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Three Short Vignettes by Mariella Mehr (translated from the German by Caroline Froh)
Artwork by Isabel Peterhans
WHEN CHESTNUT BLOSSOMS GREW INTO YOUR BEDROOM
Laughter is a bright wall around us. A ceremony of drunken greetings over at the next table, the noise of belonging together. Hanging overhead, whiffs of cool oil and hungry desire – rosy, edged in black. Housewife faces, student faces, plump party mouths, little girl faces, intellectuals, sensitives – but mostly males. The Weavers, you say, was always a waiting room. The host carries bad wine from table to table. You have your I-am-strong-on-my-own face on.
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“Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle
Underneath this room is danger. You can feel it when you walk across thefloor. This evening you feel it as you sit in your small chair reading. But stillyou cannot name it. The other members of your family who are staring attheir phones don’t appear to be concerned at all. You stop reading to listen,and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,“Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters theroom. -
Four Poems by Bronka Nowicka from “To Feed the Stone” (translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster) Drawings by Lula Bajek
Box
Mother doesn’t know that heaven exists. She’s getting a double chin from looking down. Her head, as heavy as an iron, presses that fold down.
Father keeps getting in mother’s way. He’s short. To reach grown-up things, he needs to stand on his tippy-toes or get a chair. He just moved it by pressing his belly against the seat. Now he points to the cushions. He needs them stacked to reach the table. He clambers up, props his elbows on the counter covered with an oilcloth, next to a spoon,
