The Morning Was an Eye

In the collection of short prose by Igor Beloded, there are stories with an unconventional set of characters: a dying cat; a pensioner living on malice and hatred as fuel; a teacher with dementia; an immigrant from the red-light district; a girl in a destructive relationship with her father; a pathologist; a person confronted by their own doppelgänger. 

They all seem to be in a narrow gap between two alternatives: grief and happiness, sanity and insanity, life and death. 

"The warm September light masked the ugliness of old age, blurred its figure, and seemed to bring the white-sodalite sky closer to the pupils, so that they narrowed into thick horizontal lines, floating like branches in the blue sclera. 

"For whom? For those who love contemporary prose, written in a now classical canon: simultaneously modern and following modernist traditions. "The morning was an eye, the mouth — tattered clouds, rise, do not be afraid, scarlet nails on fingers — a guarantee of easy behavior, what if the tape gets chewed — back and forth — how old are you? seventeen? — mouth, white chalk, before the yawn of fear, as if someone is afraid since Eos herself — bureaucratic curly, he said, an eyebrow flowed away like a caterpillar, in the soul on the mirror he drew lapwings, understood birds, it seemed to her he was older by time."