Traveller_Levin's Blog

A Raven on the Snow

by Patricio Pron translated by Kathleen Heil

That winter the city was full of ravens. They usually gathered in the parks, where they could be found in little groups of three or four, inspecting their surroundings with a wicked stare. If they noticed something shiny in the snow—a wrapper or a scrap of paper—they'd land on it, grabbing it with their beaks, and then spit it out in contempt. Sometimes the ravens would fight over the object, thereby sharing the confusion and disappointment their find created. Then, still united in some way by their defeat, they'd move away from each other slightly before going after the object again with little hops that were both ridiculous and threatening.

He became obsessed with the ravens as soon as he noticed them on the campus of the university he attended. Around town, people were speculating as to why the ravens—which normally arrive in the summer—had arrived so early, and he began taking part in these discussions, usually by pretending to be a disinterested bystander, enjoying his beer while eavesdropping on the polemicists at the bar, or by acting as if he were evaluating the quality of a certain pencil in a store in order to overhear the employees' conversations, but sometimes he'd also speak up, as if he—who came from a city with no ravens at all, from a country in which ravens were only mythical creatures like Simurgh or the bird who told the tale of the end of the world—had something to say about the matter. He'd lean forward on the table—as though this afforded him some kind of authority, or were a necessary requirement in order to be better understood, like those insufferable speakers who spend the whole time clearing their throats—and would explain his findings, which were generally limited to things that his audience, having grown up in a city with ravens, already knew; but he, with the innocence of someone who finds everything about his surroundings unfamiliar (the innocence of the ethnologist who can only comprehend that which he names), considered these remarks revelatory and crucial.

In the weeks following the ravens' arrival he neglected his schoolwork in order to spend more time observing them. He'd sit in a park wearing a coat over every sweater he owned, taking notes while studying the birds' movements. Sometimes when one got too close he'd kick the air in a way that, inevitably, didn't scare the bird at all; with a hop, it would move away a few steps, resuming its watch after a reasonable interval. His notebook was full of entries, but they were practically illegible since he wrote with his gloves on and shivered the whole time.

The Third Bank of the River

 João Guimarães Rosa

My father was a dutiful, orderly, straightforward man. And according to several reliable people of whom I inquired, he had had these qualities since adolescence or even childhood. By my own recollection, he was neither jollier nor more melancholy than the other men we knew. Maybe a little quieter. It was mother, not father, who ruled the house. She scolded us daily – my sister, my brother, and me. But it happened one day that father ordered a boat.

He was very serious about it. It was to be made specially for him, of mimosa wood. It was to be sturdy enough to last twenty or thirty years and just large enough for one person. Mother carried on plenty about it. Was her husband going to become a fisherman all of a sudden? Or a hunter? Father said nothing. Our house was less than a mile from the river, which around there was deep, quiet, and so wide you couldn’t see across it.

I can never forget the day the rowboat was delivered. Father showed no joy or other emotion. He just put on his hat as he always did and said goodbye to us. He took along no food or bundle of any sort. We expected mother to rant and rave, but she didn’t. She looked very pale and bit her lip, but all she said was:“If you go away. Don’t ever come back!”

Axolotl 

by Julio Cortazar

       There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

       I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down tbe boulevard Port-Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L'Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against tbe gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.

       In the library at Sainte-Geneviève, I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are the larval stage (provided with gills) of a species of salamander of the genus Ambystoma. That they were Mexican I knew already by looking at them and their little pink Aztec faces and the placard at the top of the tank. I read that specimens of them had been found in Africa capable of living on dry land during the periods of drought, and continuing their life under water when the rainy season came. I found their Spanish name, ajolote, and the mention that they were edible, and that their oil was used (no longer used, it said ) like cod-liver oil.

