The weight of the moment pressed against me. I reached with the net. The pole bent. The body sagged hard, as if the water wanted to keep the dog a little longer. I hauled it up inch by inch until it hit the tile with a heavy sound. The smell curled inside my throat.
The weight of the moment pressed against me. I reached with the net. The pole bent. The body sagged hard, as if the water wanted to keep the dog a little longer. I hauled it up inch by inch until it hit the tile with a heavy sound. The smell curled inside my throat.
We smothered the memories of flavourless meals, short showers, watered-down milk, mouldy bread, freezing nights without heating, and stuffy colds, flus or injuries without medicine, with our newfound, unbridled, six-star luxury.
I hardly ever post anything on X but I do sometimes leave a comment on someone else’s post after which I always feel a strong urge to go back and see if anyone has commented on it.
He wanted to forget her now. She had tortured him for years, seducing him with her odour and she often stank. He liked to kiss her profusely on her breasts, for he loved the smell of milk, and her armpits, though masked with perfume, were bitter.
The peddler could hardly see the path in front of him, and cursed himself for failing to buy new oil for his lantern. Twice he considered burning what he had left, but he knew these woods, and so did his horse. He was confident they’d make it through.
No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.
He didn’t recognize me, or else pretended not to see me. A neighbour who doesn’t say hello. I’m a neighbour who is see-through, perhaps completely invisible, not aware of being perfectly camouflaged.
My sister bought me a “Sucka Free” hoodie in the ‘80s when Yo! MTV Raps was hot. I wore that shirt till the hole under the right arm couldn’t be mended anymore. That was 1999, ten years after Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won the inaugural Best Rap Performance Grammy. At that time, I really believed I was sucka free …
Geoffrey pulls his hand from his pocket and withdraws the four-inch handle of a switchblade knife. Jason’s face turns ghostly. The American yells and runs out the door, causing his friend to follow. Most of the others never saw what Geoffrey showed the White man, although they laugh at the commotion it causes and applaud the result.
Horror stares back at me surreptitiously from every corner of the flat with wide-open cats’ eyes. The reflexes I had of old have become alien to me. They tempt me to provoke her, but thankfully I’m still paralysed and the only way I can wind her up is by staring at her neck.
He is not our first dead tourist. We have had copter incidents, people cutting legs on ice, avalanche victims. One lady fell down a mine shaft. The boy from the Lone Star State had just graduated high school. That’s why he was here, to celebrate the possibilities of his future.
How many times did I tell the children? We got this by a stroke of luck, and to luck it might return. Don’t fold it into the shape of a paper airplane. Don’t bet it on a game of chance or skill. Don’t draw it or dream about it.
Mom ruined her $350 wedding dress running barefoot through a cornfield. The hem gathered silky topsoil like the wind.
I got spit on while I was walking down the street, going home after a bad date with the son of a guy who wrote a book that got turned into a movie that was way more popular than the book. And a homeless guy spit on me.
For a moment, the whole pub seemed paralysed by the affront. It’s him, it’s him, he doesn’t want beer, he doesn’t want beer—the words carried from one table to the next, and the spark jumped all the way outside.
“I’m pregnant, Einstein…” Magda told him at the end of the summer. “You need to come with me and appeal to the commission…” She sat calmly in front of him as if this was something she did every other day.
It drifted along the side of the building, higher and higher, seemingly aiming to land on the flat rooftop, but then it suddenly slowed down, and plummeted onto the tiles of the balcony upside down, as though it were a dead bird.
I am here, watching on TV the President and Vice President of the United States of America run on a hamster wheel.
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into an examining room.
You must think that I am handling this poorly. My sister taught me that, too: how grief seizes us, paralyzes, renders us speechless and seemingly dumb. How in such a state, it’s best to look one’s best.
We each have a role. I am the storyteller. She is the muse. She’s Romanian. She looks like a Gypsy. A beautiful Gypsy. She says that if it gave her more cachet in the academic world, she’d gladly say she’s a Gypsy.
