translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood
This translation first appeared in Books from Slovakia 2023.
Reprinted with permission of Slovak Literary Centre and Parthian Books.
My room is impossible to eat. So are my fingernails, all I can do is bite them and cry when I come home from school because they called me an ugly lesbo for no reason, surely all girls practise kissing on girls, but it’s worse when you’re the only one who’s ugly. They also call me a swot, but I don’t have to study, ever, I just remember everything. My grandpa says I have too many brain cells for a girl, he actually treats me like a boy, making me guns and getting me used to eating stewed blood when we make blood sausages. Stewed blood is easier to eat than my room, it’s also easier than eating myself, all of myself, from my cuticles right up to my ears, the kids at school say they are the size of dinner plates. I could write about this sort of stuff but I don’t, because I entered a writing competition and we were told that it’s not very original to write about being bullied at school, everybody writes about that, so I won’t. And another thing one of the judges told me was: I once read a book that began with the sentence, I got up in the morning and cut off my hands, that’s exactly the effect your story had on me.
I woke up in the morning and cut off my room but couldn’t eat it up, and my last milk molar fell out and rolled under the bed. I got up in the morning and cut off my room, then I cut off the school; luckily my grandpa taught me to use an axe to chop wood, though it was only small chunks of wood with a small axe. But I couldn’t eat the school either, only the vending machine spat out streams of melon and strawberry fruit strings, and Silvia came running out of the gym. Silvia is my only friend apart from Grandpa and Rumoš, she came and covered my head with her hands and looked daggers at the people who made me want to cut everything off, and then she looked daggers at me while chewing a melon fruit string.
Since Rumoš died, I don’t have anyone who can stand my jabbering, even Silvia says shut up and keep pedalling. But Rumoš died a long time ago, first a card came from the sanatorium and then Grandúpa slit the goat’s throat because there was no one to look after it, as that used to be Rumoš’s job. But his main job was to listen to me rabbiting on, everyone says That Tereza neveer stops jabbering, she talks nineteen to the dozen, and then they give me a hug. But I remember everything because I have too many brain cells for a girl, only one day I will go quiet and won’t say a word to anyone about anything.