For Swedes only:

The Home Phone

So how did this sales pitch happen?

“Listen. You’ll get this device installed in your house that gives anyone in the world the opportunity to, at any given moment, set off a loud piercing signal in your home, demanding that you drop what you’re doing and give them your time. Everybody wants one!”

And then. As if you didn’t have enough:

“Listen. You’ll get this device that you can carry on your body at all times that gives anybody in the world the opportunity to, at any given moment, set off a loud piercing signal or your favorite song in really lousy quality (but still loud) OR give you a vibration that pretends not to be a sound at all – demanding that you drop what you’re doing and give them you time. Everybody has one!”

How?
How?

Swimming pool friends

There was a time, before socialneetwoorks, when you met people that you would never hear of again.

They were swimming pool friends.

Swimming pool friends were kids your size that you met when your parents took you to the pool. You played with them for the day, then no matter how fun you had – at the end of the day they were replaced by an ice cream for the car and you never saw them again.

It wasn’t so bad.

You never know what would have happened had you taken one of them home.

You only regret what you didn’t really want to do at the time

Braces: Like a little metal hug around your teeth

All parents have a favorite child

The Inconsolable Sulk

She was just like a lot of girls, cute and nice, until she got sad, and turned blue, and cried a whole river.

“It will be different for us”

You changed, but her perception of you didn’t.

The moon never beams

On the road-divider, under a lit Taco Bell-sign, sat a little puppy dog, whimpering softly to the dark sky. He got up, looked left, looked right, looked left again and trotted across the road. Soon he was shielded by the coarse, frozen grass.

The puppy turned a corner. He floated like a furry shadow along the row of towering cars. Colorful smells rendered the night fascinating. He knew exactly where he was heading. A dog barked at him furiously from the end of a chain. The puppy threw a quick glance at the dog, so domesticated his ears had flopped, and kept going, bouncing lightly forth.

He stopped by the window of a Toys R Us, nudging the glass with his nose. He stared and stared at the shadowy shapes in the window and the stacked paper boxes with strange creatures inside of them. He knew there was some sort of appeal with this place, but he couldn’t for his life figure out what. It seemed completely dead to him. Scentless.

“Where are you going?”
“Play with Luke.”

The puppy closed his mouth with a smack.

*

Matthew Shaw was just about to kiss his son good night when the boy shouted: “Daddy, there’s a doggie in the window!”
Matthew spun around towards the dark garden. Nothing there. Of course. Always an excuse up his sleeve to keep his parents on their toes.
“It was! I saw it!”
“Well, if the doggie finds a way to climb up to your window again, you could reward it with all that candy of yours.”
Matthew left the room. He wished he could attribute his son with an imaginative mind, but frankly – and frankness was important to Matthew – Luke was a liar. It saddened Matthew, more than anything. As if he wasn’t surrounded by enough of them at work.

*

Matthew was deep asleep in his armchair when something made him come alive with a jerk. Someone was watching him. A little creature was sitting on the shadowy stairs. It was a puppy dog.

“Lovmay,” Matthew whispered, for a confused moment thinking it was his childhood dog.
The puppy tilted its shaggy head and whimpered.
Matthew shook his strange thought. Weird how the mind worked sometimes. This puppy looked homeless; maybe it had escaped from the shelter. Matthew slid down from the chair and crouched on the floor.

“Come little guy. What are you saying there?”
The puppy whimpered again.
“Hey. What are you saying? Are you hungry?”
The puppy whimpered back and now Matthew tilted his head too, listening. What a strange sound. So communicative.
Matthew moved closer, extending his hand. The puppy’s ribs were showing. He wished he had something to feed it.
“Don’t be afraid.”
He was halfway to the stairs. The puppy sat motionless. Matthew felt strangely paternal. He imagined him and the puppy becoming best friends, him caring for it and protecting it, teaching it everything he knew. He wanted to win its trust. He moved closer, slowly, slowly. The puppy looked at him with its yellow eyes, as if it was taking in his entire being. There was something so endlessly sad about it that Matthew’s throat tightened. Maybe a dog could change everything. This strange little fellow who fell out of the sky and onto his stair: a puppy-dog who would yelp and cringe and shimmy for him every time they saw each other.