Ever After

Kim Addonizio

The loft where the dwarves lived had a view of the city and hardwood floors and skylights, but it was overpriced, and too small now that there were seven of them. It was a fifth-floor walkup, one soaring, track-lighted room. At the far end was the platform where Doc, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Bashful slept side by side on futons. Beneath them, Happy and Dopey shared a double bed. Grumpy, who pretty much stayed to himself, kept his nylon sleeping bag in a corner during the day and unrolled it at night on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. The kitchen was two facing zinc counters, a built-in range and microwave, and a steel refrigerator, all hidden behind a long bamboo partition that Doc had bought and Sneezy had painted a color called Cherry Jubilee. The kitchen and bathroom were the only places any sort of privacy was possible. To make the rent they all pooled their money from their jobs at the restaurant, except for Dopey, who didn’t have a job unless you counted selling drugs when he wasn’t running them up his arm; and Grumpy, who panhandled every day for spare change and never came up with more than a few wrinkled dollar bills when the first of the month rolled around. Sometimes the rest of them talked about kicking out Dopey and Grumpy, but no one quite had the heart. Besides, the Book said there were seven when she arrived, seven disciples of the goddess who would come with the sacred apple and transform them. How, exactly, they would be transformed was a mystery that would be revealed when she got there. In the meantime, it was their job to wait.

“When she comes, she’ll make us big,”said Sneezy. He had the comics section of the Sunday paper, and an egg of Silly Putty, and was flattening a doughy oval onto a panel of Calvin and Hobbes.

“Oh, bullshit,” said Grumpy. “It’s about inner transformation, man. That’s the whole point. Materialism is a trap. Identifying with your body is a trap. All this shit”—Grumpy swept his arm to indicate not just their loft but the tall downtown buildings beyond the windows, and maybe more—“is an illusion. Maya. Samsara.” He shook out the last Marlboro from a pack, crumpled the pack and tried a hook shot into a wicker wastebasket by the window, but missed. He looked around. “Matches? Lighter? Who’s going for more cigs?”

Free Fruit for Young Widows

by Nathan Englander May 17, 2010

When the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were soldiers in the Israeli Army and soldiers in the Egyptian Army who ended up wearing identical French-supplied uniforms to battle.

Not long into the fighting, an Israeli platoon came to rest at a captured Egyptian camp to the east of Bir Gafgafa, in the Sinai Desert. There Private Shimmy Gezer (formerly Shimon Bibberblat, of Warsaw, Poland) sat down to eat at a makeshift outdoor mess. Four armed commandos sat down with him. He grunted. They grunted. Shimmy dug into his lunch.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

by Joyce Carol Oates

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk."

Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn't bad enough—with her in the same building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn't do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.

The Most Beautiful Woman In Town

Charles Bukowski

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men.

Her sisters accused her of misusing her beauty, of not using her mind enough, but Cass had mind and spirit; she painted, she danced, she sang, she made things of clay, and when people were hurt either in the spirit or the flesh, Cass felt a deep grieving for them. Her mind was simply different; her mind was simply not practical. Her sisters were jealous of her because she attracted their men, and they were angry because they felt she didn't make the best use of them. She had a habit of being kind to the uglier ones; the so-called handsome men revolted her— "No guts," she said, "no zap. They are riding on their perfect little earlobes and well-shaped nostrils...all surface and no insides..." She had a temper that came close to insanity, she had a temper that some call insanity. Her father had died of alcohol and her mother had run off leaving the girls alone. The girls went to a relative who placed them in a convent. The convent had been an unhappy place, more for Cass than the sisters. The girls were jealous of Cass and Cass fought most of them. She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending herself in two fights. There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it. I met her at the West End Bar several nights after her release from the convent. Being youngest, she was the last of the sisters to be released. She simply came in and sat next to me. I was probably the ugliest man in town and this might have had something to do with it.

"Drink?" I asked.

Eminent Domain

BY ANTONYA NELSON

What caught Paolo’s attention was the smile, teeth extravagantly white and large, orthodontically flawless. Expensive maintenance in the mouth of a homeless girl. Around the smile was a pale, animated face, and around that a corona of wild purple hair. The owner of this gleeful mouth was drunk, her flame of a head swaying on the thin stick of her body, lit at nine in the morning on the front stoop of a condemned Baptist church.

