A riddle is hiding there in the forest. Cold mud trembles beneath steps heavy with a premonition—the boy scurries away, leaving his voice in the woods.
He doesn’t speak?
No, not since he became afraid.
Between winter’s yawning jaws, the townspeople shiver; and what is left to cloak themselves in but those familiar rags of bitterness? Eyes gleam with chronic distrust, voices rasp with resentment—and the two outsiders hover at the fringes, proving easy targets. This anxiety is more plentiful…
All stories are stories of disintegration.
The desire to sink down into the earth. To retreat to the primordial. What are words but excuses for bad faith? What is civilisation but a feeble heap of sand? All long for an escape. There may be cracks in the fabric of things. But most live as puppets on strings whose master is named cowardice.
The violence of love. The madness of infatuation. Still, the pervasive longing for escape. To dig out of…
Word becomes flesh. And before the word, the laughter of the immortals prevailed. What use is language? just another elaborate set of symbols. All is excess. Whether we possess the gift of language or not, the blueprint remains the same. Creatures driven by desire, consumption, excess, always excess. Even Christ is a thief. He hauls the cross and spends his days in the company of the poor and the ostracised. Still, he is caught in the net of greed, consumerism,…
On the brink —between a truth and a lie. Between the wanderer and his shadow. Which is more cruel—the truth or the lie? Death is nestled up close, an unshakable companion. And you cannot flee your own shadow. I dare not whisper a word… in her solitude, she is left there upon the brink. A balancing act, but she knows that there is no magic, nor magicians in the world. No miracle will save her, no feat of levitation, nor…
I drink at my own expense.
The net curtains straining feeble light, and the weight of the decades. Turkish coffee and some nameless poison in the plastic bottle. Lăzărescu with only his cats to quell his solitude. We’re just a bunch of miserable people, domnul. Thin voices through the telephone, ai băut? ai băut? Shame—shame and moral degradation. He is alone with his nausea and melancholy. He has long grown used to the stench of this misery, but his neighbours…
the sleepless: between two voids. the mind as volatile as flame. the stray dogs barking. sleep is elusive. reality has dissolved; only a painted screen remains. one scene eclipses another. a sun bleeding on the horizon. fire persists. sleep continues to skitter away. inertia wars restlessness. the insomniac’s resignation. consciousness as projection. luminosity as nightmare. the hour crystallises. insomnia and immolation. a curse of the spirit. she lies there, already a corpse. the sun too is consumed by this flame. and even water cannot quell this destruction.
just skin and bones. chaos stares its reflection down in the marsh’s mirror. the boy stalks a phantom, no object for his revenge. how hollow he feels. shadows, spiralling outward—enmeshed with his lonesome silhouette. the silver birches. they bear sole witness to the horrors—human refractions leave stains on this earth. a soldier preys upon the girl—he might as well have raped her. and she—in delirium. a poison as fatal as gunfire. recurrent imprints of trauma. and shadows, more shadows refract…
He is governed by solitude. Thoughts roll like marbles in his skull—bitter thoughts, hopeful thoughts, thoughts of judgement, misery, motivation. An insomniac. Eyes wilted with delirium. His days have no dividing line—the hours stretch into a single torturous eternity. He observes. He watches. He passes his judgement from afar. The scum of the streets. An angel in white. He reaches desperately for the possibility of company—only to curl in on himself once more, a companion only to his own shadow.…
The absurdity of power. Corruption infects every aspect of life, from the milkman to the politician. Laughter resounds in the depths—it is devil’s laughter, sordid and sly, a laughter of mockery, of absurdity. No soul remains untainted. Amid dances and fire, celebration and calamity, the laughter prevails, because where there is power, there is madness; and where there is madness, all that’s left to do is to laugh.
The Dealer—he orbits snatches of lives, in the absence of his own. Eyes swollen with misery, with desperation, hands grappling, muscles twitching, already wasting away—each individual is a nexus of renewed torment, and the dealer traces eternal circles around these fleeting lives.
A man bedbound, gasping his melancholy and pleading for his fix—he has not even eyes to seek out his poison, only a voice withered like a dried weed, already sinking into the grave. The Dealer accepts this misery…
Man is fading—not just abstractly, but real disappearances.
The dust of labour gathers and settles upon rusted iron and withered ideals. A cluster of workers, unsteady in their labourers’ boots and clumsy with their tools, flock together, trading jokes, fears and fantasies. A former saxophonist, an old professor and a milkman step upon the treadmill of labour—a tedium which is granted respite with human companionship. On the same construction site, a cluster of female convicts laugh and tussle with each…
History and invention, farce and memory, truth and fabrications—the surreal has grasped history in its clutches and consumed it. The tremors of memory persist, but everything is somehow off kilter. A flooded train carriage, three dead fish. The ripe fruits of nostalgia. A whistled tune, a room of dancing bodies, the burn of mezcal. This is a world of thresholds—of consciousness, nationality and ego. The pendulum is restless; all remains in tumult.
A birth reversed, a bloody umbilical cord trailing…