24 Na Hrázi Street

From behind a stand of Poplars a voice quailing said, “…Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and cleverest that could be imagined. But I could not counteract Nature's law that everything shall beget its like; and what, then, could this sterile, illtilled wit of mine beget but the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination--just what might be begotten in a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling? Tranquillity, a cheerful retreat, pleasant fields, bright skies, murmuring brooks, peace of mind, these are the things that go far to make even the most barren muses fertile, and bring into the world births that fill it with wonder and delight…”[1] From beneath a cullet of leaves a dog yowls at the moon, its tail scabbed to the rump of its leg. A lamplighter skips jacking across the tar, the wicks of his fingers blackened with soot. y Saavedra, weighing his thoughts from one hand to the other steeples across the tarweed, the moon crooning like a stoolie.

He lived at 24 Na Hrázi Street across the toll road from Uniwersytet Jagielloński with a dog named Wroclaw and a cat named Dolnoslaskie. He wished he lived in a cheerful retreat with pleasant fields and murmuring brooks, a place of peace and tranquility. When Lela’s great-great grandmamma was a child she lived at 23 Na Hrázi Street across the toll road from the Church of Perpetual Sinners which sat next to Uniwersytet Jagielloński.

[1] Don Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quixote