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.
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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