Everything seemed set for the trip to the Moon when the prudent Krutohlav, still lost in contemplation of the whole enterprise, imagined yet more problems that stood in his way.
Jane always drove a little drunk. She was a really good drunk driver and insisted she’s even better at driving when a little drunk. I wasn’t worried — she’s never been caught or close to an accident. But tonight she was off.
I asked her if it was strange that sometimes he’d rub and stroke my almost sunburned unshirted shoulders, tousle my hair, offer me a drag off his smoke, and then tell me a dirty joke, or a story about eating pussy. I asked her if this was something that should concern me.
An elderly ex colonel walking stiffly past me in the opposite direction takes the time to come carefully to a halt and explain to me how hundreds of years ago the villagers here destroyed the fish trap a landowner had built upriver to stop their supply of free fish.
Let’s pretend it wasn’t fleeing but instead the curiosity of a flame. A month in Mexico, the details lost but for a few memories, mementos. The copper bowl, purchased from a woman kneeling by the side of a road. A milky looking scar, thread thin, drawn into the muscle of your shoulder.
I was born a feral beast.
At the time of my birth, I tore my mother apart. It wasn’t on purpose. I think the circumstances caused it. There was a lot of blood in the hospital room.
My father, who gutted animals as part of his occupation, couldn’t bear to look.
He needed two dark beers and two shots of liquor to quiet the horror inside him.
This Radha, unlike the one I spend most of my waking life with, drives a car with impeccable accuracy, almost as if she has eyes at the back of her head. This Radha, though cold and calculating, has been having sex with many men behind my back.
The screaming could be heard in the outside corridor, someone had moved house out of me, never to return.
When Jack Mendenhall returns from Vietnam, Wendy thinks she is interested. She likes tough boys with swagger, dirty mouths, and nasty imaginations.
We drove through the dark landscape. We wanted to get there before darkness fell, but dusk was already spreading over the area—earlier here than elsewhere.
The benefits of stone skipping have already made a profound effect on my writing. I’ve been able to challenge myself and grow as a writer in ways that I had not been able to before I took up stone skipping.
And lifting his eyes from the book, he saw on the threshold of the open door the tall thin figure of the wayfarer with the tangled white beard, the clear blue eyes sunken in their sockets, the long weather-beaten bluish caftan.
How nice it was not knowing anything, except that what you were doing was important. To know that your daily actions contained some kind of hidden power. They believed that their work would contribute to the unified, inescapable, and impending victory.
My body is a shallow mound, is how her most famous poem began. She had written it when she was the same age as the young man who was sitting opposite her now, wanting to interview her.
Christian Dior, in his Little Dictionary of Fashion maintains that “if you have a particularly outstanding feature it is always a good thing to emphasise it. In fact the whole of fashion rests largely on emphasis.”
The teacher swung his arm to strike her once more, but it remained in mid-air, as if petrified. A blue children’s watch was engraved on his skin. And with every tick the clasp sank deeper into his flesh. They could not get it off without cutting.
It contained the body of a roughly four-year-old boy. That in itself is astounding, since we’re talking about a time frame of about twenty-four thousand years ago …
I discovered a lot of secrets, a lot of combinations, dark, political, religious, ideological, personal, to do with chess; spying, double and triple secret agents from all camps, secret police involved in dirty activities.
One of those things most difficult to convey about the special conditions in which we lived was the visegradišag: that everything, buying bread, recycling, riding the tram, came with a surreal associated cost that was impossible to anticipate …
For a moment, she wondered where all dead birds go when they die, which probably happens every minute of every hour, so really, birds should be falling from the sky not just from time to time, but raining down constantly …
A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl.
Vratislav Kadlec’s short story collection Hranice lesa (The Forest Boundary), from which this piece was taken, received the Magnesia Litera Award.
Paweł Sołtys is a Polish writer as well as a musician, singer and songwriter also known under his stage name, Pablopavo.
Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His debut chapbook of flash fiction is Tiny Universes.
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