Kalle was burdened with an intense pain located about a hand’s breadth below his right collar bone. No, there was no tumor or anything of the sort there, he had had it checked, but it was exactly there that it started to hurt whenever life got to him. A black heart pumping despair into his body.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Ebba Segerberg, Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
This was the state he strove for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its antithesis and sadness was hard to overcome. One could maintain a fairly continuous state of relative happiness if one took it easy.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Ebba Segerberg, Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
No one tells them what’s hidden in the shadows, therefore it could be anything. Most likely something horrible since no one talks about it. And they are right.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Ebba Segerberg, Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Maybe I’m not really interested in peoples’ secrets. Maybe it’s the sense of violation I’m after. That’s probably even worse.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Ebba Segerberg, Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
The membranes that separate us from insanity, from the fall, the monsters, are so thin. Only paper walls.
John Ajvide Lindqvist, trans. Ebba Segerberg, Let the Old Dreams Die: Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Someone can save you with a kiss, but refuses. Maybe that is all that Judas wanted: a kiss. When he didn’t get it, he answered in kind. Thirty pieces of silver—what were those to him? He had given his answer. Then he went and hanged himself.
John Ajvide Lindqvist and Ebba Segerberg, Itsy Bitsy: A Short Story
