Three Tales of a Very Windy Town

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Collection of Awarded Short Stories.

 Bulgarian Kindle ebook in Amazon.

* Short Story David’s Child was awarded in 2010 – VIII National Bulgarian Competition for short stories organized by LiterNet & eRunsMagazine

*In the Beginning Was the Subway - was awarded in the national SF short story contest held by the Human Library Foundation.

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Three Tales of a Very Windy Town 

 Up on the cliffs by a rough sea, there falteringly existed a town.

In the streets of that town, there were no children. The wind that blew all year round was so strong that people did not let their children out of their houses.

In each house, the largest room was the children’s, and the children spent all their time there, never going to school. The windows of the children’s rooms never overlooked the sea, because the sea was slightly frightening.

That sea attracted only madmen, who went on to become sailors. Sailors, once they had departed, never returned to the town. They sent letters home in bottles to inform their relatives that they were doing well, but they never came back.

The town struggled with the sea and the wind. Its citizens were, in a way, proud of their struggle. But often they lost track of their thoughts, because the wind blew the thoughts away.

One day, the mayor had a visitor. They sat on the wind-beaten terrace of the Town Hall, the only one looking out on the sea, and struck up a conversation while having lunch. The conversation consisted of only two sentences repeated over and over again, and the meal of a single dish served countless times. The wind blew their thoughts away, so that after the one sentence spoken by the mayor and the other spoken by his visitor, they both forgot what they had said and started over. They ordered the astonished servants to bring them one and the same dish till dusk fell.

When, on the following day, the mayor found out what had happened, he was embarrassed. He decided that such a mean wind was not to be trifled with, and he ordered that all houses in the town be made wind-proof. The walls had to be built of stone, three feet thick, and each house had to have a labyrinth inside to catch the wind.

One night, such a gale hit the town that the stone houses quavered, and the wind labyrinths chimed like organ pipes. People lost their thoughts and memories, dogs coughed instead of barking, birds hid in holes in the ground so as not to be sucked up by the wind funnels and carried out to sea, and goats banged their heads against the walls. People, animals, and probably plants were out of their minds.

The wind let up in the morning. There was an unusual quiet, and everyone would have calmed down but for one odd occurrence. Inconspicuously, the wind had blown all letters away from the town. While the frightened people had scrambled to and fro during the night—and naturally no one read anything, be it a book or newspaper—the wind had blown away all printed letters: the inscriptions on monuments and tombstones, the scrawls on walls, the degrees in the diplomas of doctors and professors, the little text on the pills inside medicine bottles, the lovers’ verses, and even those characters that looked like letters but were in fact not.

And so, as you may have guessed, because of a lack of letters, this story cannot continue, so it must stop a while.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005TPQ41A

електронна книга за Киндъл в Амазон

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