Thoughts of a Pregnant Woman

Where this comes from: I am starting my 31st week pregnant. I have gained 19 kilos but this is not just about the body but about the soul as well.

On the rare occasions that I thought about being pregnant, back in the days when becoming pregnant was near to unthinkable, I always wanted to be one of those ladies with a big belly but otherwise completely untouched. One of those women with great skin, no double chin, no extra fat around the belly, the hips perfectly untouched. I wanted to remain unaffected by it all and still get the benefits, the cookies, the baby, the pats on the belly and the peaceful consideration.

Of course what we want and what we get isn’t always the same thing (actually it rarely is). I feel like an expanding blue whale. I see a woman staring at me in the mirror that I don’t know from before. She is bloated, has dark circles around her eyes and the roots of her hair look like they are preparing for a color we all dread. The fear in her eyes is tangible.

Of course I fear that the fears I see in her eyes are apparent to everyone. I fear that anybody who looks at her sees the entire spectrum in her gray-blue eyes. Some of the fears are silly, some are vain, some are real and some look almost surrealistically like make-believe.

I’m sore and disappointed in myself for not achieving the wishful image. The impossible hopes. I fear that I will not be enough. I am disappointed in myself for gaining the extra-extra weight. I fear the after effects this will have on my body. I fear the effects this will have on my entire being. It’s not just the feared stretch marks this might leave on my body but the stretch marks this will undoubtedly leave on my soul. Will I be good enough? Will I do? What kind of a mother will I be?

I tend to embrace changes. There is nothing like the realization that you’ve grown and that you are someone better today than you were yesterday but in today’s society something more dire always comes with this realization. You don’t just grow wise, you grow old and old is always bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s the soul that is growing wiser, it’s always bad. And then there is the risk that you will become someone you never wanted to be.

The female face should be without wrinkles, it should be peaceful, relaxed, innocent and beautiful. And what happens when these things vanish from our faces and something else takes over? Will our spouses still admire and love us? Will they still look at us with that look in their eyes and whisper “you are so beautiful” or will the phrase change? Will the look change? Will the attitude change?
What is it that takes over? What is the wisdom this life brings us? What is the quality that comes with the wrinkles around the eyes and the mental stretch marks?

Of course I know something already about the love I have for this little life. A smile enters my face each time I feel her move. I want to curl up and surround her already, protect her forever from everything that I know is out there, that I know will eventually make her grow up, make her wiser, not to mention the things that will hurt her. I know something already about the joy she will bring. I imagine mornings in front of the cartoons, laughing at a crazy yellow figure in top-hat or what have you. I know a little about the joys but the fears lurk there as well and some days it’s hard to banish them into oblivion.

A child does not make you old. In fact it might cut off a few years of your back. I see it in my beautiful sisters and in the all women around me. A child might make you wiser, it might make you open to new things that life has to teach you but it doesn’t change who you are. It doesn’t change who you are.
I guess what I am trying to say is that I wish I was perfect. I wish I could have been that magazine model of a perfect woman in real life but they do not exist. There is not a single person that time doesn’t pray upon one way or the other. And the knowledge of that isn’t schadenfreude but a sweet condolence that life treats me with as much love as it treats anyone else. The image I have of myself is not the image others have of me and that in itself is a condolence as well. It’s a good thing to know that people don’t only see my outsides in a different way than I do but my innards as well (heart and soul).

I still have fits and am angry at myself for not living up to my wishful dreaming. I blame it on the hormones because, lets face it, this is the only period in your life when you have a given excuse for everything you feel (for good and for bad). I fear that I will not be the perfect person I intended to be, inside and out and the fear is real and tangible and I see it in the eyes that face me in the mirror in the morning.

