Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Epiphany and Not Following Through (Yet?) (by Daniela Atanasova)

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My first day in the United States. After a long trans-Atlantic flight, the only memories of which are my half-dried tears, a dreadful headache and the German girl who sat next to me and never spoke a word, I land in the Washington D.C. airport. Or was it Philadelphia? I no longer remember. I pass the dreaded Immigration and officially enter the US. “Rally-Durham,” cries the nice man who takes my suitcase at check-in.

Finally, I arrive. It’s sunny and I have a feeling that it is going to be a good year. The journey itself presaged it: four connecting flights and no problem whatsoever. I find Vlaho, my Croatian friend, who is nervously trying to find a taxi. We spend the night in a motel, eat crappy American food bought from a gas station near by, and in the morning head for the university.

The cab driver, an Indian with poor English and a big smile, has heard about Croatia and Macedonia and we talk about Yugoslavia. A pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, in the end he only gets a meager tip from Vlaho as we are still not well informed about the tip “policy” in the States.

We call home from the Study Abroad Office and then Amanda, our advisor, takes us to our new homes. Mine is an apartment on Alexander Street. I still don’t know who my roommate is, but I like the place. My family has always lived in no more than two rooms, and I shared two rooms with three roommates while at university in Skopje, so the thought of having a whole apartment, even if I do share a bedroom with a flat mate, is exciting. Next, I roam around campus with my new French friend, Agnès, who is also one of the Visiting Internationals. I soon meet the rest of them; they come from Germany, France and Taiwan. The following day Amanda takes us all shopping at Target. First encounter with those large supermarkets where you can buy virtually everything you could think of. Buying the things I need without worrying too much about money is fun. But in general, shopping in such huge places tires me, it takes me ages to make a choice and in the end I feel strangely downcast.



Orientation week passes like a dream: nice people, beautiful places, lots of food and information, and all the American things to do. During one of the social events, students grumble about the new ACES (the computer system of the university). I tell them that they should not complain; in my school such a system would be considered science fiction. They look at me in a weird way. What they didn’t know is that instead of an electronic record, in Macedonia we have little “index books’ in which all the courses we take and all the grades we get are entered. The grade needs to be entered by the professor after the exam results are published, and this, of course, involves a special trip to the professor’s office and sometimes waiting for hours on end. Then, at the beginning and end of each semester we have to report our courses to the Student Affairs Office, and again queue for hours in a stuffy room, hoping that the administrator behind the counter will not be in a bad mood. Not to mention filling a form for every exam taken, as well as endless other forms which clutter the Student Affairs Office, our lives and this essay…

Classes start and I get busy. There is a lot to read, but I am not discouraged. My professor of Cultural Anthropology says that after this class our whole understanding of the world is going to change. Adam Smith and Marx are on the reading list, and many other economic theorists. Most of the readings are about political philosophy and economy; the topics include the division of labour in society, the beginnings of capitalism, the working class…I begin to learn about the principles behind our present world order, which I always found far from ideal and essentially unjust. I am getting even more acutely aware of the inequalities in the world, while studying at a rich university that has all the amenities and conveniences you could ever wish for. I enjoy my almost limitless food points and share them with friends who have a smaller food plan. We sometimes jokingly bless George Soros for providing our dinner. I love the Gothic towers of West Campus and the super-modern library (though I prefer the highest tower with large windows for a studying place over the brand new futuristic basement floor), but most of all I love the walk home: the big trees, the beautiful lawns and gardens and the pretty houses all of which lodge some or other important office for the university.

Often it all seems unreal. Organized to the point of irritation. You go to the library to scan a document, and of course you have the scanning directions on the Desktop. There is a bus that takes you to classes, or brings you back home, for free, even though it would take you no more than 15 minutes to walk there. And the wonderful Safe Rides! If you are stuck in the library late at night after the buses have stopped running, you call them and they come with their shiny white vans and give you a ride home, again free of charge. I felt so grateful each time they came to pick me up. Of course, students pay for most of these services through their tuition. But I have a scholarship that covers all my expenses, so sometimes I wonder: what am I doing here? In a positive way, of course. When I tell my European friends what my monthly living expenses in Macedonia are, not more than 200 dollars, they laugh. And yet, I find myself thinking: people, this is not reality!

