Issue 87-88

VILLAGE, An excerpt from a novel in progress

it hurts right in the clock

nailed to the wall

tick-tock, tick, tick,

thump, thump, thump, thump

we barely inhale,

the time will come

soon, on the hour,

our arrhythmia is a disease

which makes us human

and keeps us from suffering

when the clock's pendulum

first strikes us

they call it time,

to no avail

a little brown bird inside

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SURFACE TENSION, An excerpt from a novel in progress

Cuttlefish. Imagine! The impossibility of such a creature, constructed, it seems, as a metaphor for need, desire. Francine hadn't expected to be facing it, like that, so suddenly, as she slips through some small spill on the bio lab floor, pitching forward, bracing herself – with both hands! – on the marble tabletop, and when she looks up, there, entombed in glass, is that spindly creature dredged from a deep river or some other nightmare. It stares at her through the display cabinet, suspended in a vial of its own water, assessing her with its very large button of an eye.

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KRISTEN GHODSEE

In more than one way, the collapse of world Communism in 1989 caught Bulgaria and the Bulgarians by surprise.No one sane enough imagined that the system devised by Stalin, Dimitrov, Brezhnev and Zhivkov – which had seemed so strong it would last forever – could just implode within a few days. Worse, no one had imagined what the "system" that came to replace it would look like. Soon, many Bulgarians discovered that there would be no system at all. So, they started seeking explanations.

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TASTY MULTI-KULTI

No matter how wide your restaurant comfort zone is, a day comes when you crave to bite something different that your usual shopska and kebapcheta. You would want something different – and if you have been living in Bulgaria for long enough you'd know how hard it is to find it. In Sofia, restaurants come and go, replacing one another with the predictability of the moon phases, but most of the time new establishments do what their predecessors used to do. Which is, follow the trend.

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