Fiction by Per Petterson, Howard Norman, Susan Perabo, and Magda Szabó

~
Day was slowly breaking.  I had been standing there for more than two hours and hadn't had a single bite.  It annoyed me, but frankly, fish wasn't my favourite dish any more.  Not like it was in the past.  The fish I did catch, I always gave away.  
        As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away.  I hadn't even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars.  I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me.  I'd had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.
        I tied the bait rig to the railing, turned round and crouched down to take a cigarette from the pack I had in my bag.  I really ought to stop smoking, I had started to cough in the mornings, it was a bad sign, and then a car stopped right in front of me with the window on the driver's side level with my face.  I had the cigarette between my lips, and as I stood up, I lit it with a match behind my cupped hand.  I always used matches, I didn't like that plastic.
        It was a grey Mercedes, brand new, and the paintwork was shiny as skin can be shiny at certain times, in certain situations.  Then the window slid down without a sound.
        'It's Jim, isn't it,' he said.
        I knew him at once.  It was Tommy.  His hair had thinned and was greying.  But the horizontal scar above his left eye was still evident, white, luminous silver.  He was wearing a purple coat buttoned to the throat.  It didn't look cheap.  He was the same, and yet he looked like Jon Voigt in Enemy of the State.  Leather gloves.  Blue eyes.  Slightly out of focus.  
        'I guess it is,' I said.
        'Well, I'll be damned.  How long has it been.  Twenty-five years.  Thirty.'  And I said: 
        'About that.  A bit more.'
        He smiled.  'We each went our separate ways that time, didn't we.'  He said it neither this nor that way.
        'That's true,' I said.  He smiled, he was happy to see me, or so it seemed.  
--From I Refuse, a novel by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Graywolf Press, 2015). First published in Norwegian as Jeg nekter (Forlaget Oktober: Oslo, Norway, 2012).  First published in English in London, England (Harvill Secker, Random House, 2014).

My name is Fabian Vas.  I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland.  You would not have heard of me.  Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though; I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it.  Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself.
         I discovered my gift for drawing and painting birds early on.  I should better say that my mother saw that someone had filled in the margins of my third-form primer with the sketches of wings, talons, and heads of local birds.  "I though this primer was brand-new," she said.  "But it's full of these bird drawings.  Well, somebody has talent."  After a night's sleep she realized that the pencil work was mine and was what I had been concentrating on during my school lessons.  Actually she seemed quite pleased, and at breakfast the following morning said, "Awfully nice to learn something so unmistakable about one's offspring."  She tore out a page full of heads of gulls and ospreys, wrote, "October 28, 1900," on it, and nailed it to the kitchen door. 
--From The Bird Artist, a novel by Howard Norman (hardcover was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994; softcover by Picador, 1995).

My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking. She had dodged the bullet of lung cancer after all, she triumphantly announced to me on the phone that summer afternoon. All those years my brothers and I had hassled her, lectured her, begged her, berated her (“Don’t you want to see your grandchildren graduate from college?”)—and for what? Her lungs were fine!
--From Why They Run the Way They Do, a short story collection by Susan Perabo (Simon & Schuster, 2016).  This excerpt is from "Indulgence," pp. 155-171 in the paperback version of the book.  "Indulgence," a short story by Susan Perabo, was first published in One Story, Issue Number 178 (May 3, 2013).

I seldom dream.  When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat.  Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night's spell.  As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through.  In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.
        My dreams are always the same, down to the finest detail, a vision that returns again and again.  In this never-changing dream I am standing in our entrance hall at the foot of the stairs, facing the steel frame and reinforced shatterproof window of the outer door, and I am struggling to turn the lock.  Outside in the street is an ambulance.  Through the glass I can make out the shimmering silhouettes of the paramedics, distorted to unnatural size, their swollen faces haloed like moons.  The key turns, but my efforts are in vain: I cannot open the door.  But I must let the rescuers in, or they'll be too late to save my patient.
--From The Door, a novel by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix (New York Review Books, 2015).  It was originally published in Hungarian as Az ajtó (Magvető, 1987); this English translation was first published in Great Britain (Harvill Secker, 2005).