Questions

By Ulf Wolf

I ask too many questions.

I've heard this all my life. So many questions, such peculiar ones, and where on earth do you get them from? Too many questions and too often. So often, in fact, that eventually they no longer heard them. In the end, they grew so tired of them, so deaf to them that I no longer bothered to ask them aloud. But I still ask them. Silently. Can't help but. They still bubble up from I don't know where, thirsty for answers, yanking my skirts and looking up at me with saucer-sized eyes, wondering why? why? why?

Yes, still as many as ever. But I keep them to myself these days.

If only the world made sense, then, I'm sure, I would not be so short of answers.

Here's one that I got answered the other day: Was I an accident? (Mom is only seventeen years older than I, which made me wonder).

Dad said (surprised I'd have to ask), "What do you think? Of course you were."

Well, thanks a lot Dad.

The world makes sense to them. Or so they say. It especially makes sense to Grandma who prays every night in her little cupboard of a room so loudly that she keeps them up, tossing and turning and swearing, Mom and Dad, two doors away. I sleep through it, though, because for a year or so when I was little and Grandma had her own place I lived with her and got acclimated to her screaming in the same room while I was sleeping on her Victorian chaise longue—just a few feet away from her, on her knees, eyes on that Jesus portrait above her bed with the straw-filled mattress—the little chaise longue which was just the right size for me: I could stretch and still not stick my feet out over the edge, and I slept quite well, thank you, while my mom and my dad were away in the big city (where the Devil made his headquarters according to Grandma) taking care of a little mishap mom had had with some man other than Dad, a little mishap that I didn't find out about until much, much later in the form of a suddenly surfacing half-brother.

Full-brother, as it turned out once some blood tests came back. ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulf Wolf
• Release date: Sep 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370552498

Ulf Wolf

Ulf is a Swedish name that once meant Wolf. So, yes, Wolf Wolf, that's me. I was born Ulf Ronnquist one snowy night in late October, in one of those northern Swedish towns that are little more than a clearing in the forest. Fast forward through twenty Swedish years, ten or so English ones, and another twenty-four in the US and you'll find me in front of an immigrations officer conducting the final citizenship interview, at the end of which he asks me, "What name would you like on your passport?" And here I recall what a friend had told me, that you can pick just about any name you want at this point, and I heard me say "Ulf Wolf." That's how it happened. Scout's honor. Of course, I had been using Ulf Wolf as a pen name for some time before this interview, but I hadn't really planned to adopt that as my official U.S. name. But I did. I have written stories all my life. Initially in Swedish, but for the last twenty or so years in English. To date I have written six novels, four novellas and two scores of stories; along with many songs and poems. My writing focus these days is on life's important questions (in my view): Who are we? What are we doing here? And how do we break out of this prison?

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