Faustus Runs the Plebeian Circle: A Short Story Collection

By Stefan Markovski

During the first meeting with "Faustus Runs the Plebeian Circle: A Short Story Collection" we encounter a complex compositional motivation and a specific polyphony of motivational relations. This polyphony, from the very beginning, reveals an important element for the structure of the work through the title.

The author suggests we symbolically recognize the wide scope of the topic, using imagination to recognize artistically shaped self-communication, notable achievements in science, objectivist descriptions of social abysses, and socially important truths about life and the world.

This work is characterized by the structural setting in the narration. It contains six elements that make up the whole.

Although the six stories separate themselves as separate wholes, they have a common matrix in terms of expression. They are structured like stories but dramatic elements are strongly felt, along with dynamic action triggers and static motives that describe certain situations.

The contemporary Macedonian writer Stefan Markovski skillfully makes a combination of lyrical and dramatic components, experimenting with the genres.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amazon KDP
• Release date: Mar 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393183532

Stefan Markovski

Stefan Markovski is a contemporary Macedonian writer, an award-winning novelist, author of short fiction, poetry, plays, and screenplays. Born in the town of Gevgelija (01. 12. 1990), he’s completed primary and secondary education in his hometown, graduating from both the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Philology, and the Institute of Philosophy of Ss. Cyril and Methodius State University of Skopje. He’s got a MA in Screenwriting at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) in Skopje. His novel The Bumblebee Anatomy has peaked #1 in Amazon's Eastern European Literature (Kindle Store) category, published under the pen name Stemarcus. His novel Letters of Heresy: Uncovering the Skies Shining in Red and the poetry collection Promised Land are also available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and elsewhere.

Book preview

Before I Throw The Poppies into The Abyss

The knowledgeable say that when losing weight, people exhale the excess body mass transformed into carbon dioxide and thus lose weight when they breathe themselves. If anything I could ever call a fact, no matter how different it may seem in the eyes of every individual mortal, it would be that material reality is no different - when you look at it, the eyes exhale all its metaphysics and mysticism, all its wonders and almost deified truth beyond grasp leaving on your palm the only mark that can reach the touch receptors. Before I can remember that the miracle of God or any metaphysics and mysticism called life is indeed that, it happens that my thoughts get stuck around axes created by several questionnaires dipped halfway in the plane along which they have slipped, and I wonder what the likelihood of that happening was.

What was the probability that I, right now, would be here wondering about various probabilities, including the one that is happening right now?

Indeed, a minor part of the particles in what is for us a visible universe... I mean, what's for the other people visible universe... it is visible, right?

Well, even with the help of a digital camera attached to a telescope such as Hubble HDF, the same digital camera because of which astrophysicists, the film directors of modern cosmology, think the universe is over 14 billion years old, now even that means seeing.

Perhaps all this results from some breathing and burning of something higher, which is manifested in humans as thought and subjective observance of the laws of logic. Something like when we, the blind, dream.

And here I am lying, somewhere, in a room signed with an unknown number, probably within the Intensive Care Unit, half-broken, the rest disabled for x reasons, or not... maybe the I from my past I decomposed in the Universe and is now being dreamt into infinity projecting itself in the indefinite past which is also the future.

Something echoes in my ears or the space behind them, such as a cosmic symphony or, more likely, a piano sonata, music with a tremblingly soothing sonority backed by faded contours of solemn euphoria similar to that in my films, perhaps the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata no. 8 in C minor better known as Pathetique. If I could talk about the overall composition of an atmosphere, it would surely include an open window made of solid wood on the left, a wooden table with a candlestick and a traditional dish on the right, and some natural fog in the narrow space that would breathe through the sun and rays, which would break each other across right in its epicenter.

There would be a few small pots of rare and low plants on the window, the walls would be ochre-colored or maybe just wooden again, the chandeliers would look like concentric 19th-century candelabra... that'd be the atmosphere in my head if I tried to capture the look of the flow of my thoughts these days.

This way of seeing is the only one I have at my disposal that has given my film director's lifelong vision a certain, perhaps natural dynamic in more than the vital visual interpretation of the space.

***

I regret my incompetence or desire to find myself in words that I no longer understand myself or in questions that rush to answer all the other questions into the network of known reason.

Do you dream? Do you see images while you sleep? And other banal questions to which the maturity of indifference does not allow me to return intensely, but behold, they are also some axes formed by questionnaires.

Yes, we dream and see images you couldn't think of.

In fact, the pictures we see can be so vivid, as if their purpose is to compensate for what's beyond our sensual grasp, sometimes they come close to what my mother, a lover of visual arts, explained to me as Cubism or cuts of integral forms of objects, another time like fauvism or combinations of ultra-strong colors scattered in the traces of something that should be a brush, my mental brush that left visible traces on the dreamt canvases of all realities hidden in the shadow of transcendentalities on this and that side.

I am most afraid when I don't dream, but another time on that.

To return to the essence, only the particles of one minuscule and an immeasurably small segment of the visible universe are arranged in such an order, with a function visible and explicable to us, while all the others, chaotically, statically or mechanically and predictably scattered forming inanimate molecules, relatively the world known to us.

Probably divinity is the pulse of the intricate organization that at any moment prepares to go into chaotic unpredictability to return in the same unpredictable way to the nest of its seemingly irreplaceable balance and stability or simple predictability like that of roses falling predictably in a straight line in an immeasurable and silent abyss.

***

My eyes are always calm in the absence of any sensation. I cannot move, I cannot see, and now I cannot even speak.

I remember biting my tongue so hard that it probably coincided with the moment I lost consciousness.

I don't know what happened to my tongue. If it's torn, it'll mean one more concern for the global yet local problems less, and many more for my human social condition.

While all this was happening ... the hitting ... at first I wasn't sure if I was tumbling into the abyss with some fluttering human or animal limbs or some force was pulling my being up, directly to heavens.

The fact that I can't speak, perhaps never again, seems to me more and more as another sign from God that all ignorance is left as a path to be taken by life, instead of a direction to be revealed.

***

I still don't understand why you had to leave, I was afraid for you I heard my mother say a few days after my return on the doorstep of the cracked door of her apartment and at the same time I felt as having permanently stuck twice, three times more blood in all parts of the head than it could fit.

A return of ten thousand kilometers for which they begged me.

Come, let me hug you, I said, holding out my hands. You know I wanted to experience life on the other side of The Pond.

To experience it? In that condition?

I did just that.

After a few days, on the same doorstep of her apartment with, as my Ivana used to say, a cracked door on the left edge and a lock with rusty screws, which still somehow worked, I couldn't recognize the smell of the usual summer pots, meat or grilled sea fish, couldn't notice any odor, and it was a sign that the old woman is resting or maybe, isn't here at all.

I rang the bell again, but nothing.

Let's go, she's probably not here, Ivana said.

As I was preparing to follow her will, in something like a half-departure my hand reached out to knock, and I was already stepping