Sorrenson sat in his car and ate his Kentucky Fried Chicken.  No one cared if he parked it in the fire zone.  He was the first one to see a fire and run to the pay phone and call it in.  He didn't see his son even if he drove over to the school to watch him get off the bus.  His mother must have driven him in to the back door.
     He called his mother everyday and told her that he was glad to be alone.  He liked being alone in his Chevrolet and he almost never had to keep the car running since all he did was plug in the electric blanket. He took up jogging again.  He still stopped and talked to girls, but he had lost the look of having a million dollars.  The truth was that he never had a million dollars, but he always looked like he might have.  Now, there was no chance.  He was no longer thirty-one.  He was thirty-seven and he smelled.  No matter how many times he went to the Y, he couldn't get the smell off of him.

fourth post

     "How long do you expect me to put up with this?" Mrs. Sorrenson already had packed her bags and was about to get into the cab.  Sam was in the back seat.  Sorrenson reached out for him, but the boy turned away.  It was raining and Sorrenson thought that he might start to cry.
     "Put up with what?" Sorrenson said.  "What have I done?"  Her face looked like the citizens of the moral majority that he had seen once in a dream if only a little more familiar.
     "You've fucked every woman in town," she said.
     As the cab sped away, he felt a sense of satisfaction.  She was right: he had.

post 3; read third

Sorrenson was decent enough to ask if it was a good idea for Sam's teacher to have a fling with him.
     "I'm dumping you next week," she joked.  "Besides, you're so good-looking.  I like old guys.  I must have a father complex."
     Sorrenson got a jolt of adrenalin whenever he got a woman into bed.  It was easy; any man who had tried it knew that, but it was thrilling too to look into a woman's eyes and knew that she was giving herself to you if only for that hour.
     The teacher made them coffee after and he stayed in bed and drank it, modestly pulling the sheets close to him in a way that made her laugh.
     "I can see why you're a good teacher," he said.
     "Why?" she said.
     "Your laugh," he said it like it was obvious.
     What he meant was her tits although they would be wasted on weaned children, of course.  She held him close.  It was just like having a five-year-old, having a mistress and next week, when she dumped him, he'd get another.
     

     It was what Sorrenson found most frightening when he pictured the afterlife.  What would he do without a body?  He didn't think he was going to heaven, but who knew?  His religious leader didn't know anything more than his kindergarten teacher did.  Probably less since he actually listened to his kindergarten teacher, weighing everything she said and seeing that she meant it when she said they were going to have a nap.  He spent most of the naps watching her, but of course she didn't nap.  Why not?  He wasn't even tired.  Lutherans didn't cremate their dead.  It was better to leave them in the ground and walk over them.  Sorrenson loved the Jewish tradition of burying their own dead, but he preferred to be turned back into ash.  Plus the fact that it is indeed difficult to do except for the Nazis who managed it with amazing efficiency.  So he wanted to go to the afterlife- if there was one- without a body, figuring he could float above the others, still possessed of all his senses.  Also an impossibility.
     Most of the women that he slept with were known to his wife, but not as his mistresses.  One was his son's teacher.  She of the perfect breasts.
     "I'm twenty-eight," she told him.

Chapter one

"You might as well get used to it," Mr. Sorrenson was pontificating in his wife's eighth month of pregnancy, "no kid of yours is going to be any good."
     He went to the kitchen and drank as many king cans of beer as he could hold before he came back into the living room to deal with the wife he had made cry.  She looked like a beached whale, but even he knew better than to say so.
     "I'm sorry," he said.  He kissed her tears away.  She lay back with her arms spread like Jesus Christ.
     "I wish I could have the bloody kid now," she said.  In her dreams, she played beach volleyball and her stomach was flat.  Young men watched her tits bounce.  She shielded her eyes from the bright sun and drank cold beer.  "I'm dying for a beer," she said.
     "I had one for you," Mr. Sorrenson told his wife.  He wished that she could have the kid now too, so that one day he could play ball with him.  Before he decided that his old man was too uncool to have anything to do with.  Mr. Sorrenson had never meant to make himself a father.  Mrs. Sorrenson told him about the pregnancy five weeks later and he said he was pleased about it.
     "He may see the future or may see the business end of a Baretta,"he said.  "It's like forever going through life with your heart outside of your body."
     He was Danish and prone to depression.  The vast majority of Danes practiced Lutheranism which was the belief that God loved you, but He was busy right now so couldn't you take care of it yourself?  What the world didn't need was more Danes.  Of that Sorrenson was convinced.
     The boy was born and loved them more than their God ever had.  And he expected the same in return.  Mr. Sorrenson found that he could not do it.  He wanted the boy to stop loving him, at some point.  What did the boy want, after all?  Sorrenson was at a loss when the boy cried when he got drunk and fell down on the chesterfield.  The boy had taken off his construction boots and put them on the stove top so that the plastic melted down to the steel plates.
     There was more.  The boy had his own hunger.  One day his wife said:
     "Look, dear," and she pulled back her shawl to reveal the baby latched on to her nipple.  "I think he likes me."
     Mr. Sorrenson found nothing natural in this scene and replaced the blanket.
     By the time the boy was five, Sorrenson had taken up jogging, slowing down whenever he saw a beauty that he wanted to talk to.  He and his wife had a sexless marriage and he was forever looking for sex from younger women.
     "I'm Danish," he explained, but no matter how many women gave him blank looks, he continued to say it.
     "You're a danish," one woman said.  Her breasts were so perfect.  Gravity hadn't dragged them down at all.  "I love danishes."
     "I'm Sam," he said.  He almost had to stop running to get down to her pace, but her ass was too good to pass up.
     "I only took up jogging so that I could meet you," she said, or at least he thought she said it.  He'd been hearing things lately.  Like his wife saying that she wanted a divorce.  Or that she was dead and he wouldn't have to pay alimony until the unlikely event that she remarried.
     "What?" he said.  He tried to focus on her.  Her eyes were light blue, like the Aegean Sea, though she might have been Swedish.
     "I only took up jogging so that I could meet you," she said again.  This time she blushed.
     Sorrenson's boy was named Steve.  He was in grade one.  In his dreams, Sorrenson saw his wife take him away, laughing all the way to the bank.  Her lawyer recounted each one of his affairs for a jury composed only of their neighbors.  The list was read for ten minutes.  He was calling out in his dream: "but one day, I'll be dead, and there'll be no more sex to have."  The jury didn't find this funny or sympathetic.  They appeared to be moral majority types and evidently thought infidelity best solved with stoning.