Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 540

Teatro Grottesco

There is a place older than memory, where fog soaked streets fold like dying veins and buildings lean in too close. They sigh when you pass. The streetlamps flicker like collapsing neurons, straining to hold their glow beneath a sky stitched with indifferent stars. You’ve walked this place before, not in waking life, but in that marrow deep theatre behind your eyes. The one you visit in dreams, or fevers, or when the Wi Fi cuts out and you're forced to spend time with your own thoughts.

You know the stage, but it knows you better.

The ushers have no faces. The audience never arrived. The play is eternal, and you’re the understudy of your own existence, mouthing lines no one wrote, performing because the curtain never falls. Above, the sky stretches like a cauterized wound. You search it for awe. Awe looks down and rolls its eyes. The stars don’t care. They never did. You’re made of their dust, sure, but dust doesn’t dream. It just settles.

That's what ������ ��������� (TG) gives you. A return to that place. A full access pass to the slow motion collapse of everything you thought mattered. TG doesn’t suffer horror the way others do. TG doesn’t ask; “What if there’s something under the bed?” TG whispers, “What is the thing under the bed?”