But what is reality? At that time reality for me was my way of life in Macedonia, with less money, but not a bad life really. And yet my reality in Macedonia is different from the reality of other Macedonians, because I come from a lower middle-class family, if such classifications can be made. There are people who live better and people who live worse, economically speaking, as everywhere in the world. Is the reality of starving people in Ethiopia more real than the reality of beggars in Atlanta, Georgia, or even more real than the reality of the children of millionaires studying at Duke? I don’t know. The problem is that people get so embedded in their own realities that they forget other realities exist. And that the realities are so drastically different from each other.

It was a bit of a blow to see so many poor people in wealthy America. The disparities in a country which is well-to-do in general are even more drastic and striking. When I went to the Martin Luther King museum in Atlanta, I was moved by the greatness of the man and his idea, and then saddened to see so many beggars right outside of the museum trying to sell you something worthless, or just asking for change. All of them belonging to the same race for whose advancement he fought his battle. And then, one of my closest friends at Duke was Tim, whose mother was homeless. He was at Duke on a scholarship, still bruised by the memories of the times when he and his mom lived on food stamps, or of the many foster homes he had lived in. In the second semester his mom had found a place to stay so he went to visit her, and to meet up with his younger brother, who had just been adopted by a very religious Protestant family. He never told us in detail how he moved from being homeless to enrolling a university and then transferring to Duke. It seemed pretty amazing to me, but he didn’t want to talk about his past very much.

Sometimes, I felt bad for the pizza deliverer and the janitor lady because they had to serve me. The system was no good.



The real crisis came when I saw Slumdog Millionaire, the movie that had won the Oscar that year. The grey Sunday afternoon started ordinarily enough. We decided to leave the library to go to the movies, even though the pile of unfinished homework lay heavily on our consciences, as always. We jumped into Sam’s car and found our way to a small cinema in downtown Durham. From the beginning the movie generated a strong reaction within me. Strangely enough, it infuriated me. I was angry at the director for turning the plight of the slum children in India into an unrealistically romantic success story. I was angry at the Western audiences who might be disturbed by the scenes of the life in the slums in the beginning, but would go home comforted with the happy ending, singing the tunes of the Bollywood-style closing dance theme. “None of those children is ever going to become a millionaire, nor get near to the famous TV show, and that’s the real problem!” I screamed silently.


From Slumdog Millionaire

We shared our thoughts after the movie was over. Tim thought it was primarily a love story. The others agreed with me over the importance of the social themes. And yet, I was unable to convey all the intensity of what I felt to them. Of course they realized the gravity of the issue. It was the unfortunate downside of capitalism, I believe Vlaho thought. I had had many debates about capitalism with him, as I went through the process of unveiling its foundations and its crimes in the anthropology course. He, as a historian who was reading about the atrocities of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, reacted differently to my rant about equality for all. It was simply not possible, he said. Capitalism might not be the best imaginable system, but it is the best possible one, he triumphantly concluded in one occasion. Sam understood my concern better. He had gone through enough of poverty in his childhood and adolescence to never wish to go back to that state of affairs. His transferring to Duke was due only to his own ingeniousness and hard work, although he had never gone to high school and received formal education. Once there, he was not going to let pass the opportunity. He was going to play by the rules of the system in order to earn lots of money, and then he would outsmart it and change it, always helping the ones in need. So, he had a plan in place, and hence was not as terribly disturbed by the movie as I was.

Sam contributed a new perspective to my unsettled thoughts about Slumdog Millionaire. Sure, the story was sugarcoated in order to become a blockbuster, but that had enabled its message to reach wide audiences all around the world. If the movie provoked such reactions as the one I had, it was doing a pretty good job making people aware of how poorly and unfairly organized our world was. Still, I remained restless. One question after another emerged in my mind. I thought about all the professors teaching at Duke and the brilliant ideas they dedicated their lives to. It was all wonderful, but how could they remain calm and doing what they did while knowing that there were people in the world who might never have enough food and safe drinking water, let alone get educated and learn even a bit of all the knowledge being produced? What’s the point of building a career and achieving personal success when millions lived in such poor conditions, not because they had deserved it, but because the system didn’t let them do better?

On a more personal level, how could I dream of going to graduate school and spending my life studying literature, or cultures, or whatever, knowing what I know and not doing anything to change the situation? Wasn’t pursuing one’s chosen profession and thus not being full-time dedicated to helping others selfish?

