Category: Fiction
The elevator is narrow but deep as a dream, with a mirrored ceiling. Six-year-old Ricardo and his mother crowd into the last available space, pressed against an elegant white woman and her daughter, who’s twisting around like a rubber band toy and whining about going home.
Definitions become ever harder, especially in the realm of sensibility. So the distinctions between, say, desire, craving, lust, passion, and words like raunch on the one hand and romance, say, on the other are hard to compartmentalize. Where does one stop and the other begin? In law? In politics? In language? In urgency? In impact? […]
6. You wake up at dawn. The worst time of day, when you miss him the most. Alack, but one hour mine. You are eager to see him again, to hear him speak to you again. To tell tales of his childhood, of your father and his mother. She was a beautiful woman, indeed, you […]
As he makes a nighttime visit to the cemetery where his grandparents are buried, a young man ponders questions which have troubled him since his childhood. He muses over the places where he sought refuge from the fuss and to-do of the world, including the imaginary garden of an imaginary friend. There was no light. […]
“You’ll end up in hell, you Antichrists,” Granny Zuzana would scold the boys whenever they did anything wrong. Putting four more buchty into the pot to steam, she’d inevitably notice that two from earlier had disappeared. “They’re lively lads,” Grandad Martin would say, smiling genially. “Antichrists like you, more like,” retorted the old woman, fired […]
We revisit a scene from Josephus Flavius’ account of what he called, in his famous history, the war of the Jews. We find ourselves with Marcus Atius, who has welcomed a party traveling with the body of Aristobulus in search of honey to preserve the corpse until it can be sent to the Jews for […]
He turned the ignition key. The concealed cameras showed him his immediate surroundings via the screen on the dashboard. The red Alfa Romeo to the left belonged to the lady next door, whom he had once quite fancied, while the Škoda on the other side meant nothing. He reversed out of their embrace without triggering […]
Gilda had closed the gate behind her and was setting off down the only street in the village to pay her visits to her elderly patients when suddenly she remembered how she and Peti Sziraki had spent the better part of one morning staring at the white hairs coming out of Uncle Titi’s ears. She […]
“… wars occasion a certain natural selection among peoples, which plays a very important role in the gradual perfection of the human race, because victory is generally won by those peoples who are physically, mentally, and morally the strongest and who stand at a higher stage of culture.” – Lajos Méhelÿ: The Biology of War […]