The puppy looked down at his large, clumsy paws. They looked wet. Blood?
“Have you hurt your paws, little friend?” Matthew said before he remembered: All the animals. A month ago, some animal had gone yard to yard and ripped all the pet rabbits and chinchillas and god-knows-what that people kept as company, out of their cages. Matthew had dismissed it as the work of a city-dwelling coyote, despite his wife’s indignant reiterations of the gossip: “The latches were lift from outside!”
“Is it you? Is it you who caused all the trouble?”
Matthew felt strangely proud. This little guy. Sweet and vulnerable, yet an animal with an animal’s instincts – only acting in key with his nature. Things kill and get killed all the time. It was only here, in this self-flushing, ice cream-colored suburb where everything was seed-less and pit-less and paid for by plastic, only here was a smaller animal eaten by a bigger one considered abnormal – a perversity.

It was strange how an event like this, a little animal out of context, could point such a flashlight to his life. It made him acutely aware of his routines, this place. His days of moving money, nights of watching television, and weekends of sports. He could do it in his sleep. He did do it in his sleep. Where was the passion? The adventure? The real, engaged, two-sided love?
The puppy looked uncannily sad.
“Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. They were stupid pets. You are a big dog. Yes. A big dog. That’s what big dogs do. They eat animals that are smaller then them.”
Matthew reached his hand even closer to the puppy, averting his eyes not to frighten it with his human gaze.
“Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I don’t care about the stupid animals. You can be my dog if you want. But only if you want.”
He sat there with one hand shielding his eyes and the other one reaching out to the puppy. Finally he felt the brief pressure of something wet and cold against his hand, before the puppy took off and skulked away with its back bent like a hyena.

Matthew remained on the floor, still enveloped in the dream-like feeling of the world not quite making sense. He heard the sound of the door opening and closing. His wife must have come home, he thought. The last person he wanted to deal with right now. He hauled himself up on the sofa and fell asleep again, determined to find the puppy tomorrow and become its friend.

*

Laura Wilkins was standing with her slippers slowly soaking in the crescent scraped on the doorstep. She blinked at the whiteness. The driveway was padded in a thick coat of fresh snow. The she noticed the police cars on the Shaw’s driveway.

“They won’t say anything.”
Laura jumped. Their neighbor, Ms. Denby, was standing behind the snow-lined hedge, not wearing a coat. Her eyes were wide with excitement.
“The little boy is… Taken in his sleep. Just like the little animals.”
Laura looked at Ms. Denby, looked at the police, then whipped around and ran downstairs, grabbing hold of corners not to slide on her useless slippers. She almost fell on the door handle and tumbled into her son’s room. Her stomach contracted in relief. The blue sheet, dotted with the plastic cars her son took to bed, had a small S-shaped bump that was heaving lightly. Donut, the stuffed rabbit, was laying in the lower nook of the S, and a long foot was sticking out at the end. Black sole. Laura closed her eyes, forcing her breathing to slow. Little Jack. Home safe.

She wanted to hug him, like yesterday, when he was brushing past her in the kitchen, man on a mission, off to play with Luke.
“What’s the rule for leaving the house?” She asked and he had squeezed her in a hug, hard as he could, then he flapped his arms open again and ran out the door and down the driveway, forgetting his mother as you forget an umbrella when it isn’t raining.

Now he was here. Laura was still too relieved to process the news about Luke.

Yesterday she had walked Gus, their golden retriever, pass the Shaw’s backyard. She had seen the boys standing side by side. Luke was kicking at the fresh pile of dirt that must be the grave of Sunbeam, the Shaw’s murdered chinchilla.
“Ripped her apart! Bam bam bam. I saw it!” Luke explained to Jack who just stood there, listening, with his hands in his pockets. He looked so small in his big blue coat. A small square with a blond pin of a head.

Laura felt a squeeze at her heart. Her son’s foot, so long and scrawny for his size. She kept staring at it, as if waiting for it to move, for Jack to wake up and explain something to her. But the blanket was still heaving calmly.

He must be tired. Last night, he had silently slipped into their bedroom well after midnight. Richard, her husband, was sleeping, but for some reason, Laura was awake. Her son looked like he just woke up, standing barefoot in his large, red shorts that were the only clothes he wanted to sleep in lately – everything else being “too hot”. He was holding Donut by the arm, clumsily rubbing his hand across his hair, and squinting his eyes so hard that Laura wondered if he could see anything at all.
“Mommy… Can you make mornings not come?”

A new image, purely imagined, floated through Laura’s mind and replaced the silhouette of her sleeping son: another bump under a blanket, not heaving, being carried towards an ambulance.