Yes, people were often closed in their selfish little worlds, full of “important priorities,” I thought. Perhaps many started out idealistic, but then submitted to the pressures and demands of earning a living and providing for their families, and left behind good intentions about changing the world order. When I was sixteen, I read in a book which was very influential for my development that when choosing what to do, people should follow their strongest impulse and choose the activity that they are uniquely capable of, that few people could do better. The problem always is about discovering what one is uniquely capable of, and what one’s strongest impulse is. At the time of the “Slumdog Millionaire crisis” I debated between my two impulses: my undefined love of literature and studying in general, and my wish to help the poor and make the world more “just.” I finally reached a decision that the second impulse was the more important one, if not necessarily the stronger. I reasoned that in an ideal world, it would be okay to indulge in research work and lofty ideas, but the situation being as it was, it was paramount to take action.

But the future was still blurry and elusive. How exactly should I go about taking action? I started lamenting the fact that I had chosen to study English instead of economy. Had I studied economy, I would have had the necessary theoretical background to come up with a ground-breaking theory that would improve the system, make a real large-scale contribution. My ambitions were obviously far from modest. I promised myself to do research over the summer and find a postgraduate program to attend or some organization that I could become involved in. But then, maybe I should change my focus and think more locally? Concrete help given directly to people, or supporting organizations who work in those areas, can also make a difference.

One night on the bus, while I was going home from the library, the boy sitting next to me was talking to the driver (all the bus drivers were really nice, funny people). From the conversation I concluded that he was one of “the rich kids,” but had a rather different view of his future after graduation. He told the driver that he was planning to do “Teach for America” for some time and then probably work for a non-profit. “Teach for America” is a state program which encourages young people to teach in public schools with small budgets and big problems. At the goodbye dinner that we, Visiting Internationals, had with our advisor, the Dean of the Study Abroad Office, she expressed consternation at the fact that apparently a high margin of the university’s graduates got a job with “Teach for America” after finishing college, instead of going into some more remunerative field. Her point of view was that since their parents had made such a huge investment in having them study at Duke, the least they could do is try to earn a lot of money. Of course, I didn’t think much of her point of view, and was happy that the university managed to make some of the students aware of the plight of the less fortunate. There were many such examples. Bryan, for example, was going to spend the summer helping in a hospital in Kenya. So there were probably ways and ways to be useful for others, and yet do what you like best.

I need not say that all those thoughts did not come to any final conclusion, nor did I make a specific plan. As spring arrived, the intensity of my dilemmas started to fade and I was enchanted by the beautiful Duke surroundings. In spite of all the reading I had to do, I found time to enjoy friends and even find new ones. The America I had been critical towards finally won me over. At least that part of America that was the bubble I was living in…not real, or how real…I don’t know.

One year since my return from “the land of opportunities and contradictions,” I am no closer to finding my personal way to deal with the problem of poverty nor do I have a much clearer picture of what I want to become in life. However, it seems more and more probable that I am not going to go the strictly altruistic way and fulfill my resolutions made at Duke. It was somehow easier to have a wider perspective and to be more aware of world issues while in the US…Macedonia is still too enclosed in its own “reality,” and I lack insight and determination to undertake a great reforming endeavour. But I guess helping others is not actually as complicated as I present it to be. Small acts count and whatever one’s primary occupation is, it is important to sustain a personal integrity and never get too carried away and forget about the parallel realities of people who are doing their best to survive.



We are all living in one world, and a world in which chance is a powerful force. The place and conditions you were born in, and all the opportunities you have had are not necessarily your personal merit. But the faults of the system and all the aspects that could be improved are your responsibility.

Don’t forsake it (note to myself).
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Daniela Atanasova is a fourth-year student of English language and literature at Ss Cyril and Methodius university in Skopje, Macedonia.

"Epiphany and Not Following Through (Yet?)" is copyright 2010 by Daniela Atanasova and may not be republished or reposted without permission of the author.

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Monday, March 1, 2010

The Right Career (by Zorica Petkoska)

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“Six years for a bloody bachelor’s degree! Two times in the hospital because of a ruptured eye capillary! All those damn all-nighters! And for what!!!” Bobbie was swearing at full speed in his dressing-room. Swearing violently, yet barely audibly.




“All that chemistry, all that physics…for what?”

“The universe is laughing behind your back.” That’s the saying he got with his coffee this morning. The café is offering “daily sarcasm” now instead of the good old perfectly boring fortune cookie.




