“ … and for a moment he felt himself flagging inside her, that helped him, in fact, to wriggle out again and push her onto her back, now she was looking at him a little surprised, a little breathless, her eyes were shining like some crazed junkie’s, her pupils were enormous, she had placed her two front teeth over her lower lip as though she was going to bite herself and was looking at him, looking, without saying anything, and he thought that she had looked at others in this same way, perhaps that very day, or the day before, perhaps her husband, who knows, maybe she looked at him like this, you can never know that, we always feel we are entirely unique in someone’s life and it always turns out that that was just self-delusion …”
From “Fairground Magician” by Jelena Lengold, a story from the Serbian writer’s European Prize for Literature-winning short story collection. Istros Books will publish the collection in English translation by Celia Hawkesworth in September 2013 under the title Pockets Full of Stones.
Read more Sunday European Fiction:
“The Green Bird” by Vlas Doroshevich
The Sixty-Year Old Woman and the Young Man by Nora Iuga
“Little Mary” by Andrei Ruse
“The Blake Precept” by Sándor Jászberényi
Photo – Lovers by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1909
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