Trashbus E-Book

Renata Britvec

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 49

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Trashbus is a place where random objects, things unused, weird people and stories long forgotten live their peculiar lives. Anecdotes about a grandmother who once met the devil and a failed boat trip, a lost kitten and a wild dog, a gloomy hotel and a fortunate gypsy tell of people, lands, and lives that unfold their real madness apart from common clichés.

Leseprobe

For Tata and Mama, who fed and feed me stories. For Jürgen, because he knows why. For Maja, who read my stories and encouraged me to publish them. For all my people, whoever and wherever you may be.

Contents

How the Devil Once Paid My Grandma a Visit

Boat Trip Without a Cause

Early Frost

How My Uncle Met His Dog

Oh Jože

Wanna Play Frisbee?

Quench Your Thirst!

God’s Dogs

As the River Turned Red

Hotel Poseidon

New Year’s Surprise

The Gypsy’s Blessing

The Gypsy’s Blessing Pt. II

The American Traveler

How the Devil Once Paid My Grandma a Visit

My grandma is a sweet old lady. She lives in this tiny Bosnian village together with my uncle and spends most of her time in the garden. Besides from enjoying her time outdoors and taking care of my uncle’s various pets, she likes to garden. There’s peppermint growing, and cherry tomatoes, and all kinds of flowers like roses, begonias, hortensias, red and yellow gladiolas, some types of orchid, oleander, and grapevine. Up the hill in the more unkempt part of my family’s lot, my grandma grows giant cabbages, zucchini, peppers, big juicy tomatoes, strawberries, onions, potatoes and other vegetables. She waters the plants, clears them of weeds, talks to them and makes them feel comfortable.

On rainy days and in winter, she likes to watch Mexican telenovelas and some Turkish series. Sometimes she has coffee with the neighbors. She likes to eat candy and cake. And she loves lubenica – watermelon. When I was a child I used to persuade her to have a cigarette with her coffee because I thought it looked funny when she smoked. Most of the time, she had done me the favor. She’s physically fit, although she has slowed down quite a bit, and mentally she is stable even if she has weird thoughts sometimes, but I guess most old ladies have strange ideas every now and then.

So, a couple of years ago, one day in late summer, my grandma was sitting in the living room, knitting. The days were getting colder so she preferred to stay inside, but she kept the window tilted to have some fresh air. She concentrated on her knitting but every once in a while heard something, a crackling noise from next to the cupboard. At first, she thought it was nothing. But as the rustling sounds wouldn’t stop, she called my uncle and my grandpa, who was still alive back then, to tell them there was something wrong. The two men were irritated as nothing was to be heard and shrugged it off as the figment of an old lady's imagination. The rustling re-appeared after they had left the room and my grandma was getting nervous.

It was getting late and when it finally was time to go to bed, my grandma at first didn’t dare switch off the light. She sleeps in the living room; and she was scared the noises might come back. She became more and more tired though, forgot about the sounds, turned out the light after all and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, my uncle and my grandpa woke up alarmed by my grandma’s screams of horror.

“Đavo sjedi na ormaru i gleda u mene!” she was yelling.

“The devil is sitting on top of the cupboard and he’s looking at me!”

He supposedly had red, glow-in-the-dark eyes and wanted to steal my grandmother’s soul. My uncle and my grandpa couldn’t see him. Apparently, he had already vanished. They searched the cupboard and the whole of the room and couldn’t find anything or anyone. They decided to go back to bed, for if the devil really wanted to do business, he would return some other time. Grandma spent the rest of the night with the lights on, saying some prayers, because that surely wouldn’t do any harm.

The next day, my uncle was chatting with a neighbor outside in the garden, beneath the living room window, next to the big apple tree. The branches and leaves of the tree reach directly to the window, and if you want to close it, you have to move the leaves first, so they don’t get jammed. While my uncle was talking to the neighbor, he noticed some commotion in the treetop. He looked up and saw a squirrel squeeze through the tilted window and hop onto the crown of the tree.

Boat Trip Without a Cause

I was staying at my uncle’s place in Bosnia for ten days when my cousin decided to come and visit us for the weekend. My cousin is my uncle’s son, but he lives with his mother’s family in Serbia. It was really hot the weekend he came and we wanted to go swimming at a lake, but my uncle had a better idea. He told us about a boat he kept in the basement. It was supposed to be comfortable and super-fast. It had a motor so we could speed over the lake instead of just swim. It sounded like the RMS Queen Mary’s little sister.

The next day after breakfast we went to the basement to get the boat ready. My uncle pulled out the boat from the basement and we had a closer look. It was a rubber boat with some wood on the bottom to keep it stable, and it had a small outboard motor which my uncle had somehow managed to install. God only knows how he had come up with the idea and how he had succeeded with it.