Carl Bloch, “The Last Supper” (late 19th century)
* * *
My ex-girlfriend was the only one who looked as if she was still in her early twenties at our twentieth-year high-school reunion.
Unfortunately, I can’t prove it, because neither I nor my friends can find her in the photos from the party.
* * *
We have saved our lives from zombies by protecting our city with an iron wall.
During building it up, we have forgotten how to speak and laugh, but only the silliest of us would put their ears to the wall to hear voices and laughing.
* * *
I was happy they brought me back to life after cryogenic freezing.
They said I would have to work just two hundred years in the mines on Mars to pay the bills for my resuscitation.
* * *
When we came out from our spaceship on that distant planet, people in loincloths, armed with spears and stone axes, surrounded us.
They were not aggressive, but we found out later that they were just slaves of intelligent robots who destroyed our ship and said that we, too, must obey them.
* * *
There was no one named Judas among the disciples of Jesus, as I realized by traveling two thousand years back in time.
But everything written in the Gospels should be happened, so I had to introduce myself to Apostles and Him as Judas from the village of Kerioth.
About the author
Maxim Sviridenkov is a writer, journalist, translator and literary critic. Born in 1984, he worked in newspapers and magazines, translated books for the leading Russian publishing house, “Eksmo.” For his fiction, he was awarded the 2003 annual prize of the newspaper “Literaturnaya Rossiya” (“Literary Russia”). He lives in Smolensk, Russia.