But essentially I see the lovely ladies all around me. I know that they have shared my fears and that they have not only fought them but won over them. I see fear in women around me, fear in the eyes of women so strong that I can only congratulate and dream wistfully, wishfully. And I see the fear beaten down, I see them win over it every day, I see the uselessness of these feelings that only serve to undermine. All these beautiful women wasting energy towards a struggle that shouldn’t be so painful or bring such fear (or in some cases loathing). Because we are enough. We aren’t all changing into evil old hags with a pimple on our noses. We can tackle what is to come, whatever it is. We can. I promise. And I am determined to continue to strive to be perfect but I promise to forgive myself when I’m not.

Nanna’s Eternity, Baldur’s Moment…

A Single Moment

Waiting

For Eternity

Frantic.
I never thought you were breakable. Fluxing and flailing hither and thither without any thought of what was happening around us we thought we were eternal.

And then…
The dark sand under your feet, the ocean bluer than I had ever seen it before and the sky so uncharacteristically clear of clouds, clear of the grayness. And you just stood there, pale as a ghost, holding the knife in your left hand staring at the horizon, into the nothingness.
And there was nothing I could do.
Nothing on earth I could have done. You didn’t see me. You didn’t hear me. In your eyes I didn’t exist anymore. It was as if all the time we had spent together had vanished into thin air.
Your memory was shattered.
Your sanity broken into billion grains of black sand underneath our feet.

And I can’t forget it.
The way you moved your hand so slowly towards your own heart. The way you continued to stare into the blue. The way you fell to the ground. Broken. Bent.
I guess I rushed towards you. Put my hands over the wound. I guess I tried to save you but I knew it was useless. I knew that your mind was already gone and your body would follow. I know I did something but my mind was back there, standing completely still on the black sand staring into your eyes and listening to the harsh sound as the waves of the ocean came crashing in.

I know I did something. I just don’t know what. I guess it doesn’t matter. I guess it will never matter and that I will never remember.
Your broken soul. Your broken eyes.

And the hatred was born within me. The hatred towards that man who had done this to us. Who had done this to you. Who had done this to me. I turned my head towards the mountains in the distance slowly and I growled at him. I screamed, I’m sure. I screamed although I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice.
And I promised myself and the universe that I would get my revenge.
I promised, I swore to all that was holy that I would chase him to the end of the earth. That I would chase him as far as I had to and I would end his life, I would break him the way he broke you, the way he broke me.
Such an exhausting thing carrying a broken soul, a broken spirit. I live an exhausting life filled with rage and hatred. There is nothing else inside of me. What once was me is still standing on that black beach, watching you in your last moment, the moment before you ended it all. I stand there still staring into your broken soul because at least it was there, it was you, broken or not.
I stand there and I wait for it to be my time but that time will not come until I have had my vengeance. When my mission is complete I will join you. I will still be standing on that beach and I will take the knife out of your hands and I will place it where it belongs.
In my heart.
And I will lie on that beach with you.
On the black sand.
And the blue waves of the ocean will wash over us.
And together we will stare, with our broken eyes, up at the cloudless sky.

But first he will pay. I will chase him to the end of the earth, till the end of time. I will find him and I will break him.
Like he broke us. 

Honest scrap

The wonderful @labeet has awarded me on her blog La Beet with this award. Check her out, her blog is definitely worth an award or two. So now I’m supposed to share 10 secrets with you and award ten others. Feel free to ignore me on this but I decided to play along. Here are the rules:

a. ‘The Honest Scrap Blogger Award’ must be shared.

b. The recipient has to tell 10 (true) things about themselves that no one else knows.

c. The recipient has to pass on the award to 10 more bloggers.

d. Those 10 bloggers should link back to the blog that awarded them.

I can begin by warning you that these are not secrets but I’ll try to find something that I haven’t actually told everyone who wanted to listen.

1. As a teenager I was into horoscopes. I didn’t read the day-to-day stuff in the papers but I had a book by a known Icelandic astrologist and I categorized people after what it said that this and that star sign should be like. It became a habit, a hobby, a fun one.

