My Dinner With Andrei

I know you cannot speak. Trust me. This is for the best.

Perhaps you have heard the stories. That I cut their tongues out and ate them, slit them like grain sacks and swallowed their innards like borscht. Or that I was in KGB and went about on the Moscow trains with the organs of my victims in my attache case.

These tales are fabulous, imaginative, even terrifying. I give you the choice to believe them or not. I will neither conform nor deny my alleged reputation.

Your eyes tell me that you wish to know why. This wish is a human failing. We are comforted by cause, yet words are inadequate. An entire world lies beyond language. It is a perverse irony, then, that words are our only tool for the understanding of causes.

Is experience itself a sort of understanding? This question you will soon settle for yourself.

 

What Pegman Saw

Based on a true story.

10 comments

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  1. k rawson

    Holy crap that’s good! The voice is superb–compelling, frightening and hypnotic. And though there’s no dialect, the sense that it’s spoken in a Russian accent is clear. This frightening character literally rose off the page and reached his hands around my neck. And now that I see the real life story, I can see why.

  2. pennygadd51

    I agree 100% with Karen about the voice. I would also add that the plot (which is the victim’s growing understanding of their imminent fate) is fabulously paced, speeding up, then a rhetorical question (where we all gasp) and an answer that is like the first twist of the knife in the wound.
    Great writing!
    PS I hated the story – I hate horror…

  3. Alicia Jamtaas

    What can I say? Everyone else said it all. The voice, the creepy idea, the matter-of-fact tone of the main character. So very well done, sir.

    (I will neither conform – did you mean confirm here?)

  4. Michael B. Fishman

    Great story. And I agree with the first comment that even though the story isn’t written in dialect, it reads that way. And thank you for the link to the NYT article.

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