LEVON KHECHOYAN | The Third Son
It rained two days ago; the morning sun erupted with a blinding flash of light. The intolerable light quickly dried the damp soil. Our neighbor Nersik was passed out drunk. No matter how much they called him, he didn’t get up. So we took his tractor out of his yard and left without him to...
Aram Saroyan | NOTES AT SEVENTY
At the beginning of Desolation Angels, Jack Kerouac is all alone, a fire lookout on a mountain peak in the Pacific Northwest surrounded by mountain stillness on all sides. A practicing if erratic Buddhist—“I’m the Buddhknown as the quitter,” he quipped once to his friend Gary Snyder—he has an epiphany: “It’s me that’s changed and...
Vrezh Israelyan | For Granny Aghavni
Many years ago the Armenian author, Avetiq Isahakian, seized the saying, ‘Why don’t you get pulled down to the complete ruin, o you world?’ from the folk’s mouth and delivered it to Granny Aghavni. She was teaching the Armenian language to the village elementary schoolchildren at the time. And her teacher’s biography began and finished...
Elda Grin | Hands
When I was just married my mother-in-law wondered and complained all the time: “Your hands are so gentle and small!” She even showed the gloves I had been wearing before my marriage to our entire neighborhood. “Look at these gloves! They’re like a doll’s. How will these hands work?” The neighbor women were examining the...
Khoren Gasparyan | A scar upon the left profile (Borges and I)
A scar upon the left profile of man can also be upon the right profile. Jorge Luis Borges The epigraph that I borrowed from Borges is not taken from his compositions. He said those words in a dream. In my dream. Said it to me. I don’t remember details. The dream was in 2002, I...
Garun Aghajanyan | Non-orgasm
Their family was somewhat artistic. He was an elegant young man, with a thin moustache. He came to ask for Zabel’s hand. Everything turned out to be casual and rather absurd. First Manvel had fallen in love with her older sister, the neighbor’s widow. She rejected his dogged overtures, saying: “You’re wasting your time. Why...
Norayr Adalyan | Determined To Kill
He firmly made up his mind to kill his wife’s back-door man, whom he had never met and had no hopes to ever meet. There were a lot more men in Davayatagh than women; in fact, there were several men per one woman. So, which of them was him…? Men, like famished mangy dogs, would...
Diana Hambardzumyan | The jackass that had been to Jerusalem forty times
Maral’s plump bottom and nipples peeking out of her bra had the eyeballs of men pop out of their sockets and glue them to the neighboring reaches of her body. Like a gun for hire pursuing a victim vanishing from one corner of a wall to another, Maral, inconspicuous to everyone else, would get angry,...
Levon Khechoyan | The Earth Shuddered
They forbade us to enter the church with weapons. Free candles were passed out to us, for the salvation of our souls. We lit the candles inside the church, leaving our weapons outside. Then we took their villages with meteoric rapidity. We approached the town; the town also fell. We went in and out, running...
Recent Comments