2. I have a love hate relationship with water. I love to drink water. It’s the liquid of life. But I don’t swim in it. I don’t run into the ocean no matter how warm it is at the beach, but I love watching the ocean and the waves. I *can* swim a little but I’m not sure my ability would safe my life if I would be put in a ’situation’.

3. I have a thing for stuffed animals (or just animals of all kind).

4. I often have over 15 books on my nightstand at any time and still utter the sentence “I have nothing to read” (I suspect it’s related to the feeling when you stand in front of a full closet and say “I have nothing to wear” it’s a matter of mood).

5. I tend to like B-movies more than quality movies. At least I tend to watch the b-movies I like more than once while the quality movies only get one sitting.

6. I tend to be a bit of a hypochondriac.

7. I am reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and enjoying it.

8. I don’t drink coffee.

9. I really wish I had taken photography courses. It’s not too late now but I wish I’d done it before the digital revolution.

10. I don’t know much about make-up and although I use it from time to time I really have no clue of what I’m doing.

And now for the fun part. The awards go to:
(treat this as you wish, ignore it if you will)

@dakegra has a wonderful blog where he shares photographs and some thoughts.

@sunilsebastian has a great blog Sentinel World where he shares his thoughts in words that tend to baffle me.

@EmmaJaneR shares her fantastic art in her blog Omphaloskepsis.

@AlgoBello blog Algobellogaleria is definitely worth a notice.

@Serenebabe and her lovely blog where she shares her writing and her life.

@inshin shares his writing on his blog. (See that he’s done this but he deserves the notice anyway)

Mad Biliophile has a wonderful book blog (which might make this nomination hard for her to do but that’s alright, her blog should be awarded and she might have some secrets about books she’s been waiting to share).

A Literary Odyssey – she is reading the classics and it’s interesting to read about her journey through this difficult territory so she deserves a praise too.

Dryride shares his views on the world and on books on his Becoming.

Steven_The_Rill shares his life in an interesting way on his blog.

Are you aware of the limits of your language?

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was thinking of my little girl the other day and the words “mamma mín” came to me in a context which is irrelevant here. “Mamma mín” is Icelandic and means “My mom” but the direct translation does not explain the terms of endearment the words relay. Picture a little girl bringing a bouquet of daisies she has just picked to her mother, she offers her the flowers and says “Hérna mamma mín”.

I tried in my mind to translate this accurately over to English but failed. There are, obviously, words that could replace these words – “Here you are mommy dearest” might work but it does not quite replace the simplicity of “mamma mín”. The Possessive Personal Pronoun in its simplicity works as a loving remark in the mouth of the child.

When the girl grows up she will probably use those particular words much more rarely, just like she will almost seize to pick flowers for her mom. These words are precious and, in my mind at least, almost irreplaceable. In English the words “My mom” in the mouth of a child can be the expression of great pride but it doesn’t relay the same feelings  of love that the Icelandic term does.

So I started to think about language. I started to think of something Herta Müller has said about language. She claims that “Language has different eyes” and claims that different languages give different thoughts and meanings. We’ve all heard the “which comes first the hen or the egg” discussion about language. In my mind the question isn’t so much about which comes first, language or thought? than it is about the question of limitations. How is our language limiting our thoughts?

Today I juggle three languages on a daily basis to some degree. My native tongue, Icelandic, is always with me but I partially think and talk in Swedish at the same time that I struggle to write in English every day.  When I started learning Swedish 10 years ago I had a head start. I had studied Danish for years and as Icelandic and Swedish are related languages I knew some of the words too.

Icelanders almost think its “nothing” to learn Swedish because they think its so simple and so much alike our own tongue and the Danish we are taught in school. What many fail to grasp until they’ve juggled Swedish (and this surely goes for all languages) for a while is that it isn’t all that easy. Some words are the same but have different meanings and different nuances. Some words, like sjuksköterska, seem practically impossible to pronounce. But what is hardest isn’t the superficial meaning of the words or their pronunciation. After 10 years I speak Swedish more or less fluently but what still gets to me are the nuances. Words I know the meaning of have deeper meanings than I yet grasp. Concepts that were previously foreign to me have been introduced and are still being introduced to me.

