Category: Fiction
Bottled by a Transylvanian Hungarian in English She stood with a half-emptied glass in one hand and an almost full glass in the other. A composed Chinese gentleman stepped in. He stepped out on the first floor. Ten minutes to eight and there she was, gin-and-tonicked and in love in the lobby, waiting for Zelda […]
Let me tell you about the first time I experienced love. She had red hair, black eyes, wore striped socks, and one of those shapeless, Little House on the Prairie-type dresses. Her name was Ann. She smelled like yarn and clean fabric. When I lifted Ann’s dress for the first time, I saw something else […]
The District Military Administration for Prague 6 was located right next door to the local police precinct and the district court. Across the street loomed a spacious palace, built in historicist style during the First Republic, between the First and Second World Wars, for the Ministry of Defense, which was still located there. Around the […]
Some things are clearly visible even if they take place in the middle of the night. The peak of the spire, topped with a rusty revolving rooster, affords a view of the square and the adjoining streets. The gently creaking rooster’s field of vision takes in the whole of the tranquil and unexciting town of P., located […]
In the autumn of 1944, the Russians poured across the border at Battonya, pushing out the Germans as they approached. They swallowed up our village of Gerla before rolling on toward the horrors of Budapest. The residents were terrified to death, but the village barely lost more than during peace time. Still, hardly any of […]
Not so long ago, on the way back to my birthplace, my wife and I stopped at a town in the province of Vojvodina, in northern Serbia. We were craving a Turkish coffee. We found a roadside diner on whose façade the establishment’s name was displayed in neon Cyrillic letters. It occurred to me that […]
It was midday. In the conference room, the senior lab technician turned on the radio. He turned the dial and found Bond, a station based in the east of the country. The chief midwife entered the room holding a paper bag. She sat down at the table and took out a half-liter bottle of mineral […]
The dog is barking because Roma are walking down the street. The dog can tell they’re not familiar. By smell. They’re strangers. More barking, more passing Roma. Roma are walking down the street, the man says as the couple prepares for bed. How do you know? The dog’s barking. The dog’s only doing what’s expected […]
“It’ll be great!” the teacher said, wanting to forget that morning, “it’ll be great.” She had staggered into the kitchen, not quite herself because she hadn’t yet had her first coffee. As usual, she’d been holding her phone in one hand, filling the kettle with the other, and for some reason the phone had slipped […]