“We’re going live in five minutes, Bobbie!” A voice reminded him.

“I’m coming!” He yelled out.

Lights. Camera. Action. He got used to this.

“Hello, my dear viewers. For today’s experiment you will need the following ingredients…”

He graduated in chemistry as his major and physics as his minor, yet he couldn’t find a job in this in this topsy-turvy society, where trained musicians moonlighted as taxi drivers and uneducated people owned large businesses. Instead he was on television, hating it all, while some kid somewhere gets drunk to death for not fulfilling his dream to work in the media. It’s a twisted little world and a twisted little story.

“…then, you add some sodium chloride, you decide the quantity according to your taste…”

He hated this circus. He should have accepted that job in the supermarket, it wouldn’t be as embarrassing as this one.

“…. One litre of H2O is poured in the mixture and you let it simmer for fifteen minutes…”

Yet, his knowledge of chemistry is a precious possession that no one can take away from him.

Just you wait, and you will all see.

The whole twisted world is wrong.

“…the state of aggregation should neither be solid, nor gas. You should get a liquid mixture through a process of hydrating some solid elements and letting some gasses expire in the liquidizing process…”

I am so sick of this.

“…you decorate with some parsley at the end and the special Easter stew is ready!”

He hated that an educated scientist like him should end up in a ridiculous cooking show. He must rely on his knowledge once again. He pulled out a syringe.

“And, at the end, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the most beautiful chemicals – THALLIUM. Its magical properties are spreading throughout one’s body and….well, you’ll see,” he added casually.

The next moment he injected the main dish with it.




“This is an excellent poison,” he continued, “as it cannot be seen with a naked eye, and when tasted, one dies a slow, lingering death.”

The whole TV studio fell silent.

“And, of course, I am joking, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “You know how I like to add a bit of a chemistry in life, because where’s chemistry, there’s love.”

“This syringe contains hot salty water. It is an excellent trick in order to make the meat equally salty in the inside as on the outside,” he explained.

The crew could be heard breathing again. Anything was possible with Bobbie.

“Please, fetch today’s meal to the director of our station. I promised him a decent holiday meal,” said Bobbie to an assistant, a young man.

“Of course, sir.”

And Bobbie went home pleased, singing all the way: “Thallium, I love you, you are real, you are true.”

And the accompaniment to it were the sirens from the ambulance rushing towards Channel 6 Studios.

Bobbie knew they were rushing in vain. He knew for certain that the director would suffer a slow and agonizing death. Chemistry confirmed that.

And where’s chemistry, there’s magic.




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Zorica Petkoska (also known as Zoria) is a graduate student of English language, specialising in translation at the Department of English language and literature, Faculty of Philology at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia. She is also teaching translation there as an assistant to a junior professor. She has been writing poetry since a very early age and published one poetry book in 1999 (The Dream’s Stars and Sparks). She has been writing poetry, prose and drama up to this day, and also engaged herself in amateur drama writing, staging, directing and acting. She writes both in English and in Macedonian.

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“The Right Career” is copyright 2010, by Zorica Petkoska. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The images and artwork are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel and may not be reprinted or reposted without permission.

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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Taken from the Notes of a Prisoner (Dragan Georgievski)

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…As I started up in this world, I was a menace, a fiend of man and woman, and I became someone else. I was born, and I ceased to become that same fiend I always knew when I looked in the small pond in front of our house. The impeccable pond, in front of our house, grew each and every day for as long as I can remember. It was situated near a village, not far away from Athens where my parents, my two sisters and I resided for a long, long time.



In the beginning, I used to love looking at that wonderful reflection every day, when I started off at school. My Greek primer in hand and my dedication to the study of Homer and Horace, painted my face in that pond, the pond that kept growing as I grew.



And then, I realised, I had become someone else. One day a completely different face was looking back from that small pond and it kept smiling back at me! I could never smile like that! I was never able to do anything, except be serious about my studies and never leave home unless it was for school or the local library. I threw a stone inside that pond and it started to make so many circles, that my analytical brain started counting them one at a time, never assuming that I was counting how many times my eyes multiplied within those circles.