Like The Swedes favorite word “Lagom” which means “average” or “just right”. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Swedes love this word and use it unsparingly and it is very hard to grasp all its meanings and all its different nuances.

“How warm do you want your cocoa?”
“Lagom”.

In this case it might come down to what we’d like to think of as the Swedish National Soul. The Swedes are a very “lagom” people. Everything should be “just right”.

I’ve exposed myself to several languages. English and Danish came early, then I studied a little French and then I moved to Sweden. These different languages each provide different thoughts and I truly believe that when we study a new language it is mainly the thought behind the language that is the most difficult to grasp (which might be why I can’t remember a word of French, I never dove into the thought behind the language!). Studying irregular verbs is a hassle but learning how to think differently, that’s the true challenge. This is also why I think it’s very rude to settle in a country and never learn the language.

So are we limiting ourselves if we only speak one language? Well, yes I do think so. It’s almost like not getting to know another person, or at least getting to know them without ever putting yourself in their shoes. The Eskimo’s are said to have many words for snow but at the same time it is limited in other aspects. Are you aware what limits your language? And with “your language” I don’t just mean your mother tongue, but your particular use of that language.

I sometimes find myself in the situation where I have a thought in mind but can’t find the right word for it in any language. There is thought without language but I do think we need language to be introduced to new ways of thinking.

Don’t judge the Pirahã people for their lack of ability to count but ask yourself what their language can contribute with. Exposing yourself to new languages is like exposing yourself to new people. You always learn something new, something you didn’t know before. You always learn a new way of looking at things. It may not always vary greatly  from your own but it is guaranteed to widen your horizon and brighten your world.

The Adventures of Miss Real

(Exercise #2, Short story by Eygló Daða, 1960 words.
All comments and criticism welcome.)

When Mr. Knowitall stood Miss Real up at the airport Miss Real was sad for a short while. Then she decided to take fate into her own hands and take the trip to Paris by herself. For the first time in her life she felt like a modern, independent woman.

Her face shone with absolute delight as the airplane landed on Charles de Gaulle airport. She was so excited that she almost forgot to claim her luggage. She took a cap from the airport to the hotel that she and Mr. Knowitall had been planning on staying in and didn’t even blink when she realized that the prize was way to steep for her alone. She would work it out, this was her vacation and her opportunity to do things she had never even dared dreaming of.

The very next day she dressed like she imagined a sophisticated Parisian would instead of dressing like a tourist. She wore a red dress, high heels and she bought a Gucci bag in a shop near the hotel that cost more than her entire outfit. She was used to the high heels but didn’t want to tire herself out so she took a cap to the Eiffel tower.

She was awestruck as she walked past the people underneath the tower. A man in a brown hat and ragged suits juggled small kittens, a naked, bronze colored mime moved when people threw coins in a small bronze colored hat beneath his feet and a woman dressed like Marie Antoinette with the appropriate make up and hair sat on a chair and looked sad.

Miss Real didn’t do what the tourists did and enter the line for the elevators to the tower, instead she walked steady-fast, like a woman on a mission, down the pathway towards the park. All around her people lay on small blankets, ate baguettes with cheese, played football and some even drank red wine out of perfectly presentable wine glasses. Children ran around giggling and elderly people sat on benches holding their purses or their canes firmly.

When Miss Real was a good way away from the tower she turned around and looked back. She smiled a satisfied smile as she saw the life she was now a part of. Then she sat down beside an old woman wearing a straw hat with three roses and too much make-up above her eyes. The old woman was holding the ugliest chihuahua Miss Real had ever seen. It was gray with almost no hair on its body and its face looked like it had been squashed flat and then forcefully blown up again. The woman was snuggling with the dog lovingly, getting red lipstick all over it.

