Conversation
V. Ulea

She had nine faces already, and each time she began to talk a new one was added.

“How does she manage to do that?” he wondered, listening to her voice. It enveloped him like a magic sphere, distorting the image of the room and making him feel like an insect inside the dew. Letting out air bubbles, a few convex birds chirped in the window tank overfilled with the splashing skies. “What is she talking about, anyway,” he thought, mesmerized by the growing number of her faces.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, answering his thoughts.

And he disappeared, instantly multiplied by the zero meaning of their conversation.

V. Ulea (Vera Zubarev) is a bilingual Russian-English poet, writer, scholar and film director. She has published eleven books of poetry, prose, and literary theory. Her works have appeared in various periodicals both American and European, including The Literary Review, Princeton Arts Review, and RE:AL. She teaches in the Department of of Slavic Languages of the University of Pennsylvania. Visit her online at www.ulita.net/ulea.htm.