Angel Igov - A Short Tale of Shame

In the house the walls are sleeping, the rugs are sleeping, the television is sleeping, the switched-off presence of sounds and images. The lamps are sleeping, bat-like bracket lamps and quiet ceiling lights, loudly snoring chandeliers. Krustev is sleeping, hung on the wall, his wife is sleeping on one side of him, his daughter on the other, they are sleeping with open eyes, smiling amid the lawn outside. The half-empty bottle of expensive whiskey taken out of the liquor cabinet with the magnetic door is sleeping.

But in the garden all times are awake at once, the leafy clocks of the birches spin around like mad, the grass bends uneasily, along the fence ants scuttle, headed every which way, they touch antennae, disappear into the dirt and come above again, and there in the unmowed lawn, where the family portrait was taken five years ago, now amid the unwitnessed licentiousness, the only person nearby lies sleeping, Elena is sleeping on the lawn and inside her names and stories spin, and in one of those simultaneously possible wakeful times, in the quiet and carefully stored time of shame, right at that moment she opens her eyes.

Angel Igov is a Bulgarian writer, literary critic, and translator. He has published two collections of short stories, and his first collection won the Southern Spring award for debuts in fiction. Igov has also translated books by Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan into Bulgarian. He is currently getting his PhD in European Literature.

Angela Rodel is the translator of The Apocalypse Comes at 6 P.M. by Georgi Gospodinov, Party Headquarters by Georgi Tenev, Thrown into Nature by Milen Ruskov, and 18 % Gray by Zachary Karabashliev. She was awarded a 2010 PEN Translation Fund Grant for her translation of several stories from Tenev’s Holy Light .