Forty-five short stories. Lots of perspectives, more or less loosely connected, yet forming a distinctive whole. Some are boundless, some breathless, some weightless; others turn inward toward memory and personal experience. Together, they look at how our society treats its children, at efforts to combat an urban rat infestation, and at a long-forgotten message from one’s youth. They explore the anonymity of urban neighborhoods and critically revisit past conversations with a father, while also asking what place remains for lyrical sensibility in today’s world.

This book is available from Amazon US, and from Amazon UK, or also from Amazon DE as hardcover, paperback, and eBook.

The Drinker

“Notorious” isn’t quite the right word, and yet I can’t think of a better one to describe how well known he was in our village. He never missed a celebration, and every evening he was easy to find; all I had to do was walk the few steps across the main square to the wine tavern. In the midst of a group of cheerful farmers and chatterboxes he held forth with his stories and emptied one glass after another without showing the slightest effect. He had held the state record, as they called it, for decades, because no one could come remotely close to keeping up with him when he guzzled wine by the liter and even downed shots of hard liquor. People had stopped betting long ago, and so the village boys simply enjoyed watching him continue to talk and laugh in a steady voice while they themselves could scarcely feel the ground beneath their feet, whether because in their drunkenness they had lost all sensation in their legs or because they had already toppled to the floor with their own personal final glass.

I had never witnessed any of his escapades, but everyone in the village passed on what they had heard in the tavern the day before, including stories about the drinker’s strange habits whenever he wasn’t with us joking with the others. At first, I had learned, he had simply grown bored with consuming nothing but liquid drinks and then not feeling the slightest effect from the alcohol they contained, though he had long since drunk his fellow drinkers under the table one after another. So he got it into his head to try other things. Fruit first, the kind that grew in the fields, then tubers and various vegetables, because he was afraid of overdoing it if he changed too quickly. To be able to drink fruit and vegetables in the literal sense, he had fashioned a very special drinking straw, which, when he was in an exceptionally good mood, he would display shyly and furtively—never in the tavern, always on a small hidden field path, and only to people he considered especially trustworthy.

He had begun what he called the harder stuff when consuming those soft and very juicy foods gradually seemed too tame to him and there was no prospect of quenching his ever more insatiably demanding thirst. Rumor had it that a beech tree whose trunk he had leaned against for a rest was the first. More playfully than with any real conviction, he had placed the straw against the bark and sucked, simply because he could think of nothing better. Somewhat surprised by the unexpectedly sweet taste, he eventually kept sucking until nothing remained of the beech, and two days later he had to explain sheepishly to the owner of that patch of land what had become of his fifty-year-old tree—which by then bore, more than six feet above the ground, a little heart and the carved names of the owner himself and his first love.

After that came the stories that over time developed into the myths of our village. Drinking streetlamps at the onset of dusk still counted among the easy exercises, for he much preferred to go after the roof tiles of houses, slurping away just enough to peer with one eye into the bedrooms and watch the sometimes colorful activity inside until the residents caught on and drove him off under threat of a severe beating—and, only when that failed, simply stopped having sex with each other. With particularly brazen delight he drank the caps and hats of his fellow villagers whenever they had annoyed him or simply happened to cross his path unexpectedly. When a chained guard dog disappeared from one of the farms during the night, many people argued that he should be banished from our region forever, but as far as I remember it was never proved that the drinker had definitely been behind the animal’s disappearance.

During his nightly appearances at the wine tavern, he enjoyed describing his consumption of numerous exotic beverages, ranging from the Reed Sparrow Pond at the neighboring and long-abandoned manor house to electric pasture fences and moldy boat keels, all the way to the proud locomotive in the local-history museum, whose deep-breathing chuff most of the farmers still remembered fondly from childhood. His great dream, which swiftly mutated into a central goal in life, was born, however, when one evening after a cheerfully spent summer day he turned his drinking straw toward the sky and, with one deep, hearty pull, sucked a plump cumulus cloud from the firmament. His great dream, he told us with utterly glassy eyes and a voice struggling not to lapse into speechless rapture, was one day to take enough time to drink the full moon on a clear night from its northern to its southern pole without stopping even once. Afterward he would sit down, close his eyes, and, looking back on a fulfilled life, wait to see whether the moonlight regenerated.

A few days later he disappeared without saying goodbye, and everyone wondered where he might be roaming. As time went on, however, questions about the drinker became less frequent until they vanished altogether, and only the boys in the wine tavern still reminisced about the drinking contests that had been impossible to win. Everyday life had become a little duller.

But every time the moon was full, I sat on the doorstep and searched along its rim for a thin straw, no more than a line against the dark, at the other end of which the drinker would be sitting—the man who had left us long ago to fulfill a dream. For days he would not stop even once, until the ever-thinning crescent became a new moon and allowed him to close his eyes and wait for another full moon to grow.

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This book is available from Amazon US, and from Amazon UK, or also from Amazon DE as hardcover, paperback, and eBook.

Cover design by Klaus Ebner