/lit/ - Literature

>>5161472

There's this book of Icelandic short stories, from various contemporary authors, (from around the '40s and '50s). Edited by an Evelyn Scherabon Firchow. (pictured is all I can ever dig up) I checked it out of a library a couple of times, photocopied this one story, (but have since lost that), loved several of the other tales.
Here's the one that stands out in my mind...

On a dark and stormy winters night we're shown a little house somewhere along the shore, where a pregnant widower and an old midwife holed up. Through the narration we learn the pregnant girl's husband had died at sea. The old woman's talk of mortality were of no comfort to the poor woman. Then they hear a voice outside the shuttered window, howling in pain from the cold sea storm. They both go outside and manage to drag the poor creature inside. who seems unconscious.

We cut away in the story to show just how this found himself outside their window. Turns out he's an angle, and he's paying penance for some sort of mischief, by walking the earth, exposed to the elements and wingless. There's some other contrived condition for his reinstatement where he will grant the wish of someone who pays him some kindness without his asking. Cut back to the cabin and after waking up, the cherub gets the pregnant woman to make a wish. Cut back in heaven he gets his wings back and all seems well, but a rival angel asks what wish did he grant this woman.

The woman asked for her child to be, in the face of all the worlds pains and hardships, to be happy. This caused something of a commotion with all the other angles.