By Nikolai Grozni, from Claustrophobias, a short-story collection published by his press, Begemot, in Bulgaria in 2016. Grozni is the author of the novel Wunderkind (Free Press).
It must’ve been either my thirty-third or my thirty-ninth birthday, if one is to believe the numerological charts, and there must’ve been some kind of adult arrangement involving children or else I would’ve never agreed to show myself in public in the company of three or four diversely aged creatures whose cumulative understanding of metaphysics was equivalent to the curiosity of a wart on the nose of a Rajasthani kaan-saaf wallah cleaning…