Minta

an Art of Dying fragment

As a rule, people do not believe that trolls exist.

Well, I do, I know they exist; for I have two mothers, Lisbet, my flesh and blood mom and Minta, my troll ditto. They were both there at my birth, my mom Lisbet in pain, my troll mom Minta not in the least.

When Lisbet clung the newly minted me to her breast and cried a little, partly from relief that the ordeal was over but mostly from happiness that I had arrived unscathed, Minta stood to the side smiling from troll-ear to troll-ear. At one point, Lisbet thought she glimpsed something shifting by her bed, as if the light reflected on the air itself, something rather large but friendly (is how she put it to me later on, when, as old then as I am now, she told me this and that and the other from her child- and young-woman-hood).

It is a matter of wavelength. Trolls have, by necessity, become very, very good at hiding; in fact, they have learned how to vanish at will. By vanish, I don’t mean cease to be in any one location but cease to be observable to any one set of creatures. Think dog whistles. Blow all you want and your kids won’t hear it. Your dog(s) will though, every time.

All remaining trolls (at least those I know of — those in Northern Sweden) can shift out of the human visual spectrum, so to speak. A sparrow could still see it, and definitely an…