"Save a chicken for the morrow," Granny Grozna

"Save a chicken for the morrow," Granny Grozna always said. But now I felt pity for the chicken, and hoped for a psychotic fugue-state instead. For I had killed my beautiful cousin

Lepyas prophesying chicken Kushka. When I broke the news to Lepya she said "Budala! Granny Grozna said 'Save a chicken for the MArrow!' " So we sucked the marrow out of Kushka's bo

oks to get the most out of life and because meat was scarce in Turkmenistan. After that 5 minutes were used up we were bored again. But national pride forced us to displace

ourselves to the Anatolian desert where we endured thirst, snakes and scorpions. We finally found a way to catch and cook the snakes, using their skins to catch the morning dew off

. The rules for this sport are rather intuitive: whichever gardener's plant is the dewiest wins. We paid for our tickets with our hard-earned snakeskins and sat

in the front row. This was going to be a stiff competition. Some world championships of the dew sports were competing. The gun sounded and the games began. Dew began to appear on

every conceivable surface in the stadium, first as tiny droplets, but then as streams connecting in networks across the field, the equipment, the athletes' skin. The collecting dew

forced a kind of fluid plasma ball right out in the open there, and people began to grow worried as their bodies dehydrated into wrinkled husks. The gravitational force of H2O had

shifted so suddenly that the Sunday afternoon beach-goers could only stand flabbergasted, mouths agape, skin flaking away in the breeze as the water churned through