Read Online The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen - Free Book Online

ten kilos or so, whatever comes to me. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll change one of your eyes, perhaps this left one, into a glass eye.”
    The woman’s mouth dropped open. “Huh?”
    Winter smiled.
    “Or I might give you a wooden leg, or some kind of disease. How does syphilitic brain damage sound? Or maybe I’ll have you broken in two in an auto accident.”
    She gave a shrill laugh. “You are truly awful!” she said. “I’m not telling you anything now, or I might end up in your next novel.”
    Winter gave a slight bow.
    “That is your right. It would no doubt put you in much less danger of being used. But I may nevertheless steal your way of moving, the expressions on your face! Perhaps I’ll even take that way you have of smiling with your mouth open, your little tongue peeking out now and then between your teeth to see what’s happening in the world. And those freckles that start on the bridge of your nose and continue all the way down between your breasts, that’s a detail that might come in handy in a piece I’m writing at the moment.”
    The woman smiled, frightened. “You’ll eat me alive.”
    She grabbed a companion by the arm and started lisping like a little girl. “Oh, won’t you please be a nice man-eating lion and let me go if I tell you a juicy story about my friend here?”
    Winter looked at her apologetically. “I’m sorry, but I don’t bargain with my material.”
    *
    Martti Winter had recently had a birthday. He’d turned forty-three . For his birthday celebration, he’d ordered a large chocolate cake covered in marzipan roses. He hadn’t told anyone about his birthday. He ate the cake himself.
    The baker said that it was a cake for twenty. It had lasted Winter two days and one night.
    Winter didn’t smoke. He was a sober man nowadays— drinking was too much trouble. Alcohol didn’t suit him. Drunkenness had lost its charm. He’d given up sex with other people for the same reasons.
    His new habit, eating, replaced both drinking and sex. He weighed well over 150 kilos.
    When people talked about the famous author, their comments generally went something like, “What of it? Why not enjoy life, right? If you like good food, why not eat your fill?”
    Martti Winter was no gourmand. He didn’t have expensive tastes, didn’t like Chinese food or care to hear about French cuisine. He hated shellfish, caviar, and complicated seafood dishes. He never drank wine with dinner. He liked to eat simple, uncomplicated foods: chocolate, pastries, ground beef, French fries, macaroni, chocolate mousse and sausage.
    He found his way to the buffet table and started to eat a cream pastry topped with three green cherries and flakes of chocolate. The filling was marzipan.
    He remembered that the woman with the freckles was an amateur actor in Rabbit Back. She was the fourth hanger-on he’d fended off that evening. There was a time when he’d positively collected actresses. There was something quite special about them—they seemed more complete and clear than other women and at the same time unreal. But it had been along time since he’d had it in him to really react to a woman’s sexual signals.
    He had noticed the moisture on the actress’s lips, sensed the shape of her flesh, smelled the perfume that only partly succeeded in concealing the aroma she naturally secreted. In theory, he would have liked to bed many of the women he met. In practice, sex with a stranger was rather laborious, messy and tiresome. He would have to look people in the eye whom he would prefer not to know if he saw them in line at the market or the corner kiosk.
    Besides, Winter liked to keep his body private. It was like an untidy room—it was indecorous to invite strangers to see it. He didn’t really think of his bloated form as his own anymore. It was thus natural that he didn’t want to be seen with it.
    He had adjusted to his fatness, of course. It was annoying that at this point he could no longer see his penis.