Featured magazines and articles
Lex Shramko has been featured in various anthologies and magazine articles, some of which contain excerpts from I Can Speak For Us Now.
The Last Day of the War
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280 Words
“I held her obituary in my hands, late at night at that portentous midnight hour, and I was in shock. And yet I wanted to stay right there, suspended in a state of unreality where all my mother’s stories were not only true, they also had an echo. Someone else grew up with these stories, too.”
Unfamiliar Gifts
“’I am so sorry,’ she repeats, breathing the words out with each exhale. She looks stunned, and I want to soothe over her exposed parts. I also feel—I think—relief. As if a dam has been erected and there is a small platform where I can move safely, even if only a few feet in either direction, while I watch the torrent rush by. But these waters are slowing down, stilling into gentle pools of invitation, and I don’t know if I want—or even how—to test their waters.”
Existence
“Minutes passed as the brothers rocked on the balcony, their sorrow radiating out from their ledge, across the boulevard and through the bare tree branches and up the concrete walls of the Derzhprom where it settled on the macaques’ window ledge. Leaning into each other, they also rocked, echoing the dance of grief on the balcony across the boulevard.”
Temporal
“I look at the paper in my hand, with her memories on one side, and history on the other side. Separate. Hauntingly un-braidable. Un-anchorable.”
Deaf Captain Wanted
A little speculative flash fiction fun.