Status Updates From زنبورهای خاکستری

Memory withers away, goes to pieces, but the photographs remain.

Fear is an invisible thing, subtle and variable, like a virus or bacterium. It can be inhaled with a breath of air, or accidentally imbibed with a sip of water or vodka, or come in through your ears – and you can certainly catch it with your eyes, so badly that its image will remain in your pupils even after the fear itself has disappeared.

When it comes to family, who knows which is more important: love or tolerance?

Sergeyich spent all the next day in bed, attending to himself as if he were his own ailing child. He listened to himself coughing as if he had been split in two: the patient-self and the healer-self. This wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, either. It happens to everyone who lives alone. Loners become both cooks and eaters. They become tidy-uppers and the ones who will appreciate the tidy room.

Silence, of course, is an arbitrary thing, a personal aural phenomenon that people adjust for themselves.

For years and years he had donated his beeswax to the church, precisely so that the priest could make candles. He had given and given, and then received these candles as a gift from the Lord. They came in an hour of need, when the power was cut off. And so they serve him now that light bulbs are useless. This too is holy work, after all – to brighten man’s life in dark times.

You live somewhere long enough, and you’ll have more family in the ground there than above it.