“Honey, you should never wish for mornings not to come. Mornings will always come. That means you’re alive. Why wouldn’t you want the morning to come?”
Jack, looking at the window: the garden view hidden behind a dark blue curtain.
“I just don’t like them. They feel weird.”
“Are you having nightmares?”
“I don’t dream.”

It amazed her how different Jack was from other little boys. She couldn’t quiet describe it. He was smaller. He was an unusually good listener. Just sitting silent, occasionally scratching his neck and his hands. She had had him examined for skin rashes, but the doctor found nothing and he never complained. He never really complained about anything, except mornings. At night, when she came in for their night talk, he would just lay there, looking at his mother, eyes lit up with what seemed like unfailing attention. But yesterday he had seemed distracted.

“Are you thinking about the animals?” she asked.
The killed animals had irrevocably held the imagination of all the children in the neighborhood.
Jack nodded.
“Are you sad about what happened to them?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are you scared?”
He nodded.
“Are you scared that the coyote will take Gus?”
“Nothing will happen to Gus.”
“Of course not.”
Laura dearly hoped that was true.
She smiled at her son. He tugged at the ears of his rabbit. She could see that he was preparing to say something.
“Maybe the animals weren’t all that happy in their cages,” she tried. “You know, maybe the coyote gave Sunbeam a fair chance. Maybe he let her out of her cage and waited to see if she wanted to run. Maybe she didn’t.”
Although Laura felt like she was failing in her attempts to comfort her son, she was pleased about his sensitive nature. He didn’t marvel at the morbid details of the story. He seemed genuinely saddened. Jack kept staring at his rabbit, squeezing its waist.
“And maybe he was also hungry.”

Laura had followed Jack back to his room to put him to bed again. They had played “animal”. It was just this game they played.

*

Laura pinched her nose with her fingers, threaded her other arm through the hole, and waved her hand. Swaying from side to side she stomped across the floor.
“That is an elephant,” Jack said gravely.
It was indeed.
Laura stretched her neck, ballooned the shape of her upper body with the help of her arms and pulled up her left leg.
Jack wrinkled his brows.
“I’m pink…” Laura said.
“Oh. You are a flamingo.”
Laura clapped her hands.
“Right honey! I’m a flamingo! And you know something, darling? Everybody dreams. You may just not remember it. A flamingo… Lets think of eggs!”
Laura grabbed her son’s large feet in her hands and shook them lightly.
“They have no legs.”
She sat down at his bedside and continued the Ogden Nash-poem:

“chickens come from eggs.
but they have legs
the plot thickens
eggs come from chickens, but have no legs under them
what a conundrum.”

Laura formed her lips around the words of the poem. Tasted their rhythm. Something was forming in her mind. Something horrible and unfathomable that she had sensed for a long time. Something…something was closing in on her, boiling under the surface… slimy…gliding forth. It was not yet formed. Not yet. The heaving blanket, the long, black sole. Dirty sole, sticking out.

Jack’s thin-voiced request:
“Can I do one?”
“Of course! Go ahead and do one!”

Laura turned around and wobbled out of the room, down the windowless corridor toward her bedroom. She felt as if she was breathing through a small tube. A scene began to construct in her head, slowly filling her mind’s screen, unreal but enormously clear; a dead whale slowly sinking by as you are scuba diving.

“Mommy… Which animal am I?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“I’m gray, Mommy!”
In her head, Jack’s voice sounded dark and confident, as if he had become a grown man.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”
“And the moon never beams without bringing you screams of the werewolf puppy’s abominable spree.”

Laura’s hand instinctively flew to her throat, and she spun around. Nothing there but the well-vacuumed carpet.
“There’s no such… thing.”
“Mommy?”
Her son’s voice belonged to a small boy again.
“I think tomorrow will be an especially bad morning, Mommy.”

Laura grabbed her jacket and purse and car keys from the bedroom. She got in her car and backed out from their driveway. She drove to the town center and parked with a screech. Tumbling out, she almost collided with a curvy woman in an open winter coat and crimson lipstick despite the early hour. The woman’s surgically altered smile rested clown-like on her tan face. There was a vast area of skin-covered bone between her large breasts. She was talking on a cell phone, tilting her head, with a concerned look that seemed strangely familiar to Laura. “Do you see red? Is it like that? You just see red?”

