There's a folder at home that I rarely touch.
I'm afraid to. The folder holds part of my childhood letters. Collected by my mother. Although there are letters to my father there, too. When my parents burned up in a plane crash a quarter-century ago, I was twelve. I don't say "only" twelve, because even twelve years turned out to be enough to experience what I experienced.
The letters were written before that age, obviously.
We're kids. We catch ten red ants in a match box. They are "the baddies." We throw them like storm troops on to the nest of quite smaller black ants who are "the goodies." We watch the vicious battle close up. With a matchstick I push back any red deserter into the acid of the battle field. I love the role of God. My matchstick is everywhere.
We are out on the ice at the edge of the shantytown that resurrects itself here each winter. Vic is padlocking the door to his shanty. Like everyone else, he's painted his name and town on the side as is required by law. But unlike everyone else, he's added his street address, state, and zip code. And below that, in letters a foot high, he's spray-painted EARTH! in bright red.
And that's how on this late pre-Christmas Boston afternoon, only twenty minutes after she bought them, Martina returns the Italian boots in question along with the receipt for over $450 and asks for her money back.
"But, please, is there something wrong?" the girl behind the counter asks anxiously, still knowing that, whatever the answer, she is legally obliged to return the client's money.
Sometimes it was her child, sometimes it had been entrusted to her by her Girl Scout leader, Mrs Fox. Once it had arrived on a ruota, the medieval Italian wheel where, in the depth of the night, foundlings were placed through an iron grille into a wooden box and spun behind a convent's walls.
Phoebe wondered what Edwin would think if he knew that she could sleep only while cradling him like some mutant newborn. She wondered what it would have been like if she had had her own children. Maybe she would have been spared the luxury of insomnia.
"My hair!" Miss USA shrieks.
Miss USA and her coaches do not have enough time to get new extensions that match. Her roommate, Miss Germany, offers to cut her own locks. She's such a martyr, even though she's the perfect Aryan specimen, with a golden lion's mane and sleeping pill-blue eyes. Maybe she feels guilty. Miss Israel reminds Miss USA that it's not the end of the world.
"How would you know?" asks Miss Palestine, who can't officially compete but hopes to tapdance in the opening number.
"Really, is not so bad," says Miss Afghanistan. "Is only little hair."
When I travel in a bus, I avoid reading, because it makes me ill. Only I don't feel sick when I peep over at the magazine of my neighbour sitting diagonally across the aisle or at the exceptionally stupid newspaper of the passenger next to me. If the newspaper were mine – not that I would have bought it, never ever! – but if it were mine, I wouldn't have read any of its articles. And anyway, furtively, I don't manage to read even one, and I'll never find out what happens to the woman who has married one and the same man for the fourth time, or even whether Marek FC will qualify for….
his transparent skin
that is me,
his seed – that is
me
I am sketching myself
I kiss my orange lips.
I was the red one,
Him – was it him?"
Men Like Colours
Every day I think that he still exists somewhere out there, within the borders of this town, in the streets of this town, and we don't meet. But he's out there and breathes, and eats, wakes up, even goes to the toilet. Sometimes I wish I was a ghost so I could come right up to his back, peep from behind his ear, while he doesn't know and laughs.
"I don’t even get a song?" Dolman said. "After all that work."
Ten minutes. Sometimes five. That's how long his rapture lasts. From the beginning in the Prologue, his look is somehow solemn, joyful, his glances over there, where he expects her to appear, register things as he wants them: the street, its mood suffused by a recent shower, which will set the scene of hands sinking into each other, intimately. The reflection of buildings on her photochromatic lenses and later – their paling in the shade of the room where her eyes will appear, black as cherries, enough to lose a man in their blackness, sweet, melting.
"Nice thing he's doing, serving the country like that. Now Mitchell here ain't got much patriotism, we've had many a-talks about it. It ain't his fault, really, it's a generational thing. But I believe in this great nation, son. Can't take it for granted. We could be in a bread line with a buncha commies somewhere, instead of right here in the greatest country the earth has ever known." Pops grins and gazes fondly across his muddy, shit-stained yard. "The land of milk and honey." He turns to me. "Y'know," he says, "I served in 'Nam."
"Yeah?"
From morning until evening he was walking up and down between the tables with some old rubber galoshes that he had from his village, he was cursing reedily and he was always finding something about which to argue with Elvis Presley. However Elvis Presley did not pay any attention to him, at every brickbat he replied: "That ain'ta word!" and most of the time he was playing backgammon with a guy from Yambol. The man also cursed, but in another manner.
It was called The Church of the Assumption – a typical Orthodox construction from the early nineteenth century, looking more like a large chapel.
"This is the oldest church in the region, that's why it's the main one," Victor clarified. "Correct, Father?"
One of the shifts that has been slowly taking place in Bulgaria since "The Changes," as most Bulgarians refer to the collapse of Communism 20 years ago, has been the re-emergence of an independent Bulgarian literary tradition. Not that it had disappeared. Simply that it had been quieted. There was once a time when merely to distribute self-published poetry or fiction among friends would have been punished by the thought police. Yet now Bulgarian writers are finding their voices again, and finding an audience, both in their country and abroad.
The sun was slowly reaching its zenith, but the streets and the squares of Samarkand were still cool. This coolness, coming from the gardens and the vineyards, from the channels crossing the town with their emerald waters, was what the Iranians, the Turks, the Maures, the Arabs, the Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews breathed in, in order to fill with their shrill cries the Sand Place or Registan, as they called the cloth market in the ancient part of town.
Did Eisenhower want his highways empty? A man takes a camera, a shoebox of cassette tapes, and goes. Goes. Tom Waits on the radio, bleeds into Kansas by the time the bumper crosses the state line and stops, bone-dry-out-of-gas, stuck in the middle, in two places at once.
Every rusted-through by-the-hour motel has a story. Dozens of sordid affairs and goings on. Two brothers share a room in Alabama and get run out of town by an extremist with a shotgun and a Bible in the back of the pick-up, rain-soaked from where he left it out in a hurricane in October of '65.
He threaded the worms onto the hook, so that their bodies went over its length, then cast the line, taking care it wouldn't make much of a splash. He saw them hesitating in the water. Finally, the float wobbled; the thinner the rod's tip, the better you felt the fish pulling at the line. What a triumph when the body emerged from the water, flashing suddenly above the dull river. As ever, he wondered how the fish felt in that instant, what it saw, what it heard, and fish can hear with their skin...
I go and buy a black corset with garters, stockings and the most whorish pair of red high heels in order to erotically jumpstart our snoozing seven–year–old married life. That evening we go to another birthday party at the luxurious home of a famous poetess and critic whom the literary moguls hover around.
Our Friday gig went totally lame. The plum of our show was my black eye. Bellerophon was once again slapping the bass and blowing kisses to the audience, I was taking my revenge on it, and Pegasus was trying to mediate between all sides. When this is done by drums, the result defies description. People evacuated themselves with headaches. Bellerophon bid us goodbye at the earliest possible moment and left us "to square our accounts." Pegasus and I decided to drink a shot of vodka. We both knew we would never come back here again. We collected our payments.
Willem van Ee has been ambassador of The Netherlands in Bulgaria since 2005, with less than a year to go. He believes in an EU with a human face, meaning that the European project is primarily for all of us peoples and citizens. Van Ee thinks that the colourful walls on the buildings in Sofia, which are part of the Dutch-inspired Wall-to-Wall Poetry project, will stimulate people's minds and make them believe that although every country is different, we are all united by the shared European values.