Amy Madson
June 27, 2025
No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.
Menu
No one knows how much the silverware drawer matters. It rattles in Leah’s mind if it’s left unorganized. She checks it often.
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.
THIRD MARRIAGE I was not invited to my father’s third marriage, but they saved me some cake, and the bride’s aunt gave me a knitted
THREE IN THE AFTERNOON I told him to meet me at three in the afternoon, a good and sensible hour. When he finally arrived, it
THE MOVEMENT Today is the first Wednesday of the month, open-door day. I show the visitors around—women, married couples, and men (more and more older
COMPANION SPECIES Every day down the same road toward Jinja Town the dog rides next to the aid worker in the company Land Rover. Sometimes
UTBURDUR Carol’s husband, Charlie, had pneumonia, but still insisted they go out and rake leaves. Charlie had always been mulish, but in old age, it
BLIND MAN (an excerpt) Thanks to the automatic system of the old days, I had been registered as a member of the Association of the
MOTH I was reborn as a moth and knew instantly that I didn’t have much time. You don’t think you’ll feel the lifespan, but you
WORLD CREATION RECIPES From Paris to Siberia, across the whole 20th century (an excerpt) 1. I want to talk about the young lady in
When the dogs had finished their business, they were, for quite some time afterward, unable to disentangle, and the Abbot asked us not to disturb them.
In the evenings Karcsi sat quietly at the table and watched his mother pray. Her lips moved silently through the rosary, and he looked as if he were trying to figure out which part of the prayer she was saying.
After the disaster, all our fears subsided, for everything was now destroyed
Life is so afflicted by clarity and definition these days that the sensations of mystery and beauty I associated with the mist are even more precious to me.
THE OLD MAN AND THE CAT There’s a square on the edge of a busy town. People go there in the late afternoon to sit
SCIENCE Picture the screen of a black and white television glowing in the corner of a dark room. A man’s face in close up.
MY BUTTON EYES I have a big head. My face is flat and doesn’t have cheeks. I have button eyes. I cannot stand on
UNTO THE THIRD GENERATION Under the grey sky, a grey village. Everything is grey: dirty snow in an empty yard, the walls of
Signs (an excerpt) On August 29th, 1646, 120 years after the Battle of Mohács, peasant Juraj Mitana was born, and on the same
A LION IN THE FOREST A forest of beech trees in late April is as neat and tidy as a newly unwrapped present. Fresh tufts
LEGEND 1. During a group therapy session for the emotionally disturbed he said that every spring, when the swallows return from the south, he
SETTING FREE I’m sitting in a gutted armchair in the middle of our dimly lit front hall, biding time. When I’m still, I
REBI I am still half-asleep in the early hours when I hear sirens approaching the farm and it occurs to me that it’s
BILLIARDS AT THE HOTEL DOBRAY (an excerpt) Billiards at the Hotel Dobray A novel by Dušan Šarotar Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau
HONEY, I KILLED THE CATS (an excerpt) Honey, I Killed The Cats A novel by Dorota Masłowska Translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff
THE QUEEN AND HER SECRET Through the narrow opening of the door that was ajar, Gina noticed the bluish eye, the arched eyebrow,
FASHION AND FRIENDS The two of you stand in front of the fitting room, he has a pair of trousers in each hand
NEW YEAR’S DAY I’ve never spent a New Year’s Eve like this before. Without going out. Just lying under the comforter without having the
MY GRANDFATHER’S MEMORY My grandfather invented a famous memory. It was the result of long years of hard struggle and more than a little
SINGER IN THE NIGHT (an excerpt) Singer in the Night A novel by Olja Savičević Translated from the Croatian by Celia
DOGS AND OTHERS (An excerpt) Dogs and Others A novel by Biljana Jovanović Translated from the Serbian by John K. Cox Published
Rushian Clashics (an excerpt) Introduction I first encountered Rushian clashics five years ago, at a time when much less was being written
CATECHISM Samuel scanned the café, barely aware of its coffee aroma. His facial analysis software said everyone was full-bred white, straight, and gender
DOPPELGÄNGER (an excerpt) Doppelgänger A novel by Daša Drndić Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis Published by Istros Books It is
THE BLUE CIRCLE COLLECTOR It was a Wednesday when a pot bellied mustached man with beady eyes walked into the Registry Office 3
THE EGAN RABBIT Meander Casey leaned against the side of The Egan Rabbit, a downtown warehouse converted into a space for small shows
THE RETURN OF THE KING OF THE BOHEMIAN FOREST (an excerpt) CHARLES ECKERT stands by an open window in the office of the
FLEETING SNOW (an excerpt) Fleeting Snow A novel by Pavel Vilikovský Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood Published by
TERMINUS There was one day that Ashok was caught in a bind, the last time he had taken a train in India. He’d
SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS (an excerpt) Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals A novel by J. R. Pick
MOSCOW II. Read part one of Moscow here I’m sitting on the toilet staring at the pink bathroom. The reason it’s pink
DJELEM DJELEM MALEM Malem carried his axe door to door, cutting firewood every fall. They say he never parted from it, not even
PLACES THAT ARE NOT ON THE MAP (an excerpt) The clock dial on a shelf above the table showed 8:30pm, but it
SHOULDER BIRD This new patient was an eccentric, there was no question. She was nuts, but in a pleasant way. Her nuttiness involved
THE 8TH DISTRICT OF GOD (excerpts) The location is the outer 8th district of Budapest, which is called Józsefváros (Josephtown). This is
MOSCOW I. Read part two of Moscow here “Do you know anything about her?” I ask the friend of my little sister
THE SCENT OF PERFECTION In which the Book is introduced to the reader, some sacred texts are discussed, and there begins the story
With the leftover beer I washed down two pills. I took Xanax to help me sleep. The first few weeks it worked, but as time passed, I had to take more and more.
PAPER PLANES The writer bought a literary magazine, leafed through it, and was gratified: he hadn’t submitted anything and none of his work had
BANNER As usual, John Gozdzik, manager of the bus station in Slonim, did not have too much to do in his office around
THREE PLASTIC ROOMS (an excerpt) Three Plastic Rooms A novel by Petra Hůlová Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker Published by
COMING HOME 05:05 am. My eyes open. A faint pearly blade of light squeezing past the blind. The distant metallic scrape of a
FOX SEASON Fox Season and Other Short Stories Short Stories by Agnieszka Dale Published by Jantar Publishing Permission to Bow Like all
FEBO WAITED FOR A PENCIL Febo could not have realized the truth that accompanied his words or that went out before them like
CHILDREN OF OUR AGE (an excerpt) Children of Our Age A novel by A.M. Bakalar Published by Jantar Publishing There
THE HOUSE OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING (an excerpt) The House of Remembering and Forgetting A novel by Filip David Translated from the
THE TRAGIC FATE OF MORITZ TOTH (an excerpt) The Tragic Fate of Moritz Toth A novel by Dana Todorović Translated from the
FEAR AND HIS SERVANT Fear and his Servant A novel by Mirjana Novaković Translated from the Serbian by Terence McEneny Published by
Ever read The Lord of the Rings? I knew it! You look like a reader, you have that kind of face. … So alright, then, listen to my story all the way through, and you’ll catch on. You’ll understand that I couldn’t have done any different.
THE GOOD COUPLE We are aware the ugly sounds coming from us may be overheard by the good couple next door. There is
© 2025 | B O D Y | bodyliterature.com
