The Sister from Bihać
When a parcel for her husband comes back from Munich marked recipient unknown, Nevresa gets on the night bus and does not tell him she is coming.
Menu
150 longer stories
Page 4 of 5
Stories of six to nine minutes, for an evening with time for a whole plot. Newest first.
When a parcel for her husband comes back from Munich marked recipient unknown, Nevresa gets on the night bus and does not tell him she is coming.
Walking home from a dinner where he spoke about humanity, a Tuzla director stumbles on the wedding of his junior clerk and decides to go in for five minutes.
On a rainy drive through the Sutjeska canyon a retired general stops at an inn to warm up, and the owner calls him by a rank no one has used in thirty years.
For six years Naida has eaten the pie Vahid's mother sends every Monday to a lonely colleague in Sarajevo. Then comes a message that his mother has died.
While she waits for news of the twin brother the sea took off Klek, Armina writes love letters in Neum for a singer who cannot even spell I love.
Omar has never run, but he installed a running app for his wife's sake. That is where he noticed her Tuesdays last fifty-three minutes longer than her training.
The owner of an old Sarajevo publishing house loves her editor but is too proud to have him. Nor will she let another woman have him, until a letter is typeset.
In Sarajevo, Jakov plays his own reckless brother Iskren, and his friend Alen keeps a sick cousin for every Sunday. Then two women want no one but Iskren.
For years a Zenica family has lived on the hope of a rich uncle in Australia. On the Korčula ferry, the father orders five coffees and returns without them.
After the funeral in Bugojno, three grown children sit down in their father's room to decide which of them will take their mother. No one thinks to ask her.
As the families meet before the wedding, Inela's mother and Emrah's father recognize each other, and the couple learns their wedding began back in high school.
For fourteen years a Travnik seamstress waits for her fiancé working in Germany. A week before the wedding she overhears a talk that was not meant for her.
For their fiftieth anniversary a retiree from Doboj takes his wife to Neum, where her old flame from 1973 waits on the promenade, every hair still on his head.
A court sign language interpreter has lent her voice to others all her life, until a deaf ceramicist from Baščaršija asks what she wants to say.
Coming home from Mostar, a high official's wife meets a young officer. Sarajevo forgives her a lot, but not that she does not hide whom she loves.
Every night, once her husband is asleep, Nadira goes to the window over a narrow Mostar street, and when he asks why, she says she gets up for the nightingale.
Summer in Blagaj, by the Buna spring: a Zagreb architect meets siblings from Malmö, and the girl who is someone new each day falls in love faster than he does.
When a doctor pronounces Grandma Hanifa dead at midnight, by dawn her son and his wife move her clock and chest, and a son-in-law arrives with a tape measure.
Amila and Edvin grew up on two sides of a bricked-up door, in families silent for twenty-seven years, and one night they agree to meet by the river.
Every morning at five, unloading crates at Markale, Ramiz looks up at a lamp on the third floor, where the woman he once asked to marry him sits.
Selver puts on his best suit and crosses the stream to propose to the neighbor's daughter, but before he can ask, a fight breaks out over the walnut tree.
For four months Ismet has counted the days to his wife's return from America. The plane lands on time, but Senija is last out, ninety minutes late, and changed.
At a seminar on inner peace, Father met a mentor who soon moved into the guest room. Now the mentor wants Father's daughter and the house on Mejtaš.
At the Kupres mowing fair a drunk mower sold his wife and baby for five hundred marks. Twenty years later he is mayor, and a market woman remembers.
For their grandfather's eightieth birthday, a grandson buys an ancestry test so the family can laugh at the sultan's gardener. Nobody expected the result.
The doctor's wife in Maglaj buys beautiful things on installments and dreams of Italy, while the pharmacist across the street notes every van at her door.
Alisa and Matea fall for two different Tonis in the same spring and turn it into a joke. Then they book dinner for four by the Neretva, Saturday at eight.
An uninvited guest comes to the fiftieth birthday of the man everyone calls the only honest minister, carrying a letter twenty years old.
While her husband is at a fair in Vienna, Meliha signs for a letter from the bank and learns their house in Zenica is pledged for something she never knew of.
Four times a day Ivona leads tourists across the Old Bridge and never looks down. The diver who waits on the parapet every morning was the first to notice.