from Texas Rose

1.
The dwarf ran right past me when I opened the door to my Aunt Lillian’s apartment, she laughed when she saw me, she pointed at me and laughed and laughed, she simply couldn’t stop. Her skin wrinkled like a boiled chicken and the stumps of her teeth were sixes and sevens in her mouth. The hump on her back resembled a rugged hilltop. As she ran her knees almost reached her chin as if she were hurdling over some high obstacle. Like the letter ”L” turned on its head, she went around beating the carpets and dusting the china horses that stood on the floor. One of the horses was wrapped up in painter’s tape. There were squiggles on the tape. It looked like the work of a child, but my aunt and uncle never had children. It’s no lie to say they did everything they could to have a child, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, acupuncture and the temperature method. They tried the multiple vitamin cures and ate royal jelly and iodine from fresh Pacific Ocean algae, and my Aunt Lillian always had her legs propped up on some piece of furniture to keep the sperm inside her.

My Aunt Lillian believed their infertility had been caused by my Uncle Jimmy having worn too tight pants in the seventies. My grandfather Eigil, though, had another opinion. I once heard him say that my Uncle Jimmy had very likely been unable to find the hole between all my Aunt Lillian’s layers of flesh, one couldn’t see what was up or down on her body, the neck could just as well have been one of the thighs. He’d probably pumped away somewhere between two of the lower rolls of stomach fat thinking he’d found the right place.

(read more in Absinthe 11)

Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy

© Dy Plambeck

Dy Plambeck was born in 1980. She received acclaim for her 2005 collection Buresøfortællinger (Tales from Bure Lake), for which she was awarded a Danish Academy Prize in 2006. She went to the Danish Writer’s School and received the coveted Danish Art Council’s three year scholarship. Her second book, the novel Texas Rose, has been nominated for two literary prizes and translated into Swedish. In 2008 she published the children’s book The Hill of Dreams. In addition, she has written songs, plays for radio, and an operetta.