I had become a man, but not just any man, I dedicated myself to the study of thunder and rain and everything that caused trouble to that little pond. But, there was something else beside my dedication to this study. In fact, I had tasted something that I had never tasted before. And it wasn’t the taste that you get when you bite a beetle which has, by accident, fallen into your mouth. I felt my own blood, human blood. Then the person looking back at me in the pond was different. The smile of that person grew larger, and suddenly the pond grew larger as well. Its appetite grew in a way. But what grew in me was a calling to serve that pond. Once it even turned into a swan. He called to me, gave me instructions and disappeared. I was ready and I did what I had to do!



Now that I recall all this, so as to present you with the facts: I have become someone else. I am not allowed my freedom to visit that pond, because I am put behind a wire. I am looking at a mirror instead of a pond, watching television instead of reading Horace and listening to the news forecast instead of studying whether the weather will lighten up, so that my jail-mate will stop nagging me about my know-it-all brain!



But a very important thing hasn’t changed, though. I have remained in service to that pond. I have managed to get my cell just opposite my master’s house, and now I can finally show you my perspective! I have taken a couple of pictures to make it easier for you…Even though, it became very clear to me at first that I have become my master’s servant, the world managed to disturb that picture by saying that I was only throwing stones into a pond that made circles inside my head. But my master instructed me differently. I was able to change that picture into something else – my own image I have kept inside my head.



Dearest reader, I provide you with those same images now, and I leave your honourable mind to bring a suitable answer to the question you asked me before. We all serve different masters, enlightened one, but I chose to serve the first and the biggest one of them all! He sits on the top of everything, hides behind every corner, goes into the soul and the mind and governs....oh how, he governs...




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Dragan Georgievski (b. 1983 – Skopje, Macedonia) is currently a Senior Undergraduate student of English and Czech Language and Literature at the ‘Ss Cyril and Methodius’ University in Skopje. He has translated works from English and Czech into Macedonian and Aromanian and vice-versa. His latest work was the translation of three plays by George Bernard Shaw (Androcles and the Lion, Overruled and Pygmalion) into Macedonian and is currently working on translating Macedonian literature into English.

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“Taken from the Notes of a Prisoner” is copyright 2010, by Dragan Georgievski. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The images are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel.

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Friday, February 5, 2010

People with Burnt Tongues (Ana Lakaliska)

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The Skopje sky is like a silver blister, ready to splash its contents all over this city of statues. So monotonous, concrete, enveloped in a mist of exhaust fumes and the noise of heels on top of the shrill voices of street vendors. Little barefoot children, splashing in the puddles from yesterday’s downpour, chasing people, begging for spare change. Chestnuts being roasted on every corner. Massive billboards hover above our heads.

We escape into a café. We haven’t seen each other in a while. Not much is different. Mya has changed her hair back as it was three years ago. It still makes her look older. “That’s what I was going for,” she always said, when we strove to find something pleasant to remark after her unfortunate visits to the hairdresser’s. But she doesn’t really care. She never has.

I came here to write, Mya came with me to dispel the awkwardness, as if to write in public were a crime, a kinky thing to do. We pick a spot in the back, dark, understated corner; we didn’t come here to be seen, we came here to see each other, catch up.

I place a notebook in my lap, I cover it with my scarf, so that people won’t see, won’t wonder, won’t judge. We order. “An espresso for me,” I say to the waitress, while Mya is in the mood for tea.

The day has descended heavily on the city today. We walked for only fifteen minutes to get here, no more, and yet, we’re drained.

The grim day follows us through the window. The lights on the upper floor are lit, giving our surroundings the sweet mellow hue of an almost ripe peach. A soft cloud of cigarette smoke hovers, squeezing through the railing. I spot a pinch of cinnamon with the tobacco. I should have ordered something with cinnamon.

A couple is positioned in the booth across from us. They’re like ghosts; they’re made into bland shadows by the light throwing itself in from behind their backs. They sit apart, she on the sofa, he on a recliner. Two cups and a sugar shaker rest on the table between their legs.




I notice the God-awful, Macedonian pop music in the background. This used to be a classier place. Smooth jazz, world music, gigs in the evenings. Today, we’re surrounded by guys with the same haircuts, sporting the same striped sweaters and ray-bans on a day with no sun at all. Almost all the girls have their hair in a bun. That’s one trend I’ve missed out on lately, I guess.

She flips through the menu as one would do at a dentist’s waiting room. His eyes are lifted towards the flat-screen, but do not meet it. The air between the two of them seems thicker than the rest of it.




In all my eagerness to get warm, I take a sip from my coffee. I burn my tongue. I set the cup down while my face twists in a knot.