This neighborhood was called “transitional.” The church was being destroyed to accommodate a new freeway, and a ramp jutted raggedly into the sky above it, a road to nowhere: eminent domain. Paolo drove past it on his way to the theatre for rehearsals. Every day, the girl balanced on the church steps, surrounded by a shifting group of men. Always the only female, and, as a result, the center of a kind of stunned, stoned, possessive attention. The group surveyed the street, drinking from brown-paper bags, leaning on bundles, panhandling with plastic cups, laughing too loudly, ready to attack anyone who made the mistake of approaching their girl. Some wore hospital wristbands. They adopted dogs and took better care of them than they did of themselves. They, too, were strays—unclaimed, uncollared, trotting purposefully through parking lots or along sidewalks, jauntily dodging danger, their only objective the next meal or drink and a place to lie down. When inspired, the group catcalled in the direction of traffic—provoked by an angry driver, a hand gesture or a shout, the look of fear or disgust on an elderly face, or the mere fact of a particularly ostentatious vehicle, like a Humvee or a Bentley. Other times, they collected aluminum cans in shopping carts. You’d see them paired off on recycling day, scrounging through the green bins left curbside. They were everywhere, like squirrels, Paolo thought, with routines, like mailmen. You could grow so accustomed to their presence that you stopped seeing them.

But Paolo felt he knew the girl. Her animation most likely had to do with being the only female and therefore the source of a kinetic sexual friction, not only among the men in her circle but among the men in the cars passing, and the ones wearing hard hats and safety vests, operating the raucous city equipment, erecting the freeway. She presided in the manner of a stripper before a paying audience. Still, Paolo stared with what he knew to be special interest, drawn by something about her that he alone perceived.

Games at Twilight 

Anita Desai 

It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated with the effort, but their mother would not open the door, everything was still curtained and shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke. 

“Please, ma, please,” they begged. “We’ll play in the veranda and porch—we won’t go a step out of the porch.” 

“You will, I know you will, and then——” 

The Blackbird

Robert Musil

The two men whom I must mention in order to relate three little stories, in which the narrative pivots around the identity of the narrator, were friends from youth; let's call them Aone and Atwo. The fact is that such early friendships grow ever more astounding the older you get. You change over the years, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, from the skin's soft down to the depths of your heart, but strangely enough, your relationship with each other stays the same, fluctuating about as little as the communion we each carry on with that diverse host of sirs successively addressed as I. It is beside the point whether or not you still identify with that little blond numskull photographed once long ago; as a matter of fact, you can't really say for sure that you even like the little devil, that bundle of I. And so too, you may very well both disagree with and disapprove of your best friends; indeed, There are many friends who can't stand each other. And in a certain sense, those friendships are the deepest and the best, for without any admixtures, they contain that indefinable essence in its purest form.

The youth that united the two friends Aone and Atwo was nothing less than religious in character. While both were brought up in an institution that prided itself on the proper emphasis it placed on the religious fundamentals, the pupils of that institution did their best to ignore those selfsame principles. The school chapel, for instance, was a real, big, beautiful church, complete with a stone steeple; it was reserved for the school's exclusive use. The absence of strangers proved a great boon, for while the bulk of the student body was busy according to the dictates of sacred custom, now kneeling, now rising at the pews up front, small groups could gather at the rear to play cards beside the confessional boot has, or to smoke on the organ steps. And some escaped up the steeple, whose pointed spire was ringed by a saucerlike balcony on the stone parapet of which, at a dizzying height, acrobatics were performed that could easily have cost the lives of far less sin-burdened boys than these.

One such provocation of the Lord involved a slow, muscle-straining elevation of the feet in midair, while with glance directed downward, you grasped the parapet, balancing precariously on your hands. Anyone who has ever tried this stunt on level ground will appreciate just how much confidence, bravery, and luck are required to pull it off on a foot-wide stone strip up at the top of a tower. It must also be said that many wild and nimble boys, though virtuoso gymnasts on level ground, never did attempt it. Aone, for instance, never tried it. Atwo, on the other hand - and let this serve to introduce him as narrator - was, in his boyhood the creator of this test of character. It was hard to find another body like his. He didn't sport an athletic build like so many others, but seems to have developed muscle naturally, effortlessly. A narrow smallish head sat atop his torso, with eyes like lightning bolts wrapped in velvet, and teeth that one would sooner have associated with the fierceness of a beast of prey that the serenity of a mystic.