After a moments rest Miss Real stood up again, smiled at the woman with the ugly dog, who only frowned back at her, and went on her way. She walked out of the park hoping to find a really cute coffee house where she could eat like a true Parisian.

After a while she found a small, dark place with open-air serving. She sat down beside a small wooden table and wished she smoked cigarettes. After a while a young woman wearing a tight white T-Shirt, short black skirt and a green apron came to take her order. The girl had a red ribbon in her black hair and several yellow teardrops painted on her eyelids.

She ordered a salad from the girl and asked for a glass of red wine to be brought to her afterwards along with a piece of chocolate cake. Her French was bad but the girl seemed to instinctively know what she wanted and just nodded her head approvingly while scribbling the order down on a small piece of paper with a giant pencil with a red rubber duck on the end.

While she waited for her food she looked at the street life around her. A man and a woman sat down close by her and started smoking long cigarillos, they ordered a bottle of wine and laughed with exaggerated movements of the hands, back and forth, back and forth, as if they were waving a flag. When her salad came she ate it quickly and then waited for her wine and cake to arrive.

Again she wished she had something to do, a book to read or write in, a cigarette to smoke, a mobile phone so she could pretend to be getting a lot of text messages, something that made her look like anything but a lonely girl in a small Parisian café.

When her wine arrived she drank slowly and ate quickly. The glass was big and on the brim of it danced several can-can girls wearing black and white skirts, red tops, big white stockings and when they lifted their skirts she saw a hint of their secrets underneath. On the street in front of her she noticed a man in a top hat, wearing striped suits. He looked at her, waved a cane he was holding, bent forward as he took of his hat as if to salute her. She smiled and tilted her head slightly.

The man saw this as an invitation. He came into the café, sat down in front of her and started to talk quickly in French. She smiled at him, genuinely flattered that he believed her to be French, unwilling to correct him. He talked and he talked and she understood near to nothing of what he said. Then he handed her a business card, stood up and went on his way.

On the card was an address, the current date and a time for later that evening.

Miss Real tickled the can-can girls, finished her glass and waved for her bill. She payed the girl with the red ribbon, tipped well and went on her way. She hailed the next cab and asked to be taken to the hotel. In a small boutique beside the hotel she bought a white lace dress with matching gloves, white shoes and a feather for her hair. Then she went to the hotel, showered,did her make-up and hair, put on the dress, the shoes and the gloves. She placed the feather strategically in her hair pushed money in her bra and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She looked like someone else and nothing like herself.

In the cab she said nothing but showed the card to the driver. He looked at her twice with his white beard and his yellow hazy eyes and then he sped off.
“Here we are, Mademoiselle” the driver said as he stopped the car outside of an old, worn building. She  payed the driver and stepped out of the car gracefully. Then she walked up the cracked stairs and entered the building without hesitating.

There was a narrow stripe of red carpet on the concrete floor pointing her which way to go. She walked down the hallway, admiring clowns dancing with skeletons on the walls. A gargoyle towered over an entrance, it had a dragons head and the body of a lion. It nodded its head towards her, hissed and spat its tongue out quickly, like a frog catching a fly. Then she went inside, through the entrance and entering a large ballroom. There were huge chandeliers sparkling their crystal light in the air, big white ribbons decorated the walls along with paintings of beheaded people dancing and clinging their glasses together. On the floor in front of her were people dressed in the most peculiar fashion. A young innocent  looking girl was wearing a tight leather top and a blue leather skirt which hardly hid her buttocks. A man wearing a tailcoat and latex pants took his hat off to her. A woman wearing a chastity belt and an iron bra greeted her and offered her a glass of sparkling, bubbling champagne.

Miss Real accepted gracefully and entered the ballroom as if she belonged there. She saw a clown kissing a queen in the corner and a monk lifting up the many skirts of a fat dame with white hair, the monk had his other hand gripping the woman’s big, left breast tightly. On the dance floor kings danced with a milk maids, stable boys danced with princesses, princes danced with princes and ladies danced with tramps.

