Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Quiet Flows the Una

adults took on its contours of earnest. Back then, the world was created anew every morning. Buildings fitted together again at right angles, roofs came down to land on the houses, and double windows returned from their cosmic journeys full of frost from having been at altitudes of over ten thousand metres. Willows, elders, alders and aspens sprang up again every morning on the banks of the Unadžik. Točile and the other hills rose up out of the ground on the fine line between night and day, taking up their established geographical positions. At night, bed is the only thing that’s not an illusion, and if a person were able to be awake and asleep at the same time they would see myriad people in their

river’s opaque green there, grey-hued from overnight rain, and only Sead saved me from drowning. It was April, and the water was high and freezing cold. Fish could be caught with angleworms. After that near drowning, mortality settled into me like an old man into a freshly whitewashed flat with a view of the sea. My childhood friend Sead survived the war but was killed in an accident like many other hardened veterans in the first years of peace. I saw smoke from my Grandmother’s house and we went down the narrow stairs next to the Harbašes’ house, where I loved to study the slimy orange slugs on the mossy wall in the early mornings, before the world of

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