Cover the spider with a small, shallow dish, such as a soap dish. Tilt the soap dish a little, and slip a piece of paper under it. Take the paper covered with the soap dish to a window. Carefully lift the soap dish and blow on the spider until it slides from the paper and out the window. Seventy percent of people who commit suicide by jumping from a high floor—I learned this from a study—feel remorse on their way down. I have no idea who volunteered to participate in this study, and at exactly which stage on the way down it was conducted. Aside from the method described here, there are many other ways to leave a small impression on the world.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay. Photo: Smadar Liani

Seven micro stories from “For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings”, at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, with illustrations by David Polonsky

“Q: What does flash fiction offer readers that slow fiction doesn’t?. A: Longing.”
More in World Literature Today.

And in those days the king ordered all his painters to paint the most beautiful map of the kingdom. He implied that he would grant complete artistic freedom: If the map of the neighboring kingdom from the east disturbed the composition, he said, have your way with its borders. The art critics of the neighboring kingdom were quick to report on this plot to their king. In response, he also ordered his painters to paint a map of his kingdom. When the first king learned that the king of the east was imitating him, he gathered some of his abstract painters and secretly ordered them to draw another map, this time of the neighboring kingdom. But even this secret leaked. Abstraction was common in the other kingdom as well. Legend says that many years later, in one abandoned museum not far from the border, the roof collapsed. And we could see the sky.

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From For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings. Translated from the Hebrew by Sacha Cold.

Art: Moran Shoub, The Ancient Sea. Acrylic and paper cutting in the “History of Europe”, July 2011. From the series Topographies in Books and Notebooks.

The truth of the matter is that the iPad did not save the short story, and in any case this was not the reason that one man, fed up with his life, jumped from the window of his apartment on a high enough floor. And then, in the middle of the journey to the sidewalk, he suddenly discovered he could actually fly. He began to hover above the city streets, and flew up and down and forgot that he had just jumped from the window to die, and even cautiously approached the utility lines (without which the world is demilitarized from sadness). After a few minutes, when he turned in the general direction of his window, he could no longer fly. He started to fall, managed only to think he should ascend one last time, but it was no use, he spun through the air, plummeting and crashing on the road just a few minutes’ walk from his home. What a brief and bizarre kind of grace this was. But grace nonetheless.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay.

Max Brod once dreamed of an angel who had only a right wing. The angel knocked on Brod’s door and asked where Kafka lived. Brod gave the angel directions, and thought in his dream that he had never in his life seen anything as terrifying as this one-winged angel. The next day Brod met Kafka. Kafka told him that on the previous night he had dreamed of an angel with no wings, who asked for Max Brod’s address.

From Blue Has No South, Clockroot Books.

• Publishers Weekly
• The Millions (A Year in Reading: Kevin Brockmeier)
• National Post
• Three Percent
• Review of Contemporary Fiction
• The Arts Fuse
• The Complete Review
• Jewish Book Council
• Broken Pencil
  

About my new “Facebook book” and social literature, at The Outlet, the blog of the wonderful Electric Literature magazine >>>

The full book in Hebrew >>>

Samples in English, via Electric Literature, translated by Jessica Cohen >>>

Once upon a time there was a writer who published a memoir of his childhood in Buchenwald. This was the first time that he’d written about the Holocaust. All his life he wrote love stories (and in all of his love stories it rained endlessly, on almost every page, so that it was possible to close the book and still smell the odor of damp earth from within the leather binding, but this is another matter). Only after a few years, on his deathbed, he admitted that the whole story was nothing more than a fabrication. In those days he was not in Buchenwald, but in Auschwitz. And only for a year.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay.

My great-grandmother once shut a book by Tolstoy so hard that a spark came from its pages, and the spark climbed up the curtains, and ignited a fire, and our summer house went up in flames. I did not inherit this talent of my great-grandmother’s, but once I did try to write a story in which everything took place in reverse: the summer house goes up in flames, the curtain burns, a spark catches in the pages of Anna Karenina, and so on: my great-grandmother shut the book so hard that the fire was extinguished.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay. Art: Lior Reizel. Mixed technique on canvas (detail).