She was soon swept into a dance with a woman wearing a harlequin suit. The entire night she ate shrimp and caviar, drank champagne and danced like she had never danced before. She danced with anyone who would, a prince, a beggar, a sowing lady, a prostitute and a king, a concrete gargoyle and a queen. No one spoke a word to her and the music echoed between the walls of the room delightfully.

After a few hours of this a man wearing a beggar’s outfit jumped up on a table and started speaking. She understood little but saw the gleeful anticipation in the eyes of the guests. When the man stopped talking she heard several squeals and suddenly people were running, laughing and chasing each other back and forth and out of the room.

The man in the striped suit, with the top hat approached her and pinched her cheeks. “Run and play” he said and pinched her buttocks. “Run and play or we’ll get you” and then he laughed maniacally. Miss Real wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. She looked at the man questioningly and noticed the baneful look in his eyes.

“Run” he exclaimed and soon she was running as he chased her down the corridor where she had come from, she ran down staircases and was greeted by skeletons, chattering their teeth and poking their fingers at her. She ran forward, terror ripping at her heart. Then she entered a room, closed the door and caught her breath.

It was a small room filled with lilies and black satin cloth, hanging from the ceiling, waving in the air. She sighed a breath of relief as she bolted the door behind her and then walked over to a window which led to the pavement outside. It was a small window but she would be able to climb out of it if she could get it to open.

She felt the satin fabric kiss her cheeks and the lilies playing softly with her feet. And then she turned from the window.
“No” she said aloud to herself, “I will not be chased out of my dream” she exclaimed rather loudly and walked briskly to the door. She opened it and faced the man in the top hat. He bowed to her courteously and smiled wickedly.

“Come with me” she said and pulled the man inside the room. Then she took his hat, placed it on her own head and took the man by the arms and started dancing. They danced like that, without music, without a sound, careful not to tramp the lilies. Then she kissed him on the mouth and sighed deeply. The man kissed her back, softly, passionately and they fell to the floor, making love amongst the flowers and the satin curtains.

When he fell asleep she slid silently out of the room and out of the quiet house. The air outside was cold and the sun was just peaking up above the horizon. Smiling gladly Miss Real walked towards a larger road nearby and hailed a cab to her hotel. She packed the white dress in her suitcase and fell into her bed.

A week of this, she thought to herself, one more day of this and I will never want to go back home. She smiled shyly and fell asleep smearing lipstick on her white pillow.

The Exercises

I posted a short story the day before yesterday. It was about 1300 words, written in one day and posted the same day. It was the first exercise of what I hope to be many.

A while ago I participated in a short story competition which required the entries to be short stories of 2000 words or less. I wrote a few of these stories and put one in the competition last April. It got short listed, which made me happy. The format also taught me a thing or two about writing. It’s really challenging to write such short stories. It’s both rewarding and fun to write them and you learn a thing or two.

My mission:

These stories I’m writing now are not just 2000 words or less but formed in a certain format. I’m going to be writing stories that a) feel (to me at least) almost allegorical, b) I will start with a single feeling and write from it and c) I will be keeping a certain flare of the carnival in the stories which will make them surreal or at least somewhat unreal.

Or that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish. I’ll be posting them as I write them. Hoping that one story will take only one day from idea to final draft (I’d hate to call them finished in such a short time). That will not always be possible of course but I’m going to try my best with the time limit, the important thing is to get the stories written and to learn something along the way.

The Death of Former Miss Amazing, Mrs. Average

(Exercise, Short story by Eygló Daða, 1300 words. All comments and criticism welcomed.)

When Mr. Average’s wife died at the age of thirty-nine Mr. Average fell into a deep depression. He had been a quiet, orderly guy his entire life. He always wore blue suits to work. He always ironed his own shirts. He never walked over a street when the light was red and he always kept money in his wallet in case of emergency. He had loved his wife well and hardly ever even looked at another woman since the day they took their vows.

