A Day in the Country

A man and his children spend a day among nature with only each other for love and company:

“The beggar-girl runs behind the huts to the kitchen-gardens and there finds Terenty; the tall old man with a thin, pock-marked face, very long legs, and bare feet, dressed in a woman’s tattered jacket, is standing near the vegetable plots, looking with drowsy, drunken eyes at the dark storm-cloud. On his long crane-like legs he sways in the wind like a starling-cote.

“‘Uncle Terenty!’ the white-headed beggar-girl addresses him. ‘Uncle, darling!’

“Terenty bends down to Fyokla, and his grim, drunken face is overspread with a smile, such as come into people’s faces when they look at something little, foolish, and absurd, but warmly loved.

“‘Ah! servant of God, Fyokla,’ he says, lisping tenderly, ‘where have you come from?'”

Source: Classic Shorts
Published:
Length: 9 minutes (2,321 words)

Eyes of a Blue Dog

[Fiction] A man and woman encounter each other every night in their dreams:

“I said: ‘Sometimes in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that’s why you’re cold.’ And she said: ‘Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it’s as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It’s like- -what do you call it–laminated metal.’ She drew closer to the lamp. ‘I would have liked to hear you,’ I said. And she said: ‘If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you’ll hear me echoing. I’ve always wanted you to do it sometime.'”

Source: Classic Shorts
Published: May 8, 1978
Length: 11 minutes (2,797 words)