To Kill a Child

Just wanted to share one of my favorite short stories.
It is horrific, and morbid and I find it slightly disturbing that I am so drawn to it.
Perhaps it is the truth in the morbidity that I find so disturbingly fascinating.
This story has been read by almost every Swede I believe, it is by no means a hipster-obscure dusty old tale I have found.
It is however, haunting;


Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease, and only one minute before a woman screams out in horror she can close her eyes and dream of the sea, and during the last minute of that child’s life his parents can sit in a kitchen waiting for sugar, talking casually about the child’s white teeth and the rowing trip they have planned, and that child himself can close a gate and begin to cross a road, holding in his right hand a few cubes of sugar wrapped up in white paper, and for the whole of that minute he can see nothing but a clear stream with big fish and a wide-bottomed boat with silent oars.

Afterward everything is too late. Afterward there is a blue car stopped sideways in the road, and a screaming woman takes her hand from her mouth, and it’s red with blood. Afterward a man opens a car door and tries to stand on his legs, even though he has a pit of horror within him. Afterward a few sugar cubes are strewn meaninglessly about in the blood and gravel, and a child lies motionless on its stomach, its face pressed heavily against the road. Afterward two pale people, who have not yet had their coffee, come running through a gate to see a sight in the road they will never forget. Because it’s not true that time heals all wounds. Time does not heal the wounds of a dead child, and it heals very poorly the pain of a mother who forgot to buy sugar and who sent her child across the road to borrow some. And it heals just as poorly the anguish of a once cheerful man who has killed a child.

Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child
he can still feel entirely at ease..

That part has been etched in my mind since the age of twelve when I first came across this story.
How one can captivate such horror in such simplicity.. It is certainly a beautifully crafted sentence.

Read the full short story here.
Or click here for the original Swedish version.