Then his wife, former Miss Amazing, died. He found Mrs. Average on the living room floor in their villa in the suburbs. She was wearing a white dress with green leaved pattern and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth. Her face was mildly green and her thin, perfect body was bloated beyond recognition. He didn’t hear the police men and paramedics claim that they had never seen anything like it. He only saw Mrs. Average being taken away by the coroner and not in an ambulance.

The house changed immediately. While his wife was alive it had always been free of dust and the rubbish seemed to stayed away as if by magic but suddenly every corner, ever inch of the house was layered with dust and litter. The house that had always been light, colorful and full of life, now became gray, dirty and dark in a matter of moments. The furniture were darker, the drapes hung heavily before the windows blocking out the sunlight and the decoration didn’t look modern anymore but Gothic and old. The shadows were long and everything smelled of decay and mildew.

Mr. Average handled the questions the police officers had to ask with quiet resolution. He looked at his environment change around him. He saw quiet transformation in the faces of the men in uniforms. Pity and compassion became disdain and suspicion. When they were gone he sighed a breath of relief and out of his mouth spewed fumes of sadness and rage. It was a thick, gray cloud that settled like a persistent fog over everything around him.

He still saw his wife wandering around the house wearing her white dress with the green leaved pattern which almost seemed color co-ordinated with her green complexion. He saw her tongue lulling out of her mouth in hideous manner as she stumbled into room after room as if she was looking for a way out of her miserable none existence. He tried his best to ignore her. He told himself that this version of his wife was not welcome in his life but he knew not of a way to get rid of her, to steer her out of his life and existence.
So he decided to pretend nothing ever happened, no matter how impossible the task seemed.

His colleges saw the change in him. They saw the storm cloud constantly floating above his head, showering him with bile and acid rain. And they saw the lines underneath his eyes deepen and darken. When he was approached with gentleness and kind words he hissed and the color of his eyes changed from true blue to volcanic red. They started to avoid him, approaching him only when the work required it with absolute necessity.

Mr. Average didn’t mind. He felt he was no longer living in the world he had been born in, instead he had been sucked into the gray, un-dead world of his wife where there were no antithesis’. There was no color, no happiness, no life and no hope.

The years went by and people forgot about Mr. Average fun loving, wonderful, sunny wife in a bright dress and with a kind smile. They forgot that he had ever been anything but Mr. Sour-Grapes. The children teased him in the street, cast rotten apples at his windows and told stories about his house being haunted by a ghastly green woman with her tongue lulling out of her mouth. His dark hair became gray and then white, his body looked like a skeleton and his fingernails were yellow, his eyes dark seeing little but the fog around him and the green face of Mrs. Average, former Miss Amazing.

Then one day a sound broke the dead silence of his house. It was a Sunday afternoon and in his world the clouds were raging havoc, the smell of death and decay was suffocating and the grayness of everything around him was even more miserable than it had been the day before. The sound that clung had become unfamiliar to him but he recognized it after a while as the tune from the doorbell. Mrs. Average had had a bell installed with a tune which sounded out of place and fundamentally out of character for the place he lived in now. None the less he stumbled out of the chair in the corner of the living room where he had been admiring the green corpse of his dead wife as she tried to swallow her tongue in the middle of the floor at the same time that she cackled at him like a hyena.

When he opened the door he noticed a breath of fresh air escape inside the house. In front of him stood a little girl wearing pig tails and a pink dress. She bore a box full of cookies and a pink backpack which seemed too big for such a small child.

“Hello Mr” said the child, “will you buy sunshine cookies? It’s for our school trip” she stumbled on her words, her face became bright red and a giggling smile escaped her lips.
Mr. Average looked at the child ready to spill some of his bile over the child but instead he hiccuped and coughed. Then he looked again at her red cheeks and her smiling face.

