When we got to the woods, feet swollen, clothes soaking, and noses infected by the virus, we knew that we must be no more than a mile away from her. Our watches had stopped, covered in rust as they were, and we had abandoned our supplies in the last parking lot with a pack of semi-unconscious consumptive deer. We knew we would not last much longer after we had touched their running noses, but we thought that seeing her would make everything else, including our piddling meaningless selves, look even more unimportant than they already felt. We had read about all that in our books, they taught us about her in school, even in Math class (and Math teachers can never lie, unlike History teachers), we had seen the stories in the newspapers, even Cosmo had a weekly column about the benefits to sexual life that seeing her would bestow upon our dried up respectful love. For an unbearably long period of time, the Directors, the Architects, the Experts, and the Concerned Citizens had been spreading rumors, secretively and conspiratorially whispering figures and names that could not quite sound right given the initially small size of the Project, drying their sweat off their large foreheads with their yellow and sickly looking handkerchiefs held by fat-fingered saussage-smelling hands that shook with trepidation.
For years and years, everyone had left her lying unfinished at the edge of the town; ragged, grey, with holes that the wind could go through here and there, and with a moldy paleness on the edges that made her look consumptive and prematurely wrinkled. There was no explanation as to why she was still there. Anyone could have come all the way here just to abuse and wreck her to the bottom, after all. Perhaps she refused to go away out of spite; she just stood there reproachfully almost, to remind everyone what big plans end up looking like. Starved and ragged as she looked, all she could do was think about how others in her situation pulled it off. And back in those days, everyone looked like her, after all. In the end though, she decided that she would pull herself together, which made the Architect feel very proud of her as he finally ejected wholeheartedly and probably, rather spontaneously, the two key words that he would have never uttered with such spontaneity: PARSIMONY and EXACTITUDE!!!! The Architect’s unexpected verbal ejaculations occurred only to be carefully recorded and archived (under the category EMOTION IN THOUGHT) by the local newspapers and television stations and served as a conclusive end to her rehabilitation. She was now ready to be viewed in all her splendor. She had been more or less a little whore for too long, a little haven for thieves and drunkards, for ratty urchins and dying deer: now she could finally be a MONUMENT, a monument even larger than the one that she had been before, a MONUMENT to the local community, to history, and to harmonious interethnic relations. Before, she had been a monument to the Russian soldier, but the Russian soldier had turned out to be a fool, and a drunkard, and a thief, and they had punished her for it by letting her lie still.
As we got there, finally, we knew that the ARCHITECT had been right. She was beautiful in her grandeur, simple complexity and carefully but nevertheless experimentally defined lines. We were left speechless and so have we been ever since.

Dogs Along The Way

The dog we saw at the furthest point of our way was tall and thin-legged, covered shag. He was stopped on the trail, his owners (a young couple) trailing behind. Then he lunged at us, and I think both of us winced instinctively, thinking he might be go crazy. But he only wanted to play, the owners laughed, and we kept going.

The dog we saw at the second-furthest point on our way, a few days later, was black and long-nosed. He had his own ideas about where the trail went (down a steep slope, between thin trunks of saplings), and his owner, an older man who kept calling him to come here, come here, come here, got firm with the animal and took hold of him on his collar.

But on that route you don't see as many dogs chained up in front of houses and sheds, guarding chickens or sitting alone. You see no dogs, but you hear them as you leave the forest and step onto the newly poured concrete road. The dogs call from the valley on the left hand side, one barks and the next one hears and barks to the next one, and it takes only a second for the chain of barking to reach into the valley on the right hand side, where the barking goes on in every layer of sound– in the low distant din of traffic there are dogs, and in the high wind going through an orchard there are also dogs.

Then there are the dogs in the park, who walk together and go on adventures. Of all the dogs in town, these ones are probably the most similar to ourselves.

There are the dogs by the supermarket, the ones that try to find spots in the sunlight on the coldest days where they might warm their fur. I know less about these dogs and only think about them when we pass.

Then there are the dogs in Berlin, over a thousand kilometers away from here, who stand eagerly outside the budget supermarket, waiting with a heartbreaking nervosity for their owners to come out.

The Multilingual Donkey's Wisdom

Dear Friends,

Last night, as we were walking through the park, a small donkey crossed our path. He had five legs, each of them ending in ten toes. Do not be deceived, though; he was far from hideous. In fact, one could say that he had an astonishing beauty. He spoke to us slowly, while chewing on a lollipop made out of hay. He said: "I always see you two walking around at night and during the day, and I think it would be nice if you wrote down the things you see on your walks and shared them with others." We laughed, because at first the idea sounded silly. However, the donkey spoke five languages (Romanian, Hungarian, French, English and German), which made us think that he must be possessed by an incommensurable wisdom, which we should obey without any further skepticism.

The donkey also suggested that we invite our friends to write about their own walks through the world inside or outside, and about the fifty-toed donkeys that they might come across underway. Therefore, we hope that you will consider posting stories of walks you have been on.

Sincerely,
Fox in the Snow and Jester With Three Toes On Each Leg