Excerpts from
Another Metamorphosis and Other Fictions
By Villy Sørensen
Another Metamorphosis
"So call him, " said one brother to another.
"Vati!" called the other - in German, although they normally spoke Danish, and the answer, a clear "ja, " was also in German. Their father was, considering his age - he must have been much older than his sons - quite agile, but also quite small, for the next moment he had clambered up one of his sons to get there. He was scarcely more than 20 or 30 centimeters tall.
"Did you tell him that he doesn´t have to go back to the nursing home anymore?" asked one brother, as if his father couldn´t hear. The other nodded and with a quick grab put his father into a lovely doll house in the middle of the table.
"If he doesn´t like it," they said, "we´ll have to call up the toy store."
And I - who was the invisible observer of this family idyll - I realized that the father had come home from the nursing home, where they had shrunk him to a manageable size, and I thought: Nowadays Kafka´s type of metamorphosis is perhaps not the common one.
From: Villy Sørensen: Another Metamorphosis and other fictions, Fjord Press, 1990
Translated by Tiina Nunnally & Steve Murray
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