Excerpt from Bolla by Pajtim Statovci, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Girl and It

For almost a year it hasn't felt sunlight on its skin, only the cold walls of its cave, which it scratches and gnaws incessantly, nervous and restless, its claws and teeth ground and blunt; it cannot distinguish night from day, sleep from wake, its wings from the pitch darkness, or its calloused body from the stones and boulders with which from force of habit it exchanges pleasantries.

They tell its story in grim tales that frighten little children. Finish your dinner, it loves leftovers, they say, it will think you are its friend, and while you are asleep it will steal in like a breeze through the window or rise up like steam through the floorboards, so slowly that you won't even notice, it will climb into your bed and quietly lie down next to you, then it will press its forked tongue in through your nostrils, your mouth, and your ears and out through your eyes, and with that you will die and won't live to see the following morning. Don't talk back to your parents, don't be selfish, vain, lazy, greedy, envious, don't lie, because it will appear and eat you alive, swallow you like a marshmallow.

It lives in the judgments that the enraged hand down to one another, the words used to describe the stubborn and the agitated, the resentful and bitter, and it lurks on the paths we tread alone, where the rivers meet and the current is at its most treacherous, in abandoned houses, uninhabited forests and dales, on lonely mountains whose tall, icy summits pierce the clouds like balloons.

For one day a year it is allowed out of its cave, always in the springtime, at sunrise, when the trees stand straight and the fields have begun to grow new hide. On that day it has a set of borrowed wings, and it is called a kulshedra, but on all other days it has a different name. It is said that while it is free it destroys everything it sees, that it strikes the woods ablaze, emptying the towns, razing everything the people have created in the preceding year. After this, it begins looking for somewhere suitable to nap; it visits the sea, the land, and the heavens, and after finding an agreeable place it sometimes forgets where it has come from, where it resided only a day earlier, how many people it has just killed, the guilty and the guiltless, and even sings in a voice hoarse with allure.

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One year, as it rocked carefree on a branch, it felt a pebble strike its side. It boomed like thunder and disappeared from sight in the blink of an eye.

"Who is there?" came a bright voice from the mouth of a girl wrapped in a bearskin standing at the foot of the tree.

In a flash, it darted down from the sky and grabbed the girl, wrapped itself around her body, and held her face close to its own, ran its tongue across her eye sockets, which were as empty as the pockets of the dead.

"Do you know what I am, you silly little girl?" it asked.

"No," the girl replied and began to giggle. "I am blind."

"That tickled me, by the way," she said and continued chuckling. "You are very strong," she said as it tightened its grip. "I wish I was too."

"Aren't you afraid of me?" it asked.

"Afraid?"

"Yes."

"Of course I'm not afraid of you," the girl replied, playfully tapped its hide, unable to appreciate its immensity, and laughed again. "And it's not very polite to call me silly when we don't yet know each other. I might be blind, but I'm very clever."

"Really?"

"Yesss!"

All it could do was join her chuckling; it lowered the girl to the ground, and when it was about to leave, the girl reached out her left hand and grabbed it by the end of the tail.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Away," it replied, wriggled free of the girl's grip, and twisted into an attacking position, its hide covered in gleaming scales and crinkles, its mouth like a loaded weapon, ready to bite the girl's arm off as punishment for her impudence.

Excerpted from Bolla by Pajtim Statovci. Copyright © 2021 by Pajtim Statovci. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.