She blinked those pale blue eyes, like water lit over white rocks, and men leaned toward her almost instinctively. She had curly blonde hair, was thin and small, and looked like a fairy from old stories.
But she was not a fairy. She was a structural engineer and designed dams for thermal power plants.
At home she had one of those enormous drafting tables covered with white tracing paper, and across it she drew straight lines and angles so exact you got dizzy just by looking at them. Everything had to be precise. Water had to flow where it had been calculated to flow, pressure had to remain within exact limits.
“The important cracks never appear at the surface. They begin first in places nobody can see,” she used to say to anyone willing to listen, but especially to her mother.
They were living together, in an apartment with a large and sunny balcony. Every Sunday they baked plum pie. Every morning her mother watered the plants on the balcony and shouted after her to take an umbrella, even in summer. And she always pretended to be irritated, although the umbrella ended up in her bag every single time.
They lived like that for almost forty years.
Then her mother died. She did not cry at the funeral, she organized everything impeccably.
She cried only a few months later, in a supermarket, when she passed the shelf full of plum jam.
She bought a jar, but when she arrived home she saw it was already cracked. She had probably hit it against the concrete stairs of the apartment building while climbing too quickly, tears still on her face.
After that, straight lines began to exhaust her. In the mornings she would stand in front of the drafting table and watch how all those lines and angles she was supposed to draw with precision began to bend, slip into one another, slowly turning into spirals.
One night she dreamed the thermal plants were singing.
It was not a metallic or heavy sound, as she might have expected. If one can expect thermal plants to sing, of course. They vibrated more like the enormous organs inside cathedrals, with a sound so deep she did not exactly hear it, but she felt it climbing through the bones of her body.
In the dream she walked barefoot along the dam and felt the concrete beneath her feet vibrating together with the song. As the sound grew, the dams began to tremble. At first barely visibly. Then more and more violently, until they began to come apart slowly, seam by seam. Thin cracks appeared first, almost elegant. After that the concrete broke away in large heavy pieces that fell without sound, and the water that had been held there for years began to move in waves.
Dark, deep water filled with orange, red, and yellow flowers drifting slowly through the currents.
The thermal plants kept singing, and she took off her clothes and stepped into the water.
The last thing she remembered was the sensation of the water against her skin. It was warm and dense, almost velvety. Liquid honey, she thought, although the comparison made no sense.
She woke with a dry mouth and the image still floating in her mind: the black water, the flowers burning through the currents, and the sensation of honey against her skin. For a long time she lay there without turning on the light, trying to remember whether she had been afraid in the dream. She had not.
In the morning she went to work as usual. She took the 7:15 bus, bought a poppy seed pretzel from the corner shop, and climbed the three flights of stairs to her office. She drank coffee that was too hot from the metal mug she always kept on her desk. She unfolded the drafting plans.
At lunchtime she wrote her resignation on a sheet of lined paper torn from an old notebook.
The director asked her whether she was ill.
She said no.
Preview, chapter from the upcoming book “The Quiet of Breaking”
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