TWO LINES ONLINE: December 2011

This month at TWO LINES ONLINE we offer two pieces of fiction: Straight Lines by Yuan Qiongqiong, translated from the Taiwanese by Kevin Hsu, and How I Started Shouting in My Sleep by Miljenko Jergović, translated from the Croatian by Stela Tomasevic and David Williams. The latter is from the book Mama Leone, which will be published in full by Archipelago Books in 2012.

Here's a quote from Straight Lines to get you started:

Whenever she felt her mind was in disarray she would began drawing straight lines. It had been about four or five months since this began. Whenever she began to feel balled up, she would find a piece of paper and, with great care, began drawing straight lines. Holding the pen, she made a line straight across, leaving a trail of a long, somewhat quivering and crooked line. Even those quivering lines could calm her. She was drawing straight lines. Without distraction, she stared at her pen, connected to her wrist and her palm, as if it were a slender fingertip that had sprouted from the extremity of her body and flesh, leaving trails of long, frail moan-like lines. Of course, only ink flowed from out of the pen's tip, black ink, but she would always feel as if something would flow, too, out of the inside of her body, something vital, black, which evidently was her blood. Perhaps the blood inside of her had two colors, red and black, like some sort of cocktail, with a red layer and a black layer next to each other, never mixing, as if they had talked it over one with the other, to follow their own paths, only barely touching. Yes, she firmly believed that these two kinds of blood must flow through her body, the black being from him, having been polluted by him. Therefore when she drew straight lines and watched the black lines frailly but firmly trickling out from the extremity of her body, she would feel an indescribable sense of liberation, and an indescribable sense of joy.

She had never done this in front of him. She could not do anything else simultaneously while she was talking to him. She had to really concentrate, like if she did not focus all of her attention, the entire world would gradually, like liquid, melt and seep away . . .

And here's one from How I Started Shouting in My Sleep:

Throughout the summer and autumn, while he was getting ready to die, Grandpa kept uttering his last words. To Isak Sokolovski, his bridge partner, he said: “I know each and every card, and that is why I’m leaving.” He spun his hat on his index finger, cleared his throat for the last time in Isak’s life and left. He said to Grandma: “You sleep, I’m fine. I’ve been fine for a long time now.” She could not sleep a wink again until the day he died. He said to Mom: “There’s no one left, just the two of us and darkness.” Then, he promptly died. Mom closed his eyes, and wrote the words down on a box of laxatives. I was at the seaside at the time, with my Aunty Lola, Grandma’s sister. I marked a cross on my calendar next to the date. It’s only then that Grandpa’s death became real. Actually, no, I did it so they would realize that I knew my Grandpa had died.

That day Aunty Lola made some cakes, put an entire plateful before me, sat across from me, placed her elbows on the table and said: “Eat, my child.” I kept eating, afraid that she would tell me that Grandpa had died . . .