News — FictionAndPoetry

It’s the soggy kind of wind that undoes all the hair-dos on the west coast of Ireland; that makes broken tents of nice new outfits, and shouting matches of good wishes: I’ll love you and leave you. What love? Love me and leave me. I’ll let you go. Have a good life! Indeed it is. Fine a day as any for blowing off cobwebs. A northerly with wet spells. Where has the day gone? We lost track of ourselves. It’ll be quiet in the shop today. What harm. Marjorie finds the work involved in customers to be quite annoying. She...

He lived around the corner from us, in our neighborhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-story apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. Our postboxes still said ‘Briefe’ in German. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. From one...