The man who could walk through walls

Marcel Aymé

In Montmartre, on the fourth floor of number 75½ Rue Orchampt, there once lived a fine fellow named Dutilleul who had the remarkable gift of being able to pass through walls with perfect ease. He wore a pince-nez and a small black goatee and he worked as a level three clerk in the Registration Ministry. In winter he would take the bus to work, and come summer he would walk, wearing his bowler hat.

Dutilleul discovered his power shortly after he turned forty-two. One evening, the electricity went out briefly while he was standing in the front hall of his small bachelor apartment. He groped around for a moment in the dark, and when the power came back on, he found himself standing on his fourth floor landing. Since the door to his apartment was locked from the inside, this gave him pause for thought. Despite the objections of his common sense, he decided to return home in the same way he left—by passing through the wall. This strange ability seemed to have no bearing on any of his aspira­tions, and he could not help feeling rather vexed about it. The following day was Saturday, and since he worked a five-day week, he sought out the local doctor and presented his case to him. The doctor satisfied himself that Dutilleul was telling the truth, and upon examining him he discovered that the problem was caused by a helicoidal hardening of the strangu­lar membrane of the thyroid gland. He prescribed intensive overwork and told him to take two doses a year of tetravalent pirette powder containing a mixture of rice flour and centaur hormone.

Dutilleul took one dose, then put the medicine in the back of a drawer and forgot about it. As for intensive overwork, his activity as a civil servant followed fixed practices which did not lend themselves to any excess. He spent his free time read­ing the newspaper and working on his stamp collection; these activities did not require him to expend an unreasonable amount of energy either. After a year then, he still retained the ability to pass through walls, but he never used it inten­tionally; he had little interest in adventures and he stubbornly resisted the impulses of his imagination. The idea never even occurred to him to enter his apartment any other way than by the door, and that after having duly opened it using the lock.

Stairway to Heaven

by Aleksandar Hemon October 23, 2006

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burned flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling above my bed, a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees below my window. But the most troubling thing was the ceaseless roll of drums: a sonorous, ponderous thudding that hovered around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I couldn’t tell.

I was sixteen, at the age when fear arouses inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug a brand-new Moleskine journal out of my suitcase, and had just managed to write, on the first page, “Kinshasa 7.7.1983,” when I heard my parents’ bedroom door slam open and Tata cursing and stomping away. I leaped out of bed and followed him into the living room, where he had already flipped on the lights. I bumped into Mama, who was cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms; Sestra was there, too, pressing her face into Mama’s side. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

“Spinelli,” Tata exclaimed. “What a dick.”

The Falling Girl

By Dino Buzzati

Marta was nineteen. She looked out over the roof of the skyscraper, and seeing the city below shining in the dusk, she was overcome with dizziness.

The skyscraper was silver, supreme and fortunate in that most beautiful and pure evening, as here and there the wind stirred a few fine filaments of cloud against an absolutely incredible blue background. It was in fact the hour when the city is seized by inspiration and whoever is not blind is swept away by it. From that airy height the girl saw the streets and the masses of buildings writhing in the long spasm of sunset; and at the point where the white of the houses ended, the blue of the sea began. Seen from above, the sea looked as if it were rising. And since the veils of the night were advancing from the east, the city became a sweet abyss burning with pulsating lights. Within it were powerful men, and women who were even more powerful, furs and violins, cars glossy as onyx, the neon signs of nightclubs, the entrance halls of darkened mansions, fountains, diamonds, old silent gardens, parties, desires, affairs, and above all, that consuming sorcery of the evening which provokes dreams of greatness and glory.

Seeing these things, Marta hopelessly leaned out over the railing and let herself go. She felt as if she were hovering in the air, but she was falling. Given the extraordinary height of the skyscraper, the streets and squares down at the bottom were very far away. Who knows how long it would take here to get there. Yet the girl was falling.

The White Umbrella

by Gish Jen

When I was twelve, my mother went to work without telling me or my little sister.

“Not that we need the second income.” The lilt of her accent drifted from the kitchen up to the top of the stairs, where Mona and I were listening.

“No,” said my father, in a barely audible voice. “Not like the Lee family.”

