A long time ago, there once lived a husband with his wife. Every morning the husband put his wife up against the door, put an egg on her head and shot it with his rifle. The man’s wife to be sure was scared lest a bullet should hit her but she did not confess this to her husband. Seeing the difficult position she was in, she somehow managed to get the attention of an old wise woman and told the old hag everything.

Once there was a man that suffered from a sore old back and bad eyesight. It was more than he could bear, so he thought.

Dreams will stimulate my mind, and I’m trying to understand the state of internal and external peace, they find a direct reference to past and future. I do not have Present Time. I stayed there, on the the War.

The city which is not present on Earth! Did you hear of such? But I was there. The city of my love died. I went for a walk on the stranger for me streets of dead city. No, people were there. But there was not the soul. Not single soul.

In an old saklia (hut) there lived a poor man. He had three sons. Together they went to the mountains and brought down wood for the prince.

This is a reconstruction of the story, passed down by word of mouth, of how my ancestor survived our turbulent past, and how history lives on.

“Desert Mirages”, a short story by famous Chechen writer Taisa Irs. It was the only one translated story of the 2008 Short Story Competition at ShortStoryRadio.com webpage.