“I guess I will” he told the child and fetched his wallet. Inside he took out a few bills which he handed the child “This should do it?” he told the girl who happily handed him two boxes of cookies from the bigger box she was carrying.
“Thank you Mr. Average” the child said in a bright voice. “You should eat them all right away, they will make you feel like dancing”. Then she spun around and ran into the street with the pigtails following after her like two faithful puppies.

Mr. Average didn’t notice the breath of fresh air swirling around his house. He sat down in his chair and started to munch on the cookies. Noticing only after several mouthfuls that the face of Mrs. Average was fading slowly before him, it’s color changed slowly from green to white and her demeanor changed. She stopped lulling with her tongue and started to brush the dust of her dress.
“Well Mr. Average” he heard her say, “I guess it’s time for me to be gone” she said. “Will you be alright without me?”

Mr. Average looked at her with sorrowful eyes, a big blue tear escaped and fell down onto the carpet. The tear tainted the carpets color, the infection spread out painting the gray blue. He didn’t notice but saw only his wife who almost looked the way she had once upon a time oh so long ago.
“I don’t know” he said faithfully and truthfully.

Former Miss Amazing walked over to her living husband and touched his cheek with her silky white hands.  “You will be fine” she said and smiled. The smile cleared the air and painted the walls white.
“You will be fine” she said again and then she turned around and walked out of the house, leaving him all alone with the breath of fresh air which cleared the remaining grayness away and swept some color back into Mr. Average’s life.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 goes to:

Herta Müller

Photo: #WordlessWednesday

#WordlessWednesday

Speculations on the Nobel Prize in Literature 2009

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 will be announced next Thursday according to the official site. So now the speculations start. Who will get it this year?

The new permanent secretary, Peter Englund, will announce the prize for the first time. It will be interesting to see if the prize takes a different direction with a new secretary or if it will (as I suspect it will) stay the same, unchanged.

I have a few favorites, who have been favorites for some time now. Last year Doris Lessing got crossed off that list of mine but I’d like to speak of a few of the others.

The author that is first on my list of candidates comes as a surprise to no one who knows me. It is the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami whose work I’ve admired for years now. His originality, magical-realism sometimes bordering on surrealism is astounding to me and I truly think there is no better novelist alive today. This is of course a bold statement if we think about all the great authors out there.

Ladbrokes has in the past year had a fairly good prediction rate on the Nobel Prize in Literature, this is their list this year. Amos Oz is predictably on top of their list, tightly followed by Djebar and Oates.

What I do think they should do is give the prize to the poet Bob Dylan this year though. He’s been on the list as an outsider for several years now, speculations either claim he is an extremely unlikely candidate or the perfect poet. I think it would path a way in a new direction for the prize. It would renew it in a way that is much needed because excluding a poet like Bob Dylan in favor of some obscure poet we’ve never heard of limits the prize’s possibilities.

I do appreciate the value of being introduced to great new authors, authors that would otherwise have passed me by completely. I appreciate that authors like the Icelandic novelist, Halldór Laxness would have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world had it not been for the Nobel Prize and I do think that it’s an interesting and a very important aspect of the prize. And there are so many authors, so many poets, so many play writers that could and maybe should get the prize but never do because of a simple thing as time limit.

Bob Dylan however, should not be seen as an underdog amongst fellow poets simply because we all already know who he is, have listened to his songs and appreciated his lyrics. He should get the prize, not because of these things, but to mark that song lyrics can be just as poetic as words written on a piece of paper or read out loud monotonously.

Other names I favor on the ladbroke list are Salmon Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, Ko Un, Milan Kundera and perhaps Mario Vargas Llosa.

I’ve never been good at predicting who will get it. I will be watching with interest to see who gets it, as I have done in the past years. I can admit that my heart thumbs for some reason when I see the doors to the chambers open and the permanent secretary enter the room to announce the prize. It’s always interesting to get to know new authors, it’s always satisfying when an author you have appreciated gets the prize.

Is there too much prestege and snobbery around the prize? Sure there is and I’m glad there are other prizes out there focusing on genre’s this prize has ignored completely but that’s a topic for a completely new entry.