The Town Drunk, January 2008

In The Town Drunk for January, 2008, “Panko” by Zdravka Evtimova weaves an interesting tale of a dead donkey whose meat has the magical ability to make even the most downtrodden woman appear “magnificent” to the (human) male asses that happen to be around.

The imagery of a man more devoted to his donkey than to his wife and daughter is disturbing. Evtimova, a Bulgarian native and literary translator, seems to be employing the techniques used by the likes of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Mikhail Bulgakov, a Russian language novelist and playwright, using magical realism to covertly illuminate a social situation over which the common citizen has little or no control.

“Panko” is (gasp) literary fiction, the sort I’ve seen in The New Yorker. It is well-written and thought provoking, but any story that starts out with a woman describing her husband’s threat to slash her throat could never be funny, as far as I’m concerned. And when it ends with the same woman still with the same man, even less so.

“Naked Revenge” by Sonya M. Sipes begins with what appears to be a werewolf undergoing a transformation and ends with a suburban neighbor’s nightmare: living next to an unkempt lawn. But there is a twist at the end, and despite the were-molerat’s best intentions, once the moon is full, the sweet smell of revenge is in the air. Sipes lightened my mood a bit.