7 Stories by Morris Panych

7 Stories

by

Morris Panych

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SYNOPSIS

Imagine sticking your head out of the window of your seventh storey apartment and seeing a man standing on the ledge, looking down at the pavement. What do you do? Call the police? The fire brigade? Try to talk to him? Find out why he’s there? The characters in Morris Panych’s 7 Stories have their own very individual ways of reacting, or not reacting to the unusual sight outside their windows. There are two lovers threatening to murder one another, a paranoid psychiatrist, an actor preparing for the role of his life on his wedding day, and a Christian lady who – in her own special way – answers the prayers of the tenants on the sixth floor. Only one of the eccentric neighbours, a 100-hundred-year-old lady has a proposal for the man on the ledge…

Panych’s dialogues are a light-hearted examination of the dark absurdity of human existence. While the man on the ledge walks the fine line between life and death, the rest of the residents struggle more or less consciously with what one of them calls the ‘fine line between fiction and reality’. The man on the ledge, it seems, has made an honest choice. How honest though are the protagonists of the seven urban stories being enacted inside the apartment block?