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    The Mooneating Newborn
    The Mooneating Newborn
    The Mooneating Newborn
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Mooneating Newborn

    By Levon Shahnur

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    About this ebook

    The heroes of these stories are people lost in time and space, who try to understand the reality around them, to discern the layers of the outside world and peel them off. With new and unusual perspectives, philosophical consultations, often anti-utopian narratives and a mystic, ritualistic style, the author seeks to penetrate the depths of life, going beyond accepted conventions in his depiction of the world as well as the things and people it contains. The recurring protagonist is a person who constantly feels fragmented, a twin of love, someone who hides his thinking and the diseased word that others want to extract from his mind. Each sensory organ requires a personal approach after perceiving something from the outside world. Everything has its twin in a person's head, even love, and sometimes it is necessary to write about them so that they look for other places to live... There are micro-transitions from one story to the next, allowing the text to breathe.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAustin Macauley Publishers
    Release dateJul 30, 2021
    ISBN9781649793102
    The Mooneating Newborn
    Author

    Levon Shahnur

    Levon Shahnur (Shahnazaryan) was born on October 16, 1987. He writes prose and his first collection of stories, Night of Creation, was published in 2013. He has received several awards, including the 2015 Russian Speech (“Russkaya Rech”) award for Best Prose Piece, with the winning story published in a collection of literature from the Commonwealth of Independent States. His stories are regularly featured in Armenian and international publications. Shahnur’s work has been translated into several languages. His novel Journey: Before Love was published in 2016. One of his stories, The Mooneating Newborn, was developed into a screenplay and movie in 2018. The story also featured in his collection called The Pain Capturer, published in 2018. Levon Shahnur is a member of the Union of Writers and the Union of Journalists of the Republic of Armenia.

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      Book preview

      The Mooneating Newborn - Levon Shahnur

      About the Author

      Levon Shahnur (Shahnazaryan) was born on October 16, 1987. He writes prose and his first collection of stories, Night of Creation, was published in 2013. He has received several awards, including the 2015 Russian Speech (Russkaya Rech) award for Best Prose Piece, with the winning story published in a collection of literature from the Commonwealth of Independent States. His stories are regularly featured in Armenian and international publications. Shahnur’s work has been translated into several languages. His novel Journey: Before Love was published in 2016. One of his stories, The Mooneating Newborn, was developed into a screenplay and movie in 2018. The story also featured in his collection called The Pain Capturer, published in 2018. Levon Shahnur is a member of the Union of Writers and the Union of Journalists of the Republic of Armenia.

      Dedication

      I dedicate this book to my friend, Alla Arutyunyan.

      Copyright Information ©

      Levon Shahnur (2021)

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

      Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

      Ordering Information

      Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

      Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

      Shahnur, Levon

      The Mooneating Newborn

      ISBN 9781649793096 (Paperback)

      ISBN 9781649793102 (ePub e-book)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2021912810

      www.austinmacauley.com/us

      First Published (2021)

      Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

      40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

      New York, NY 10005

      USA

      [email protected]

      +1 (646) 5125767

      Acknowledgment

      I am thankful to my wonderful parents, to my cat, Nico, and to my crow, Markos, for inspiring me.

      Oh God, take my soul, but forgive my audacity, for only half of me comes to You…

      My family tree had gone missing a long time ago, but I managed to find it recently. The word ‘God’ appeared on the roots of the tree with dense branches. The trunk said ‘Adam,’ then ‘Noah,’ ‘Japeth,’ and then ‘Hayk,’ following which the branches bore the names of all my forefathers and ancestors, with one of the extensions reaching my father. I try to add my name to the branch, but my hands are shaking. There is a profound emptiness and an abyss after me because I have no offspring. People like me are called ‘unproductive’ in my village. When the house is filled with the laughter and giggles of children, their shouting and clacking, and someone suddenly opens the door and pushes them out of the house, the walls of the room seem to narrow and touch each other, the ceiling slowly descends and kisses the floor, objects take on the supernatural and disgusting quality of not breaking, solitude tightens a black tie around my neck and drags me in front of a mirror, where I strike different poses so that I can trick myself into thinking that I am one of those people who smiles, standing with his back bent, surrounded by people who are having interesting conversations. But my house sinks underground and, like someone drowning in the ocean, all I see is the sky, because there will not be another generation after me, which means that I come directly after Adam and, perhaps, God had created me as the progenitor of the world…

      My family tree begins with God. When I was small, I asked my grandfather, How far do the branches go?

      My grandfather thought a bit, picked up the family tree, and told me about the ancestors perching on its branches, counted out their names, and then he said:

      In the end, God is going to come again. His name will always be on the mountain peak. The departing generations are simply a staircase through which the soul ascends to the Lord. There is a powerful thing between the heavens and the earth – life, which threads its way to God.

      When I was first placed into my mother’s arms, I was like a little piece of moss. An old woman who had seen me struck her hands on the hem of her skirt and said, Oh dear! The moon has seen this child…

      There’s an old tradition that the moon should not cast itself on a newborn until the fortieth day after he or she is born, but it had already seen me. I was born and had spent ten days quietly asleep under its rays, right next to the window. I was the firstborn and ended up being the only child of the family. Terrified by what the old woman had said, my inexperienced mother was trying in vain to draw the curtains, carry me away from the window, and use her eyes to peck at the old woman’s face like a bird. But the old woman was shaking her head and saying that it was too late. From that day on, I was dubbed the ‘mooneating newborn’ in our village. The other kids didn’t care, but the mothers looked at me in fear, as if I were a leper. One thing was clear – day by day, they kept waiting for something to happen to me…

      I started to withdraw. Only the elderly men in the village did not recoil when they saw me. Perhaps it was out of respect for my grandfather. I would sit next to them from morning to evening in the village square, on the thick poplar tree log. They would smoke, mumble, shout, and recall times gone by, and they would only remember me when they needed water to be brought from the spring.

      I would write poems. I finished school and was walking back to the poplar tree one morning, but there was nobody there. I waited. The door of one of the houses opened. An old man slowly walked up to me and said pensively, Mooneater, you would know. How’s it all going to end?

      A war had broken out.

      The elderly men of the village started gathering again, and the women also joined them at the poplar tree. I started to go there again like in the old days. I soon realized that all conversation came to a halt when I appeared, and whispering is unbearable for a moon like me. Their children, my peers, had been taken to fight in the war. They had left me because I was the only child in the family, and my grandfather had died; he was no longer around to press the family tree against my face and hold me back from what I had set my mind on doing…

      I had nothing to hide from the world. I was young. My soul was pure. When I was leaving home, my back would feel the taste of emptiness without leaning against anything solid. On my journey out of the village, I acknowledged the increasingly rapid beats of my heart, each rushing ahead of the other for fear of being struck.

      My body kept trying to throw itself back into

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