Category: Short Stories

Manchmal, wenn das Licht goldig ist vom Sommer, und die länger werdenden Schatten der Dämmerung die letzten Sonnenstrahlen aus den Strassenrinnen waschen, während der Wind etwas stärker weht und es nach frisch geschnittenem Gras riecht, und du schon bald ins Bett musst, obwohl du gerne noch über tausend Träume nachdenken würdest, dann hörst du das…

She was almost indistinguishable from the dark, and the only reason that Harold noticed her was the gold of her wrist watch flaring up when she moved her arm. Other than that, she was completely still, standing in his back garden and looking up at the house, at the window, at him behind the window….

The cottage was lying still and dark. Nothing stirred, aside from the moonbeam sweeping over my blanket infinitesimally slow, and the hands of the alarm clock on the strange bedside table. They showed 2:16 but I couldn’t have known, because I was asleep. But while I slept, something funny happened: I grew 10 feet tall…

Dieser Text wurde bereits auf der Seite des Aargauer Literaturhauses publiziert, er ist entstanden während derTextstatt 2020. Natürlich habe ich sie nicht mehr gefunden. Solche Dinge passieren nur in Büchern, und nicht mal da immer. Herumgeirrt bin ich, durch die Altstadt, vorbei an den Läden und dem Park, habe in die Gesichter der Menschen geschaut,…

The quickly darkening city spread out before her like a unidimensional platform, only punctuated by the lit windows of the tall office blocks, the street lamps and the light garlands of station inns and all the other light seeping out of every imaginable corner onto the dark plain. Light was what moulded the scene, what…

The fog was weighing down heavily on the little town of Ypsilanti. The people of Ypsilanti had been taught, by now, not to linger on the streets after dark and to do their business in daylight whenever possible. They knew that when dusk swept across the streets to rinse out the last rays of sunshine…

The day started with 120 birds falling from the sky. It looked like a stupendously horrid miracle; 120 birds flying one moment and dropping from the heavens like stone the next. The people driving on the road beneath stopped their cars by the curb and got out to come to the rescue, they ran onto…

Heute gibt’s zwei Blog-Beiträge, denn dieser zählt nicht wirklich, da er bereits anderweitig publiziert wurde. Trotzdem, hier ist mein Beitrag für den Schreibwettbewerb “Text des Monats” des Literaturhauses Zürich zum Thema “Schneefallgrenze steigend”: Es ist mitten in der Nacht und ich rüttle meine Kinder wach, schnell, schnell, wir müssen los, es ist Zeit, wohin denn,…

Ohne grosses Aufhebens war sie manchmal da und manchmal nicht. Ich machte mir nicht viel daraus, viele Menschen sind manchmal da und manchmal nicht, ein paar Menschen sind wohl gar nie richtig da, wenn ich mir das recht überlege. Aber sie war manchmal da. Dann ging sie auf ihren Stelzenbeinen vorbei an uns allen und…

The house was empty, as it had been for years. A thin shingle of light came unbidden through a crack in the blinds into the otherwise dark room. It was a sombre darkness, full of half-shadows and dense with words never spoken, bottled up in this kitchen for years. The light ate its way across…

The sheer magnitude of a summer in New York City threatened to swallow me whole in late August of ’98. Instead of going out for eggs on toast on Saturday mornings and hanging around Central Park late Friday evenings and generally having a damn good time of it – instead of all those things I’d…

There is a fox, he’s sly and snouty, he wanders the woods every night around two. With all that he knows and all that he is, he goes along the muddy paths, moonlit silence looming over him, listening out for a neigh or a meow or a silent woof or any other animal’s sound. He…

Her body was a golden string, hanging upon the last thread. Eyes sunken and sallow, nothing of the old glory left. Black shadows hid in the ruins of her face where there used to be rosy cheeks and dust and debris settled on her head as if she was a statue of herself, a copy…

She had never been so cold before, in all her eight, short years of living. She couldn’t really wrap her head around the mind-freezing coldness that started to nestle itself into her very bones. The numbness was not all that uncomfortable, though, she almost liked the sleepiness of her feet, the tickling. It was so…

There are exactly nine ghosts in this house. They are all real, even though you cannot see them. On days where the sun warms the brown bricks of the stately home and her rays are breaking through the rounded high windows you can almost adumbrate them, each one in her window, an apparition paler than…