Kasia Buczkowska
Three Miniatures

“Lesson”

A cow stood on the grass. Grandma was milking the cow. The milk was flowing into the bucket. A fly was cruising around the cow. Granddaughter was chasing the fly with a birch branch. “Grandma, where is God?” “God lives in your heart and he will always whisper to you whenever you move away from him.” The cow was stretching its ear. “God is also in this grass, on which the bucket stands, and in this milk that fills the bucket to the brim, and in this cow that gives the milk, and everything wants to live its own life.” The cow nodded. The girl held the branch still. The fly bit the cow. The irritated cow swung its tail. Grandma knocked over the bucket. The milk spilled on the grass. “Nobody will drink milk today. Everything has its boundaries,” Grandma said. The cow nodded.

*

“Mansions”

“You could have been a diplomat, a businessman with a mansion, a doctor with a private plane, a banker, and you became a poet…” a father used to say to his son.

The father lived in a palace, had a fortune, but his heart was rather stingy and sad. He wished his son had his own palace, but the son loved life of a different kind.

“What an oaf.” The father did not consider writing poetry a worthy occupation.
A comfortable armchair, a costly suit, services and well-traveled roads would not suffice for the son. He fancied uncertainty, fortuity and risk. Surprises, not statistics.

“Father, I’m going to travel the world.”

“Off you go!” The father slammed a heavy door behind him.

In the countryside the son gathered gooseberries to earn a living. He wrote about rural life, about beauty and how he betrayed his love. When in a country of prosperity he became homeless, he wrote about things intangible that many feel, about his own and others’ wounds that do not bleed. About a night spent on the street, on a frozen bird for a pillow. About a happy coincidence.

When the son read his poems on TV, the father deemed writing poetry a worthy occupation. Now that he is no longer able to stroll his palace’s numerous chambers, he lies in bed and reads his son’s verses. What can a man smuggle to the other side of life but a few words.

*

“Heart Exam”

Hurriedly I moved away from a huge crane that was lifting iron beams in its teeth. I like to avoid construction scaffoldings, hammer drills, columns of steam belching from under the streets, buckets of concrete hanging in the air.
I was peeling an orange as I walked.

“Could you share a piece of your orange?” asked a man with bravura. His pants were densely mottled with paint. His foot in a heavy boot, with untied shoelace, rested on a hydrant. In this club pose, he smoked a cigarette nonchalantly.

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh, no, thank you,” he demurred with an easy smile.

“Here you are,” I said, stretching out my hand with the offering.

“Thank you, really. I just wanted to check the state of your heart.”

_ _

Kasia Buczkowska is a writer and translator in New York City, who writes
short fiction in Polish and English. She has published miniatures in Literary
Imagination and in Przegląd Polski, the cultural supplement to Nowy Dziennik
in NYC, to which she also contributes articles and reviews.

<< Back to Issue 15, 2012