The latest issue of Apex Magazine has published the debut of Israeli author Michael Pevzner, short story Faithful City.
I’m not a music person. Father has all sorts of things in the house that can still play, and he listens to them on occasion, but I never cared. I have no need of borrowed emotions; my own are more than enough for me.
Yet a morning came when the orchestra sounded within me. It burst through the cobweb of my dream and I knew that it was something different. I couldn’t see it, I could only hear it, and I heard that it was calling me to it. I felt all of me drawn towards something greater than myself, something distant and beyond my comprehension, something I must become a part of.
In my dream I could fly. I had gossamer wings and these wings carried me upwards, above the tin tent, above the hydroponic farms and the rest of the settlement. I flew, led on by the sounds of the orchestra, not yet knowing myself where I was headed, but knowing with the utmost certainty that the orchestra was leading me to where I belong. I flew through the dust clouds, above the heaps of garbage that have flooded the world, towards the ruined buildings that towered on the horizon like the rotten teeth of a giant. I saw underneath me skeletons of cars and tractors, of trucks and of buses, and I flew straight through the shattered windows of colossal buildings. In one of them I saw a writing desk covered with dust and a shattered television set and a framed picture that lay on the desk, and I stopped for a moment to sweep the dust off the picture and saw the face of a woman smiling at me. – continue reading.
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