*

The summer camp counselor had had just such a look on her face, but Laura wasn’t fooled. That big, soft body draped in flowery cloth was just a convenient cover. The counselor was cold as an icicle. Laura looked down at her dirty shoes. She didn’t remember what she said, or what the rest of that summer had been like. She just remembered maneuvering the light aluminum canoe amongst water lilies hogging the sides of the lake, making the mid-oval of water smaller for each year. She remembered letting the canoe glide, and dragging her hand in the water, collecting bundles of slimy seaweed. The muddy smell of lake water, the itch from bands of mosquito bites around her wrists and ankles and the triumph of figuring out the heat regulator in the shower. Then there was a snake in the tree outside her cabin, a huge snake with eyes like seeds, and after that there could be snakes everywhere. But she didn’t remember why, and how it felt, to get so angry. She just remembered she was. Uncontrollably, bee-stung mad.

Never mind. She must focus on her son. Jack’s dirty sole. She needed something… Laura opened the door to Wendy’s. The space looked suffering in the drab light and decoration completely forgone. A purple and green-patterned carpet and walls in the shade of salmon encompassed five fat people, eating breakfast alone. A brain-cutting remix of “Every little thing she does is magic” whined from the speakers. Laura bought a soda for sugar and found a corner.

Did life just move in circles? Did anything ever fully go away? It doesn’t help the itch to scratch. You have to… smack the mosquito? What was she doing…Her anger…Yes, she had been angry. Had attacked… Elizabeth like a wild animal and poured her out of her canoe. “The girl could have drowned!” But she didn’t. She didn’t! And when does anyone ever attack the person who deserves it? No. You attack the one you can attack. Because the person who beat you in the first place, was probably bigger.

Unless you’re part dog.

No.

Yes, Mommy. Unless you’re part dog.

The whale waves and wink. Then it’s eyes turn to crosses and it goes belly-up.

If you’re part dog, you can do all sorts of things, Mommy.

Laura saw herself walking in the woods with her son, but instead of her telling him about the flowers and trees, it was Jack who was doing the teaching: “A dog finds the rabbit cage in the dark; a human knows how to open it. A human can predict another human will grip for a weapon. A dog knows how to render a stretched out hand useless.”

Laura looked at a man leaning his large puffy torso against the wall. His skin gleamed with moist and his lips were pouty and shiny. Dirty brown hair was sticking out from underneath a tight baseball hat. His chubby white hands were holding on to the clumsy thick pant-fabric. He looked like he was in his 40s. Next to him sat his mother, solving a crossword puzzle. Her tortoise-like mouth was clamped shut in what seemed to be an eternal expression of determination. She wore her hair short and gray, and her clothes were all black. Her big paddle-shaped forearms where resting on the table. Then her son awoke and got up to use the bathroom. For a moment it looked like he would put his hand tenderly on his mother’s head, but he just hovered it over her scalp for a second.

What happens to such a duo when one of them dies? Laura wondered. What happened to one when the other can’t… But she had never been that angry again. She had changed her nature. Grown up. Moved to the suburbs.

“Oh Mommy! Have you ever felt the wet grass under your paw-pads on a glistening night? Have you ever bounced that softly? Played with the smells of humans and animals and plants and dirt? You’re alive, Mommy! Shape-shifting in the moonlight, howling to the yellow street lamps, you’re eating your own kills, Mommy! Still small ones, get them by the throat, but bigger too. Mommy? Bigger too! This is what you do. You obey your desires. Then everything makes sense.”

But Jack never lost his temper?

“And you don’t either, Mommy. But if you hide it, it must come out somewhere. If you hide it, someone else might find it. Someone else might find it and turn into a…
Jack was running ahead on the path in his blue-quilted coat, eager to reach the tree on which a squirrel had just scurried up. Little Jack, turning around to see if she was following, smiling with eyes like tight little slits: “Yellow-eyed, blood-drinking, puppy-murderer.”

Laura looked at the black-clad mother, as if she could help. The woman was no longer working on her crossword puzzle. She just stared into space with old, moist eyes.

No.

You can’t give up. You can’t. If you don’t know how to solve it, you can find ways to manage. Bad, strange and unexplainable things happens all the time. You just have to find a way deal with them. Laura felt a surge of new energy. She’d go home. Yes. She‘d go home. Go home and hide all traces. “Maybe it was also hungry.” She’d tell her husband to build a cage, a sturdy one, and make a bed in it. And then, upon each full moon, they’d just let their son go to sleep in the back of their car and drive around until morning came and nothing had happened.