and was run over by a train while sleeping on the tracks near the place where the handcar had once run.

The candy factory was shut down, the railway fenced off, the tenements vacated and renovated, the school painted in its noble native ochre. Around it sprang up coffee shops and flower stores. Yet every time she comes home, she returns to another life, to a world where voices still sound—hers, Brown’s, Anderson’s, first loudly, then ever more softly, imperceptibly.

The End