Six Micro Stories
Sisyphus Writes in His Diary
Never mind me, I was sentenced to this. It’s the boulder I don’t understand.
Recall
A month later a letter arrived from the manufacturer: an apology for a malfunction in the button that switches the robotic baby to sleep mode. The new parents decided not to send their son back to the factory. They’d gotten used to singing him a lullaby every night.
The Visit
The time traveler returned to the hospital again, to spend the night at his mother’s bedside. But there was no space left in the room—they were all there. He recognized himself from the year 1990, and himself from 1994, and even himself from ten years in the future. His elderly father came out to the hallway to greet him and said, “Thanks for coming, but I can’t tell anymore—what year are you from?” No paradox is truer than death.
Time
After the death of her parents, while packing up their house, she found a binder in the attic, in it a picture of a moon she’d painted as a child. She added digits. Then hands.
Love Story
“I am a windmill,” said the windmill. “Maybe you’ll know: was I always a windmill?” “I got lost in the world. I don’t even remember who I am,” answered Don Quixote. “Let’s fight.”
How to Propose via Instagram
I have no idea (maybe something with a ring, a cake, and a bokeh filter), but in spring 1945, as he invaded Berlin with the Red Army, my grandfather, Arcady, decided to ask for my grandmother’s hand. At the time, she was busy sewing sails onto Russian fighter jets, far away in the Ural Mountains. All my grandfather had to do was spray graffiti onto the wall of the burning Reichstag: “Rosa, will you marry me?” As fate would have it, a military photographer took a picture of the graffiti, which was published two weeks later, on May 13, 1945, in one of the back pages of the legendary magazine Ogoniok. My grandmother recognized my grandfather’s handwriting immediately, and said (only to herself, for the time being), “I always knew he was a nut case. Well, why not.”
