Author
You’ve crossed the globe to be here, yet you can’t take the last few steps. Stone fences speckled with age, salute your long shadow. The smell — musty slate roofs, moist dirt — stretches an arm and waits for you to take it. You remain motionless. Houses outlive us, you think, the paved streets too, those… Continue reading A two-beat waltz
Chen and Milo were inseparable. They slept in the same bed, had breakfast together, and watched videos when Mother allowed. Milo wasn’t good at sitting or rolling over. His best trick was lying on top of the piano for hours — all morning, the afternoon and even at night — and listening while Chen practised.… Continue reading Fantasie Impromptu
“We show the world before we’re ready for their reaction, and like a negative prematurely exposed to the light, our ideas and confidence can fade away in front of our eyes.And then the writer gives up or gets blocked and doesn’t know why.The biggest mistake writers make is not knowing which stage of the writing… Continue reading Flight lessons at Muriwai
She’s sitting alone at the second to last row of empty chairs in the dim foyer where the poetry readings are. I wonder where I’ve seen her — is she a doctor, a nurse, one of James’s therapists? Her sneakers, like the white paws of a black cat, are the single diversion from her black… Continue reading The Bard’s Wife
She sits at the bus station, still as the moment between two breaths. What do you do with yourself the morning after that single night, she thinks. What do you feel — hope, hate, regret? A crumb of leftover love? Her hands are fragile and spent. He said they were beautiful, her hands. He kissed… Continue reading a.m. story
She’s here to say goodbye. To stock up on memories and use them — as a shield, a safety rope, medicine — once she crosses the threshold of the unknown. Her feet sink into the powdered road dust. Up ahead, the red rock she used to be scared of crumbles in the sun and her… Continue reading The wish
‘Hey! Who’s there?’ ‘So, you came. I knew you would. Don’t be scared, come closer. There’s no one else.’ ‘Boss? Is that you? What do you want?’ ‘Always the control freak, aren’t you?’ ‘I’m the control freak? Meet me in the abandoned car park at ten thirty tonight. Who the hell leaves notes like that?… Continue reading Surprise!
‘The bandages would go off in a week,’ you say. I don’t know your voice yet, but I know how to trust it. It reverberates in me, in that forgotten place kept for new love. New love, at fifty-six? ‘Just rest for now, all right?’ It’s a musical voice, a baritone? No, brighter, a velvety… Continue reading First Date
Rostislava Pankova-Karadjova 