Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) by Dorthe Nors Page B

has drifted halfway up onto the shore. The golden retriever has a secret urge to roll around in carcasses, preferably those of birds or mice, but how is it to tell the difference? I can picture it, and I can imagine its owner at the moment the realization kicks in. I imagine he remembers the moment the suitcase was opened whenever he is getting ready to take a trip, and likely even the dog was never the same again.
    Things are contagious. Things want to get in through the cracks. That’s the way they are, and I know from a former colleague of mine that the woman was killed and dismembered in an apartment in the Vesterbro district and that the girl who lived in the apartment downstairs and who was studying veterinary science moved out not long afterward, even though her upstairs neighbor had been apprehended and sentenced for the murder. Who could blame her? She probably kept thinking about all the times she had passed him on the stairs. Most likely she felt the building was contaminated and even the slightest sound reminded her of the night she heard something going on upstairs. But something is always going on in the night, there are always smells and sounds: pigeons rustling in the attic, creatures on the move, and the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens can sometimes be seen, looking like gray poultry shears in the sky over Valby. The heron is an awkward bird in flight, and the Heron Man on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion would do well to tell the herons so, seeing as how he’s always babbling away at them like that.
    Although my apartment is on Frederiksberg Avenue I willingly walk the extra distance to Damhus Pond to escape the gathering of birds, and as for dismembered bodies I’ve walked around the pond most of my life without ever finding one myself. When I was a child, my friends and I would run around the pond because our physical-education teachers at Vigerslev Allé School told us to do so. I still see children who look like me and my best friend, the dentist’s son, Lorenz, running around the pond. Whenever a tall, skinny boy runs past me, I picture Lorenz racing to come in first. I tend to stop and smile when I see kids running around the pond like that. But after going around it myself I no longer want to stop and smile at anyone, certainly not the young women with their stony faces and big baby carriages. They always come in flocks, great flocks of mothers, and they stir up bad feelings in one another, so none of them will even look at you when you walk past.
    I step aside into the grass, thinking about the dog, the suitcase, the body, and how the veterinary student lost her swagger overnight, and how it doesn’t take a doctorate to have kids. I have known hopeless individuals to have children. It doesn’t require much more than a certain degree of sexual excitement, at least in the male, and at any rate it’s not the women with the baby carriages who are in charge of the biology of it. If anyone is in charge of the biology it’s God, but they probably made Him step aside, too. No one at the age of those mothers believes she needs eternal life, and even the concept of giving way to oncoming traffic seems unreasonable. But it’s important to me, and sometimes when those mothers have passed by I look back at them and wonder what it would be like if they swelled up. They’d begin to expand, and eventually they’d expand so much that they could no longer keep themselves together, and then I picture them exploding: shreds of flesh in the trees and along the shore, blood spattering on the swans, the ducks, and the coots floundering in the grass. There’s a rustling in the grass, the kind that makes dogs want to roll on the banks. I hear the rustle, and I hear the babies screaming in their carriages. I picture Lorenz skating through the mud, racing on around the pond on his pale, thin legs, long since dead, eaten up from within by sick-cell divisions, cremated and interred into the ground, while I