Free Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo Page B

the stone, because I’d taken it outside and put it with the other stones. Pentti’s got hundreds of magazines piled on the floor of the closet, and he regularly buys new ones without ever looking at the old ones. If I hide mine among them, right at the bottom, he’ll surely never find it. And if he does, he may think he bought it himself. Pentti doesn’t always remember everything he’s done.
I go to the closet and start carefully lifting one of the stacks of magazines. I’m taking care to keep them in the same order. Allthe covers have women on them. My hand falls on one that has a little yellow sticker on the cover, where Pentti’s written something. The cover also shows two dark-skinned women. Filipino women. They’re hugging each other like sisters, but they aren’t looking at each other; they’re looking out of the magazine and pouting their lips. Another sticker is poking out between the pages. I open there. There’s a lot of print, and the pictures are totally different from the usual ones, small, some black and white and a little unclear. They all show a woman. Beside the pictures, there are words I know, and Manila comes up often.
Three of the pictures have been encircled with blue ink. In one of them there’s me.
I recognize myself, though the photo’s poor, and I smile though it doesn’t amuse me at all. Enteng took the photo in the bar at Ermita soon after it had become clear to me I would not become a nurse.
I close the magazine and put it carefully back in its own place then stack the rest on top of mine.

ANGEL
    I wake in the night.
He’s sitting on the sofa-back looking at me.
He’s a silhouette, black as night against the slightly lighter background, and I’m seared by a tense and excruciating awareness that I’m completely at his mercy.
His eyes. The eyes of a night creature.
He sees me clearly and keenly regardless of the dark, perceives every eye-blink, every swallow of my mouth, while all I can take in are his black, black outlines.

ECKE
    Odd how there can be cities and cities. Cities within cities. The dogs’ city is built up of smells. For dogs, the limits of a city block are drawn by different aromas of piss, and each smell’s like a cloth fluttering in the wind or a block-long cartoon balloon: “Fido was here about a day and night ago.” Or it shouts out loud: “A YOUNGISH MALE HUMAN JUST WENT BY HERE CARRYING SOME SMOKED HAM.” The air’s thick with these signals, but the dog reads them as fluently and extemporaneously as a human processing the cacophony of photons from all the colors and shapes and shifts of light.
Then there are different people’s cities. There’s the city of a certain kind of woman, who judges a street by the kinds of shops there are, the classiness of the fashion shops, the perfumeries, jewelers, shoe stores. An alcoholic’s city, on the other hand, consists of pubs, sausage stands, liquor stores, alleys where you can piss without being picked up for indecent behavior, other drunks’ pads where you can scrounge the price of a drink or a bed for the night. And he doesn’t even notice the designer boutique because it’s got no function for him, just as the fashionable lady doesn’t see that sleazy dive—it doesn’t exist for her. She knows a certain street corner well because of a coffee shop she sometimes drops into, for a cappuccino and a fancy cake. The bus driver’s city is a mass ofroutes, stops, traffic lights, hills, and of corners that look completely insignificant, except that their dark magic lies in their trickiness under certain winter conditions. There are terminuses every inch of which are familiar and meaningful because he’s loafed about there, cigarette in mouth, waiting for his time to go back. He even knows every squirrel in the trees, too, though the casual passerby sees nothing but a bit of broader road worn down by heavy wheels.
Our city’s unique, but with a slightly different nuance for each of us. In a little town like