Forever Overhead

by David Foster Wallace

Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of a feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights though your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

Fathers

Alice Munro

On Friday morning last, Harvey Ryan Newcombe, a well-known farmer of Shelby Township, lost his life due to electrocution. The funeral was held Monday afternoon from Reavie Brothers Funeral Home and interment was in Bethel Cemetery. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident. It had happened when he reached up to turn on a light in a hanging brass socket while standing on the wet floor in a neighbor's stable. He had taken one of his cows there to visit the bull. For some reason that nobody could understand, he was not wearing his rubber boots.

All over the countryside that spring, there was a sound that would soon disappear. Perhaps it would have disappeared already, if it were not for the war. The war meant that the people who had the money to buy tractors could not find any to buy, and the few who already had tractors could not get the fuel to run them. So the farmers were out on the land with their horses for the spring plowing, and from time to time, near and far, you could hear them calling out their commands, in which there would be varying degrees of encouragement, or impatience, or warning. You couldn't hear the exact words, any more than you could make out what the seagulls were saying on their inland flights, or decipher the arguments of crows. From the tone of voice, though, you could probably tell when the farmers were swearing.

Car Crash While Hitchhiking

Dennis Johnson

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping... A Cherokee filled with bourbon... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student...

hashish A purified resin prepared from the flowering tops of the female cannabis plant and smoked or chewed as a narcotic or an intoxicant.  印度大麻提炼出成的麻醉品

And a family from Marshalltown who head-onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri...

Separating

John Updike

THE DAY was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal misery with solid sunlight — golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this time of the year they had acquired tans; but when they met their elder daughter’s plane on her return from a year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled by the sunny opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming by telling her immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their formulations, in that string of gray dialogues — over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau — that had shaped the strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan had insisted they wait until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and ceremonies attended, and the bauble of summer to console them. So he had drudged away, in love, in dread, repairing screens, getting the mowers sharpened, rolling and patching their new tennis court.

The court, clay, had come through its first winter pitted and windswept bare of redcoat. Years ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a dramatic home improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own previous worst crisis had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen renovation. Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun. The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding sensation as if the bed were being tipped, Richard found the barren tennis court – its net and tapes still rolled in the barn – an environment congruous with his mood of purposeful desolation, and the crumbling of handfuls of clay into cracks and holes (dogs had frolicked on the court in a thaw; rivulets had eroded trenches) an activity suitably elemental and interminable. In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.

Now it was here. A Friday. Judith was reacclimated; all four children were assembled, before jobs and camps and visits again scattered them. Joan thought they should be told one by one. Richard was for making an announcement at the table. She said, ‘I think just making an announcement is a cop-out. They’ll start quarrelling and playing to each other instead of focusing. They’re each individuals, you know, not just some corporate obstacle to your freedom.’

“Crossing the Zbrucz”

Isaac Babel

Nachdiv 6* has reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken at dawn today.  The staff has moved out of Krapivno, and our transport is strung like a noisy rearguard along the high road, along the unfading high road that goes from Brest to Warsaw and was build on the bones of muzhiks by Nicholas I.

Fields of purple poppies flower around us, the noonday wind is playing in the yellowing rye, and virginal buckwheat rises on the horizon like the wall of a distant monastery. The quiet Volyn is withdrawing from us into a pearly mist of birch groves, it si creeping away into flowery knolls and entangling itself with enfeebled arms in thickets of hops. An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, a gentle radiance glows in the ravines of the thunderclouds and the standards of the sunset float above our heads. The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into the evening coolness.  The Zbrucz, now turned black, roars and pulls tight the foamy knots of the rapids.  The bridges have been destroyed, and we ford the river on horseback. The horses sink into the water up to their backs, the sonorous currents ooze between hundreds of horses’ legs. Someone sinks, and resonantly defames the Mother of God. The river is littered with the black rectangles of carts, it is filled with a rumbling, whistling and singing that clamour above the serpents of the moon and the shining chasms.  

Late at night we arrive in Novograd. In the billet that has been assigned to me I find a pregnant woman and two red-haired Jews with thin necks: a third is already asleep, covered up to the top of his head and pressed against the wall.  In the room that has been allotted to me, I find ransacked wardrobes, on the floor scraps of women’s fur coats, pieces of human excrement and broken shards of the sacred vessels used by the Jews once a year, at Passover.

Guts

by Chuck Palahniuk

Printed in Playboy magazine March 2004

Inhale.

Take in as much air as you can.