TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

By Remote Means (short story) By Danutė Kalinauskaitė Translated from Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris

“Let her be happy that someone still visits,” said the older one as they snuck up the steps. She lived on the second floor of an old, wooden apartment building with a moaning staircase. She climbed down them backwards, holding onto the railing. The image of her walking backwards… It seems that a person moves forward, but in reality – it ’s all backwards. She moves towards her end because the front for such people has already come to it ’s end. The two of them ran up, well – gamboled more like it, quick like squirrels – holding carefully, one to the railing, one to the walls, so that the stairs wouldn’t squeak. When they snuck into the kitchen, they found her in the depths of the room, in the dense clutter of things and patterns, with a hanging carpet in the background picturing deer, bent over by her bed, rummaging about. She had slept there alone for many years now. She covered her bed by day in a curtain of tulle, and placed on top of it a doll with dusty curls. The older one knew where she kept her money, for, with an idea from the spiritus movens, the rogue had hidden in the canopy of a maple tree opposite the kitchen window and worked out that if 69