Mya cracks up. “Rash!” She smiles and dips the tea bag in her cup. I cringe and look away again.

He’s playing with a lighter. His elbows are on his knees, his head in a bow. She sits there with her hands joined on the side of her hip. They share no words.



Mya speaks about her summer vacation; about her studies; about her boyfriend’s studies. They’ve been together for ages. I listen with only one ear. She talks about the last party I missed, about a semi-known singer and her lover who is her neighbor, about another friend’s feud with one of her professors. I scribble in my notebook.

He adds some sugar to his coffee and twirls the spoon in it with a lightness of wrist often met in men whose only physical activity in the day is this circular aerobic workout. He lifts the sugar halfway towards her, not looking. Her head, as in a twitch, shakes to say no. He pulls it back softly.



Mya starts talking about the time her boyfriend and she were pulled over by a police officer for speeding and they cheated out of it by pretending she had appendicitis and he was rushing her to the hospital. She says it would have been pretty nasty if they hadn’t found a way out, since they were pretty much intoxicated and ever so slightly high, at least he was. She sees I’m amused, so she becomes even more animated in telling. Her hands are flying around. It’s not the story I’m so entertained by -- this is the fourth time I’ve heard it -- but I had never heard it from her. I laugh because I notice how the story has morphed from one gossip’s mouth to the next. Or maybe she is just spicing it up for me. She does that sometimes. Now, I’m not saying she is a liar or anything of the sort; she just likes things a little bit over the top. Like that shirt she is wearing. Too… pink. My glance strays from her once again.

The waitress places a bill on their table, joining their vow of silence and walks away, as with people she knows, people she trusts. He places two bills on top of it without looking at it. She is already in her coat and extends a step towards the door.

Mya asks how I’ve been doing these last few months. I sigh. I start speaking of meaningless things, minor endeavors, bumps on the road. Mya listens as if I’m relating the truth about the origin of the Universe. It’s always been baffling to me; I never managed to develop that keen interest in other people’s affairs. Still, I babble on.

She pushes the heavy glass door and is out of the café, while he’s still battling with one of the sleeves of his jacket. He catches up with her and his arm goes dryly around her hip, like two tree trunks fighting for territory. They walk out of sight. The crisp air from when she opened the door arrives in our corner. They’re replaced by a solitary, pale statue of a pained woman wrapped around a guitar on the promenade.




It’s one of those new, ugly ones, completely ridiculous. They haunt this city. It’s like Skopje doesn’t need its mortal citizens anymore. It has its new, sound-proof, marble and gypsum ones.




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Ana Lakaliska is a student of English language and literature at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia. She has been writing from an early age and has won a number of local and national awards for her poetry. Some of her poems have appeared in collections and publications from competitions, as well as Macedonian newspapers and periodicals.

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“People with Burnt Tongues” is copyright 2010, by Ana Lakaliska. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The Skopje images/artwork are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel and may not be reprinted or reposted without permission.

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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Short Announcements via Twitter

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I have added a Twitter widget to the left panel; from now on, short announcements will be via Twitter.

Longer, more complicated announcements will still appear on this thread.
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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Short Story: “A Pomegranate Heart” (Afrodita Nikolova)

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About this video

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I know that I will most certainly die. You do things and then you die. Gandhi said: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

See that small child eating pomegranate on the bench in the yard of the old wooden house? Well, that’s me. When I was little there were two things I couldn’t resist: looking at girls in miniskirts and eating pomegranates.

Girls will be girls, but pomegranates, that juicy wet liquid, blood soaring in the mouth to 99 degrees, that’s something.

When I was little I must’ve thought that my Momma’s right breast was a pomegranate, for I’m told that I clung to it and only to it, perpetually. I clung to my older sister too, but I guess it must’ve been that she always wore those velvet miniskirts.

I used to think that the moon is one huuge pomegranate, yellow from the outside, but red from the inside. I always had these dreams of squeezing the moon, but with my teeth. The erotic substance, the red juice bubbling in my mouth cavity as the mass of red juicy seeds sprinkled the inside walls of the cheeks. There is nothing erotic about it, yes, I know.



