Zak shivered. He could feel the miracle approaching. The morning grew still.
Grunting madly, Ivy bent with sudden resolve—his final, wild judgment. He lifted the body of the horse above his head and threw it into the valley below. Already dead, it rolled and rolled. It rolled away from the buildings, away from the men who did not understand. Just another useless, painful miracle of the city.
They stood there, looking at each other.
“How—” Pete started. His voice was lost in the valley below.
Punish the body to set the mind free. Yes, Zak thought, perhaps true freedom is the one privilege of those with nothing to lose. Somewhere in the distance, a horse had perished. Had her death granted him freedom from pain, and was that a fair trade?
The sky looked as if it wanted to snow, and the air smelled like snow. Zak took a step back, and finally lifted his eyes to look at Ivy.
“You, too, will be your own judge,” Zak muttered.
For a long time—weeks, perhaps—he did not visit the place. It was Ivy who found him one day and asked him to walk together. There was something at the tree, he said, that he wanted to show him.
The ravine was still there, like a cavity, but at the bottom somebody had inexplicably built a white dome. Defiant, it stood against the brown grass of the snowless winter, among dirt and rocks and garbage. An old nun came out of the dome—an unassuming figure in black. The sting of what Zak had denied himself since April’s death, even through years of married life, finally reached him. Looking down, he felt compelled to utter one question, although the answer stared at him silently from the valley of the dead horse, the same answer that pumped blood into his veins. He wanted to hear himself say it—it was as simple as that:
“Is it possible to live… without joy?”
The two men lingered awhile in silence. Below, the modest collector of souls busied herself by the dome in the cold, lonely morning. Their presence meant nothing to her. She was just eager to wash clean the bottom of the bottomless city.
This excerpt comes from the book Whirl of Birds by Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/whirl-of-birds-by-liana-vrajitoru-andreasen/
The literary landscape of Whirl of Birds interlaces the spatial and temporal complexities of the mind, in narrative flickers and bursts. Whether we glimpse at the plight of Neanderthals in the depths of lost ages, or at the collapse of communism in the mirrors of a children’s theater, whether we’re uplifted by the triumph of friendship over poverty or watch the last cowboy in New York State struggle to save his business, we recognize how much we are driven by our passions. Strange, but all too human obsessions shape the characters: from rat hoarding to an infatuation with a sculpture, from lies we tell ourselves and others to encounters with the dead, readers are swept in whirls of time, chains of connectivity that can break like glass, the unseen that whispers in our ear. The twists and turns of these short stories create a restless world where self and other meet in glimpses. Each small moment becomes an earthquake that echoes through time, each life is wrestled out of its own darkness, to arrive at the one question that is worth asking.
Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen
The Paddock Review 