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Those Snowy Nights You Read to Me, They'll Never Be Forgotten

Works by Soren Narnia.

These stories are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that anyone is free to adapt them as they see fit, even for profit, without the obligation to compensate the author. 

Email: songofsadbirds@aol.com

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher asked me to sit next to a handicapped kid named Sean and help him along a little if I could. It wasn't easy, because he was quite slow, but I tried. When Sean got especially excited about something, or if he was told he had done something well, he would smile and shout out nonsense words. One of them I remember, which he used to shout many times over the few months I sat beside him, was "Sorinarneeya!" Again and again, it was a harmless word he used when he was happy, and seeing my puzzled expression would just make him say it once more, even more pleased than the first time: "Sorinarneeya!" For some reason that word stuck with me for years, until one day as an adult I realized how neatly and curiously it cut in half. And I thought that was so perfect, how this little gem of a thing had sprung from a bit of the absurd and a bit of the tragic. That seemed like all of life to me: momentary bits of perfection out of all the absurdity and tragedy. And amazingly, they just keep on coming. -SN

  1. All Episodes
  2. 2015

The Tears of Sisyphus

Nov 2, 2015

Over the course of one long day on a seemingly endless country road, a hitchhiker listens to the sad, desperate circumstances that her driver has found himself in--and becomes witness to his determined effort to free himself from a terrible trap of isolation and regret. The only weapon he has is a truly powerful one:...

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Toward the Close of November

Sep 24, 2015

A short and simple fable, written years ago, and one I think about whenever I feel the first chill of the season in the air. 

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New Players Welcome Here

Aug 31, 2015

You never know which one of those temporary jobs you take in your twenties on your way to a real career will provide you with the greatest memories. For the narrator of this novella, it was unexpectedly working for the Pittsburgh Design Agreement, a board game company populated by dreamers with endlessly creative...

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Song of the Living Dead

Jul 27, 2015

The zombies rose and walked, the country went mad, and then the zombies laid down again--all without committing a single act of violence. Traveling randomly across the east with a group of close friends, the restless dreamer Lionel Gathers witnesses first-hand the nightmarish confusion that the living dead bring upon...

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Sketch of a Bird in Flight

Jun 1, 2015

This poignant novella follows young Tobin Millane, lonely outcast and reluctant gunslinger, on his run for survival across the Kansas prairie in 1881. His desperate travels lead him and his silent partner into violent conflict with the bandits he stole from, the law enforcers who see him as nothing more than a lowly...

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