FICTION

‘You’re so sour-tempered, Gergana’ asserted baba Zoya and kept knitting. ‘As if a lemon wedge is stuck to your tongue.’

The gulp of winter air fills my lungs with chills, then retreats with a sigh. It clears off old visions and carries them away. The visions vanish, soaring high, where they belong.

11 August 1999

There is a pedestrian tunnel beneath Fourteenth Street, connecting the subway trains at Sixth Avenue with those at Seventh.

So will things be different, do you think, for us now? She asked this from the bathtub. Her voice was surprising because it was so light.

When my aunt Fani called me in Chicago from Bulgaria to tell me she had found her brother, my father, dead, lying back across his bed with his right hand over the heart, she chose the inferential mood to relay the news.

…

[…]

A young man, with an apron, stained from a just filleted fresh fish, storms out of the back entrance of a small restaurant to a crossing of Stamboliyski boulevard, sits in front and lights a cigarette.

Wednesday morning

1

I remember her bloody, drained, and happy, her thighs trembling from exertion, spread open to the sides. And I'm holding a piece of living flesh in my hands and trembling with fear. Through my fogged-up glasses I see her torn pelvic floor still spitting blood. I shout, "Another unit! Quick!" and raise the slimy little body above my head – for everyone to see the tiny penis – and the midwife takes it. The entire operating room sighs, like a punctured bus tire. They hand me scissors, I grasp the umbilical cord close to the little tummy, and I cut it.

"Can I get you anything else, Bear Boy?" inquired the waiter of the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall café with an ill-contained smirk. 

The white Renault parked in front of the House of the Communist Party. The chauffeur rolled down the window to have a smoke. Dimcho took a few moments sitting quietly in the back seat.

I have a story in which the main character is a voyeur. It is called The Red Room. Every few months this guy rents a new place to stay in search of more and more new scenes for observation. One night, the lens of his powerful telescope falls upon a room flooded with intense red light. It is completely empty, except for the plain wooden chair in the middle. For days, weeks on end, our voyeur observes the room, but no one enters. The chair remains empty and the red light streams relentlessly into the night.

Comparisons of rakiya and other spirits are nothing new in Bulgaria – one such competition takes place annually in Sofia – but those contests consider alcoholic drinks mass-produced by established wineries and corporations. The event in the village, on the other hand, is open to residents of the area who make rakiya in their bathrooms, garages, and cellars. This competition attracts little fanfare and winning is solely a matter of local pride.

"Nazdrave!"

To defrost from a long Arctic Vortex and to draw mangroves in charcoal I flew to an artist colony near Fort Myers, Florida, on an elongated and thin island, a Key. I didn't know there were Keys on the West Coast of Florida, only south of Miami, where I had never been. It seems a Key is a glorified sandbar which has gained solidity through vegetation sinking roots and tides bringing in more sand, mostly white but with specks of black. Some of the black came from thousands of years of shark teeth, and every morning I could see people collecting the teeth. It was an art form.

We're in the time of COVID-19, and I'm in the southernmost country in the world, save for New Zealand and Antarctica.

Restrictions are in place, although I read that ours are nothing like the lockdowns elsewhere around the world. Most days I feel lucky, although this is not luck that you'd necessarily want. It's fate at its purest; my parents moved from the United Kingdom more than forty years ago and settled us first in New Zealand, and then Australia. There but for the grace of a job offer go I and my family into most people's current reality.

I've been to Bulgaria twice, separated by a gap of three years, though it feels like I've actually been to two different Bulgarias. This difference is on my mind as I think of how my home country, America, has changed in about the same timeframe. I feel like I've lived in two different Americas lately, and think back to Bulgaria looking for words to pinpoint this sensation.

Mt. Everest, April 2011

He knew he could conquer the anguish. His head pounded against dehydration and thin mountain air, as if a tiny demon lodged in his ear canal, pitchfork raised, the same demon who might whisper to him, What are you doing here, heading to the top of the world? Are you who you think you are?

The White Gentleman decided that the weather was too beautiful this morning to waste the day in everyday nonsense. Therefore, he put on his happy hat and flung the door open with a flourish. He took a deep breath, then stepped onto the street with his left foot. The town was still asleep.

The street was so quiet that he could hear his footsteps. He'd take three steps and then a hop, because walking in an even cadence was boring.