Nora Nadjarian
Imagine a room that is moominesque. There are creatures in it who talk to each other with delicate words. One of them is hunched and old standing by a small window. It is snowing in the room and the tiniest of the creatures is making a snowman. The others are sitting at the table drinking hot cinnamon tea. It is snowing in the room and the tiniest of the creatures is humming a delicious tune, as delicious as white icing. When the creatures move, they make the sound of little trinkets shaken in a polished wooden box. The hunched old creature clasps her hands in joy or despair, nobody knows. The moon is the color of carrots. The snowman is ugly, misshapen like a mushroom, its face eaten by candlelight. A cup clinks on a saucer and life is very precise except one or two tiny brown crumbs on the tablecloth. I’ve dreamed all my life of this polite room filled with silence and little hiccup-chuckles. The snowman melts. Nobody moves or makes a sound.
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Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. Her work was published in Poetry International, The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Perverse, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Iktsuarpok is available from Broken Sleep Books.