Willa Chernov
Bio
Willa Chernov is a writer and translator living in New York.
Stories (13/0)
Shame
I never trusted myself to write my story, or even to tell it. But who knows when you might kick the bucket, especially when you’re sick. Shouldn’t you confide in someone? Shouldn’t you leave some kind of record behind, to make your mark? Jesus, too, was wary of writing things down. Not that I should be diagnosed with a Christ complex. I know I’m no great sacrifice.
By Willa Chernov2 years ago in Fiction
Clever Hans
The Hans Council, which included three zoologists, two psychologists, a circus trainer, a cavalry officer, and a Catholic as well as a Protestant priest, had been unable to disprove the rumor. Hans, a horse, could count. What’s more, he was able to answer sums, multiply, divide, and tell the date and time—all of which he communicated by tapping his front left hoof. These feats had been performed not only in collaboration with Hans’s trainer, Herr von Osten, but under experimental conditions as well, and to the great astonishment of Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in a demonstration in Berlin on August 23rd of 1904. Thus it was recommended at the highest levels of the Prussian state that a group of specialists convene to discover the full extent of the horse’s abilities.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Horror
home is memory
where do stories happen? she had an intimation, a sensation even, they happened behind the bridge of her nose. or maybe, she thought slipping fingers beneath sock to feel that bone that protrudes there, maybe they don’t happen at all, or the happening is the putting together and falling apart, the crack in the bedroom wall:
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Poets
The Theater
Although he’d said he was too busy, he decided to see a movie. Would she want to come? He went into the bedroom. She lay there on her back, one arm curled around her head, her mouth open. Better to let her sleep in. In fact, better to let her think he’d gone to work.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Fiction
The Bathhouse at Qusayr Amra
Al-Walid II, whose tastes were too peculiar to find expression in Damascus, turned to Qusayr Amra, his desert palace and bathhouse, to satisfy his eccentricities. Obscured from the critical gaze of zealots, in a kind of ritual exile, as he liked to think of it, he indulged in his lust for heat and human forms. And who could begrudge him for adorning the walls of his bathhouse with frescoes of unclad, high-breasted women—in the austerity of the desert, surrounded by measureless expanses of lifeless dust, no less?
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Fiction
The Messenger
It’s the wet season; an imperial messenger sails down the Chobe River with a parcel wrapped in tawny papyrus. The messenger scans the horizon with a blended sense of wonder and disappointment. As widely as the land stretches on either side, with its golden reeds and flowery hills, he is contained by the swollen banks of the somnolent river. Without the slightest effort, it seems, the river carries him on to his destination, to deliver his parcel to its destined recipient.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Fiction
The Tower
I brought you here to try a slice of my chocolate cake. Do not be deceived; the slap-dash smear of soft, buttery icing conceals dense layers of inscrutable depth and complexity. It is not, in other words, the signature of an amateur, or merely imitative, baker. This cake is a metaphor, from which we might borrow one decadent slice.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Fiction
The Hangman's Barn
I’m not one to hang myself half-seriously. On the contrary, I carefully planned the circumstances of my death; and while I did so, I did not anticipate how long it would take for death to finally come. And so I’m still here, hanging - obediently, rather as a dog waits at the end of its leash - for what seems an inordinate length of time.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Fiction
The Gift of a Notebook
Kindly reader, you must be tired by now, but permit me to tell yet one more story. It touches not only upon the work of a writer—who must constantly traffic in fleeting details and incidentals—but also upon the life of any person who day after day must remind themselves of a number of tedious objectives. Naturally, my story has to do with one’s most vital companion, the little black notebook. It is perfectly suited to life’s journeys, both within and without; hence St. George would find one just as handy to record his impression of the dragon’s mesquite breath as would St. Jerome, the scholarly saint, to record his latest clever translation of an ancient Greek poem.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Humans
On the Neretva
Capljina and Sarajevo, my hometowns, have to me become inseparable from the memories I have of my parents before the war; thus any recollection of the streets, monuments, and rhythms of those cities — to which I have not returned — will inescapably take the form of an elegy to them. The thought of returning, except in remembrance, has always troubled me.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Families
The Last Divination
I. My grandfather, before he was hit by a truck, used to tell me stories about our ancestors in the mountains. For millennia, he claimed, they raised sheep in the same valleys, drank water from the same wells, and practiced the same traditions. It was, according to him, an unforgiving life: sometimes it rained until their huts were swept away, or their sheep were devoured by wolves. But as there was hardly anything to take from these poor shepherds and farmers—and because the mountains were considered to be impassable—they were rarely visited by armies.
By Willa Chernov3 years ago in Families