Read Online Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) by Dorthe Nors - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Dorthe Nors
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before dinner. Kasper had said something about the sessions Annelise had been having with him, but first she and Carl Erik had eaten dinner and shared a bottle of wine, and then they had fucked, drunk more wine, and taken a shower, and it was all fine until she made to dry Carl Erik’s back. That was when he became annoyed about her having to touch everything and not leave things alone, always poking and meddling and sticking her nose into the slightest thing. It was as though she were never satisfied with the knowledge she had, he yelled at her, and the last thing she remembered before he blew up at her was the sentence All that crap you’ve been telling Kasper, for instance. And at that point she had asked for the crap to be expounded upon, which was what then happened in the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom.
She was perfectly willing to admit that she had lost confidence in her choices. She kept on mostly because she was scared of giving up on her urge to be happy and simply content herself with peace and quiet. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, she considered that she had most likely seen her worst and her best now. She had been down on all fours, on the edge of her nerves, naked and bound and temporarily insane at the time of the crime.
She climbed gingerly back into bed. There was Carl Erik, unconcerned by her still being awake. His hand was next to her face, clutching at a corner of the comforter. It looked gentle lying there. A little red across the knuckles, but there was nothing wrong with its outline, especially not if Annelise put her eyes slightly out of focus. She considered its shape and thought about the lines; everything you wanted to see but which in actual fact was not there. Everything that should have been but which never became, and this was important to understand. Not only in respect to herself. It was something she could put to use with the children at school. She recalled that as a child she had been heavily seduced by the black line drawings in coloring books. They were done so well she always wanted to fill in the empty spaces with crayon and felt-tip. Behind that burning desire to color in the drawings lay the creative human’s longing to give life, and, not least: to make the drawings her own. In a way, it was like stealing preconceived ideas. The drawing could never be lifelike, and for that reason you reached a point where you began to draw outside the lines.
She had observed that children only seldom showed the colored-in drawings in their coloring books to their parents or other adults. Presumably because they were such poor indicators of the child’s creative abilities and demonstrated all too clearly their less flattering traits: laziness and lack of confidence to really get below the surface of things. Annelise’s gaze fell once more upon Carl Erik. One of his kind—a man—was part of the idea preconceived for women. More than that, any individual you happened to meet was nothing but a potential, an outline to be colored in and assigned content. She had read about it in respect to young girls and their propensity to over-function—the need to change, control, expound upon. But you can’t do that, and eventually you pick up the felt-tip with the most in it and color everything in. Maybe that was why he hit her? Maybe her bruises were just a way of coloring outside the lines? Maybe the reason he turned her onto her stomach, pressed her into the mattress, and fucked her from behind as she sobbed and felt her legs grow heavy was to make her real and living by being careless, and seen from the opposite viewpoint what she did afterward while he was asleep was the same, outside the lines, outside them all, even if the result as it lay there in a mess of blood and comforter seemed to be anything else but alive.
MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, AND AUNT ELLEN
HE REMEMBERS HIS GRANDMOTHER, BUT EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED before he was born comes from his mother and Aunt
She was perfectly willing to admit that she had lost confidence in her choices. She kept on mostly because she was scared of giving up on her urge to be happy and simply content herself with peace and quiet. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, she considered that she had most likely seen her worst and her best now. She had been down on all fours, on the edge of her nerves, naked and bound and temporarily insane at the time of the crime.
She climbed gingerly back into bed. There was Carl Erik, unconcerned by her still being awake. His hand was next to her face, clutching at a corner of the comforter. It looked gentle lying there. A little red across the knuckles, but there was nothing wrong with its outline, especially not if Annelise put her eyes slightly out of focus. She considered its shape and thought about the lines; everything you wanted to see but which in actual fact was not there. Everything that should have been but which never became, and this was important to understand. Not only in respect to herself. It was something she could put to use with the children at school. She recalled that as a child she had been heavily seduced by the black line drawings in coloring books. They were done so well she always wanted to fill in the empty spaces with crayon and felt-tip. Behind that burning desire to color in the drawings lay the creative human’s longing to give life, and, not least: to make the drawings her own. In a way, it was like stealing preconceived ideas. The drawing could never be lifelike, and for that reason you reached a point where you began to draw outside the lines.
She had observed that children only seldom showed the colored-in drawings in their coloring books to their parents or other adults. Presumably because they were such poor indicators of the child’s creative abilities and demonstrated all too clearly their less flattering traits: laziness and lack of confidence to really get below the surface of things. Annelise’s gaze fell once more upon Carl Erik. One of his kind—a man—was part of the idea preconceived for women. More than that, any individual you happened to meet was nothing but a potential, an outline to be colored in and assigned content. She had read about it in respect to young girls and their propensity to over-function—the need to change, control, expound upon. But you can’t do that, and eventually you pick up the felt-tip with the most in it and color everything in. Maybe that was why he hit her? Maybe her bruises were just a way of coloring outside the lines? Maybe the reason he turned her onto her stomach, pressed her into the mattress, and fucked her from behind as she sobbed and felt her legs grow heavy was to make her real and living by being careless, and seen from the opposite viewpoint what she did afterward while he was asleep was the same, outside the lines, outside them all, even if the result as it lay there in a mess of blood and comforter seemed to be anything else but alive.
MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER, AND AUNT ELLEN
HE REMEMBERS HIS GRANDMOTHER, BUT EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED before he was born comes from his mother and Aunt
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