What I also know is that the moon is not a pomegranate, I was told so afterwards, but did that prevent me from believing in my childhood theory? No. Did that prevent the child, sitting on the bench in the yard of the old wooden house, from expecting every winter, the snow to fall in red snowflakes? No. I was definitely convinced that if I don’t sink my teeth into the moon’s core, than someone else will do it and he will fail to do it properly and the red dense liquid will fall onto the clouds and it’ll get stuck in them as food gets stuck in teeth, or maybe as gore forms on an infected wound. That’s why I expected to see, every damn winter, how these clouds release the moon’s gore on the surface of earth, as red snow. Even then I knew of envy. Maybe I didn’t know it was called so, but I did have this unknown warm suffocating feeling inside, every time I thought someone else would spill the moon’s insights, let alone that I won’t even know about it, because there maybe won’t be snow to foretell it, or if it came as rain maybe I’d think it was only muddy rain. People envy, children too, the one who says he doesn’t lies, but I envied someone without a face, body, name, without even being sure of someone’s existence, but as the globe is a cradle of so many people, I knew that some day, someone will come up with this idea. I knew that this childish idea will mature soon enough in some human mind.

I’m telling you, it wasn’t me, if it was, I would be glad to tell you it was. I couldn’t have tasted the real moon’s substance. I do admit that I like eating pomegranates even now, but I doubt that even Neil Armstrong could have tasted something of it on the moon. It is totally absurd and imaginary.



When I was an adolescent, my Poppa used to be my best companion. I knew then how stupid was to have been in fear of my childhood theory so I shunned it. It was then that I clung to Poppa, more than to any other member of my family, though he didn’t wear a mini skirt, and though I still loved eating pomegranates and staring at girls in mini skirts.

He unlocked the door of reality to me, the medicine and mystery of human body function.

Thanks, Poppa, I owe you the degree I’ve acquired in medicine, may you rest in peace.

He died from a heart condition. It was these clogs of blood that formed in his vessels, which stopped the flow of blood forever. The great philosopher Martin Dubrakov Pleskov ceased to be, not his theories.

Yes, I know that “great minds think alike,” my Poppa used to say that. He liked literature a hell of a lot. He told me once, I remember, to cherish the science, medical science, but he always had a subtle way of getting to his point. He instigated my becoming a cardiologist and he was a man of great humour. I know that talking about him now doesn’t make sense to you, but once, when Suzi was my girlfriend, he quoted: “…give her an onion, it’s your heart wrapped in brown paper.” You see now, isn’t that an improvement to my childish theory, to say that the moon is a heart wrapped in yellow and grey paper?

My Poppa died on the table, his chest, open in front of my eyes, under the bloody plastic gloves on my hands.

Even as I was holding the instruments, I knew I couldn’t fix his clogged vessels.

Was it difficult?

It was, but isn’t it that “whatever you do in life it will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it”?

I tell you now, dear lawyer. I’m not guilty of any crime. I wasn’t able to help the patient Majovski as I couldn’t help my Poppa. All patients are equal to me. If I say in an interview or in a book something that may imply myself being a doer of a crime, it is all empty association. And, man is not always what he says or what he does.



I do admit and it is written in my record, and in my biography that I did, after the death of Poppa, take his heart and sink my teeth into it. Does that make me a perpetrator? It is in accordance to the law that one may do what he chooses with his relative’s remains. Is it moral? Grief-stricken people are free even of the possibility to sense morality. That is my story, dear Ms Paula Korevski, you are the lawyer whom I trust thoroughly and you have to know I’m not guilty of any crime.

Mr B. Dubrakov Pleskov, a renowned cardiologist, was led to court the following week, mumbling under his breath, “the moon is a heart, a pomegranate, and all human hearts are beating moons, pomegranates.”

The case about the missing patients’ hearts is still in process. It is said that in one of his interviews he supposedly stated that he always taught his children the theory of the moon being a pomegranate when they were small. When they became adults they were well aware that the moon is only the round object that moves in the sky around the Earth and can be seen at night.

The sources continue to claim that Mr Pleskov was taken away somewhere… “Old age snuffs out the flame one has for women,” Pleskov told the media, “but it never extinguishes the gluttony to eat pomegranates.”

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“A Pomegranate Heart” is copyright 2010, by Afrodita Nikolova. All rights are reserved. This story may not be reprinted or reposted without permission from the author.

The video and images (“A Pomegranate is a Beating Heart”) are copyright 2010, by Jennifer Semple Siegel.

“Copper Mountain,” the YouTube track for “A Pomegranate is a Beating Heart,” is courtesy of Dan-O:
Free Music by DanoSongs.com.
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