No...el
A wall of dark smog, unbothered by the blueness of the sky and the spring birds singing, was hovering over the city landscape. He knew exactly how it would look like, he knew the shapelessness of the dark torrent directed by the wind, he knew the speed of its darkness covering the nearby neighborhoods, he knew how swiftly death spreads its word among the people of New York.
Every second felt like a prolonged heartbeat felt from within, from the room next to his heart. He didn’t have to spend extra seconds for putting the entire gear up, he was all set up, just needed to survive through these minutes of anticipation and then, act.
• Stay calm. Do not panic. Notify the Fire Department as soon as possible. Firefighters will be on the scene of a fire within minutes of receiving an alarm.
• Because flame, heat and smoke rise, generally a fire on a floor below your apartment presents a greater threat to your safety than a fire on a floor above your apartment.
• Do not overestimate your ability to put out a fire. Most fires cannot be easily or safely extinguished…
The protocols were clear, those were already in that immune chamber of his mind, out of which not a single line or a letter can escape anymore. He was mumbling the lines to himself with the one and only wish: “Let her know what to do, let the doctors know what to do”.
Norayr Manvelyan (b. 2000, Yerevan, Armenia) is a short-story writer in Armenian. His speakers are always self-critical as they are narrating the curious stories and the peculiar characters. Manvelyan’s inspirations are the people he has met on his life path and the experiences he shared with or the stories of which he has witnessed and heard about. Sincerity and music are cornerstones of the author’s prose work and especially poetry work. As an ultimate way of self-expression and introspection, Manvelyan gets exposed, almost naked against the whiteness of the paper, and dives into the depths of paper-ocean. “Writing is a perfectly rational process unless your pen is in your hand, then the pen takes you on a journey, and leads your hand in the unknown ways.” The poet believes in Love, the driving, creative and universal language that all the people have intrinsic knowledge of and can speak against all odds, Indifference, War and Hatred, and Beauty, the trace of Love in the physical and metaphysical reality we are living in.
With Love and Beauty.
