“Blemished” by Syed Mustafa Sarfraz E-Book

Syed Mustafa Sarfraz

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A tale of slumbering emotions, awakened by a series of sudden events. The genre is fairytale and the use of puppets is symbolic. It's a journey into the inner volcanoes of a man.

Leseprobe

Syed Mustafa Sarfraz

“Blemished” by Syed Mustafa Sarfraz

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Blemished

Blemished

By: Syed Mustafa Sarfraz

Szymon Kowalski woke up from his perilously disturbed sleep at the crack of the dawn, and like every day, he thought it was middle of the night. By the time he recovered from his daily bout of whooping cough, he knew it was time to get up. One look at the archaic wooden planks of his annoyingly low ceiling was enough to tell him that the sun had risen. The ephemeral dance of the nascent sun rays on his ceiling was his first sight of the day since ages. “I have an hour before the children reach the market square” he said to “Kuro”; his dark brown, semblance of a dog. Kuro kept his head on the floor, not even lending a glance to his shabby looking master. Ah! monotony renders all creatures indifferent. “Wake up!” he said turning his melon like white haired head towards his old saddle bag and slowly walked into the washroom, not expecting an answer from the bag.

Kowalski dragged his living corpse on the street leading to the market square, Kuro followed. Their shadows on the thick blanket of snow, trailed behind them. The dog and his master both looked like old hunchbacks from their shadows. Kowalski’s face was whiter than the snow and devoid of expressions. His eyes, though, were piercing and mirrored his jumbled thoughts. He was 79 years old, but no record could confirm that. He had just been counting years from his 6th birthday when his mother gave him a hand sewn sweater with the number “6” embroidered on the cuffs. He was 15 when he joined his father at work at his forge. They were blacksmiths, the only ones in this small town since centuries and centuries were what had gone by while he was working in the forge, so he used to think. 10 years ago, one night he closed the furnace and never went back to the forge. The inferno in his heart, he thought, was as close as he could be to fire now. Losing his sons to the war and his wife and only daughter to the plague, he was no less of a furnace himself. His life crumbled right in front of him but he could never get himself to cry. Or perhaps his tears flowed inwards. Strange things they are; tears. They never made his eyes wet but carved a desert out of his old pair of lips, parched and barren.

None of the shops was open when Kowalski reached the market square except for the bakery owned by “Fhilipe” and the butchery of his comrade “Gustav”. The butchery was Kowalski’s amphitheatre. The seat of his self taught artistic performance. A dismal feat, to say the least. But he wasn’t luring the connoisseurs, never played to the gallery. His audience was village children and to them, he was nothing short of a maestro. Without changing his story one bit over the years, he had been pulling kids to his show like moth to a flame. Children attending his daily performance were on the fence, age wise. A little too young to be admitted to school and old enough to be forcefully retained in-doors. So every six months or so, his spectators would change when a number of them were put to a better use in the school. Still, retaining a crowd for over six months with exactly the same performance was a trick known only to Kowalski. And his show was not free, well almost! He would accept any coin of any denomination as an entry fee, even vegetables, bread and old shoes or clothing. Gustav was his friend and sort of a business partner as well. He had given him one of his old meat dicing tables and a small place on the front corner of his shop to put up his somewhat of a stage. Needless to say that his business benefited from the show since a lot of mothers would come looking for their kids and many of them ended up buying one thing or another from his butchery.