If you want to purchase the copyrights for the book Wariograf. Opowiadania (Polygraph. Short Stories), published in Warsaw, Poland, in 2023, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Polish publisher, Wydawnictwo Anagram (Anagram Publishing House), at:
anagram@adres.pl
Below, you can find one of my stories from Polygraph. Short Stories (Warsaw, 2023):
Tomasz Krakowiak
Autumnette
The weather sliced the air like a sleek blade, separating August’s heat waves from September’s downpours. Just yesterday, you were riding bikes, catching sunbeams, and, in your naivety, thinking that surely there was, oh my, so much summer left. And today, with an ‘aw,’ you had to welcome a temperature drop of a dozen or so degrees, scattered showers, and forecasts saying this is it for the coming week. Grey clouds, clouds with a dashed line of rain, three diagonal lines of rain under a large cloud, and the most depressing – a Celsius graph, like a cross-section through a lowland landscape. Constant, which yesterday and the day before resembled more of a cardiograph printout. The mornings may have been cool – plowed through by the desert of August – but the afternoons allowed for wading in pure sunshine, in orange warmth. And now, suddenly, that’s that. Meteorological autumn hits the most sensitive of us. Meteorological autumn came so appointedly that other seasons shook the treetops in disbelief – spring with lilac, summer with linden, and winter with spruce. Meteorological autumn said: ‘Aha, you’re mine now.’
And yet you harbored dreams in the secrecy of your hearts that this year the Polish autumn would have a nickname: ‘gold.’ But it won’t be gold, dear goldies – neither silver nor copper. Neither noble nor semi-precious. It will be heavy, hefty, staunch, and scattered. It will be cold, metal-like, rusty, and a mustard-gone-bad type of color. It will reign with every realm of rain. So, get ready. Reach for scarves, hats, coats, and jackets. Warm shoes, long socks, bloomers, and long johns. Get your flipped-inside-out-by-summer-storms umbrellas fixed. Buy Wellington boots because last year’s are either holey or mouse-infested. Get your cloaks and jackets out of the cubbyholes. Many battles await you, yet your stamina and chances are slim. Many rains await you, and yet your skin is unseasoned, full of freckles from the sun. Cold days await you – that’s what you’re most afraid of. You hide under blankets, in fleeces, with a cup of strong tea, coffee with honey, or cocoa. You call in sick, come down with a cold. You eat sweets in hope that it will help. But there is no help for you. You think you will find solace in the colors of leaves, in bowls of fruit punch, long evenings by candlelight, readings of your favourite novels; in pumpkins, apples, pears, plums, nuts, and blackberries – no way have you got that thing coming. The leaves will rot, the jars will unseal, the evenings will darken, the novels will weaken, and the fruit will sicken you. Not to mention the blackberries. And just wait for the calendar and astronomical autumn. This is just the beginning. But few of you will last that long. Most will already be on the gray side of being, with eyes fixed on the ceiling, awaiting sunbeams glare through the glass.
tłumaczenie/translation: Emilia Staniek