Ice
Author: Dukaj, Jacek
Tags: fantasy
Progress: 0% as of Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- The air inside the lodging house is dense and heavy, scarred by every bodily odour, human or animal; no one opens the windows, doors are instantly slammed shut and cracks above the doorsteps stuffed with rags, so that no warmth escapes from the building – firewood has to be paid for, after all, anyone able to afford coal wouldn’t normally be cooped up in such dark holes, where the air is dense and heavy, and you breathe it in as if you’d drunk the water spat out by your neighbor as well as by his dog, as if your every breath had previously passed a million times through the consumptive lungs of peasants, Jews, coachmen, butchers and whores; hawked up from black larynxes, it returns to you again and again, filtered through their saliva and sputum, processed through their mould-infested, louse-infected, pus-incrusted bodies, coughed up by them, blown out through their noses, spewed up straight into your mouth, but you have to swallow it, you have to breathe it in, so breathe, breathe!