The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

appeared from a colourless sky and invaded the fields, gardens and lawns of Romerike like an
armada from outer space.
Mathias was sitting alone in his mother’s Toyota Corolla in front of a house in Kolloveien. He had
no idea what his mother was doing inside the house. She had said it wouldn’t take long. But it had
already taken a long time. She had left the key in the ignition and the car radio was playing ‘Under
snø’, by the new girl group, Dollie. He kicked open the car door and went out. Because of the snow
an almost unnatural silence had settled over the houses. He bent down, picked up a handful of the
sticky white stuff and cupped it into a snowball.
Today they had thrown snowballs at him in the school playground and called him ‘Mathias No-
Nips’, his so-called classmates in 7A. He hated secondary school, hated being thirteen years old. It
had begun after the first gym lesson when they found out he didn’t have any nipples. According to
the doctor, it could have been hereditary, and he had been tested for a number of illnesses. Mum
had told him and Dad that her father, who died when Mum was small, didn’t have any nipples,
either. But looking through one of his grandmother’s photo albums Mathias had found a picture of
his grandfather during the mowing season in trousers and braces with a bare chest. And he
definitely had nipples then.
Mathias packed the snowball harder between his hands. He wanted to throw it at someone. Hard. So
hard that it hurt. But there was no one to launch it at. He could make someone to throw it at. He
placed the packed snowball in the snow beside the garage. Started rolling it. The snow crystals
hooked into each other. After doing a circuit of the lawn, it already reached his stomach, and left a
trail of brown grass. He continued to roll it. When he couldn’t push it any further, he started a new
one. It was big, too. He just managed to lift it up onto the first one. Then he made a head, climbed
up and placed it on top. The snowman stood by one of the windows in the house. Sounds were
coming out. He broke a couple of twigs off the apple tree and stuck them in the snowman’s sides.
Dug up some gravel by the front steps, shinned up again and made two eyes and a line of pebbles
for a smile. Then he placed his thighs around the snowman’s head, and sitting on the snowman’s
shoulders looked through the window.
In the illuminated room stood a man with a bare chest thrusting his hips backwards and forwards
with his eyes closed, as if he were dancing. From the bed in front of him protruded a pair of spread
legs. Mathias couldn’t see, but he knew that it was Sara. That it was his mother. That they were
bonking.
Mathias tightened his thighs around the snow head, felt the cold in his crotch. He was unable to
breathe; a steel wire seemed to tauten around his throat.
Again and again the man’s hips banged against his mother. Mathias stared inside at the man’s chest
as the cold numbness spread from his crotch to his stomach and up until it reached his head. The
man was thrusting his willy inside her. As they did in the magazines. Soon the man would be
spraying sperm inside his mother. And the man didn’t have any nipples.
Suddenly the man stopped. His eyes were open now. And they were looking at Mathias.
Mathias loosened his grip, slid down the back of the snowman, curled up and sat as quiet as a
mouse, waiting. His mind was reeling. He was a smart boy, intelligent, he’d always been told that.
Strange, but with excellent mental faculties, the teachers had said. Thus all his thoughts were falling
into place now, like pieces of a jigsaw he had been doing for a long time. But the picture that
emerged was still incomprehensible, intolerable. It couldn’t be right. It had to be right.