Category: To Read

My love, don’t be surprised. Right now we have all escaped to the stairway again, the walls were shaking, the explosions came one after the other, and I was squatting in embryo pose and thinking: if the rocket hits the house right now, my very last thought would be that I didn’t get a chance to tell you anything. When this will be over, we will see each other every day again, and again I will smile stupidly, stammer, act like a fool as usual, and shut up. Shut up. I don’t want to. This love is already pouring over...

Jazz was playing in this little café, Ranee Lee’s voice curling like fragrant smoke, spreading like a raindrop on the windowpane, embracing and teasing, calling you to forget it all. Relax, sit back in the uncomfortable metal chair and sway to the song: Paris, Paris... Or maybe it’s not the music that makes a large cappuccino cup go fuzzy? That’s exactly what you need right now, he scolded himself. Why don’t you also shed some tears in front of those stupid gawkers while you are at it.  Are you a man or what?! But there weren’t that many gawkers around,...

“Nothing wounds you as deeply as the shards of your own happiness” Mikhail Zhvanetsky   Saturday night he felt an urge to call his ex-wife. He had no idea why he needed it, and he knew for a fact that she didn’t need it at all. It’s been a while since her voice flowed like honey and velvet on the phone, a while since her smile poppled in her dark eyes, and his hands have long forgotten how unbelievably tender is her skin under her strict blouse. Two years ago when she left he could hardly wait for her to...

One day Ayelet just realized she was not going to do anything that she personally didn’t need or cared for anymore. She was not going to waste her time on things her uncles from mother’s side were trying to make her do. Mom died long ago, when she was eight, and she didn’t have a father at all. That’s what mom told her – “You never had a father”, and left it at that. She was left with grandma and grandpa and a bunch of their sons with their noisy wives, who as grandma put it, “took active part” in...

Happy travels, mom She used to tell her granddaughters that she wants to go, that she’s tired, that she’s been living too long, that this stupid old body has exhausted her – and also no one in their family has ever lived this long, she’s almost eighty five, and that’s no joke. But she loved life. Despite her already useless legs, worn out heart and constant weakness – every morning she was fiercely enjoying the sun, when it was out; the rain, when it occurred; the smell of flowers which she couldn’t really sense anymore, just remembered what it should...

He was used to be the first. First at everything, always. Since the kindergarten, when he could outrun anybody and was considered the strongest kid on the block. And he was also very smart. That’s what his mom thought, and his mom definitely knew what she was talking about. Everybody knew Ran, everybody loved him except for those who envied him fiercely. But even the latter loved him anyway, because it was impossible not to. And he loved a skinny redhead with honey eyes, one of her eyes was slightly squinted, and that made his heart soar in wild tenderness...

She is really, really old, this Pani Jadwiga. But everything’s all right with her head, and she remembers everything, every last tiny little bit. They were a family of twelve. Eleven of them perished in a black smoke of Auschwitz, and Jadzia was saved due to Russian invasion. And there was also the guard, the fat hog who decided to keep the girl for himself and was holding her back while sending people to the gas chambers. Jadzia almost forgot the guard, she was doing her best to forget him, but sometimes it just stung her from inside – fat...

Orit loved to walk in this park that looked like a forest. Very few people around, the air is damp and thick, a gurgle of a frog, a rustling of a snake, everything just the way we like it, she used to say, grinning with the corner of her mouth. The other half of her face was numb – brushed by shrapnel, a microscopic metal piece of crap definitely tore a couple of ligaments – and she could only smile with the left corner of her mouth ever since. But at least you won’t get any wrinkles there, Danny was...