Maria Logven’s short stories entwine daydream with desire, action with inner fantasy, and prose with verse in an enchanting vision. In her story Trapped in Love, Logven’s narrator is thrown into the turmoil of lost relationship when memories of what once was bubble through daily ritual and make-believe. Created personalities are given to passengers on the train imbued with secret lives of the narrator’s making. The text skips through perambulations of a mind rich in imagination the likes of which compares to Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole. Logven’s tales offer a most seductive opportunity to escape the daily grind.
—Eve Rifkah, editor of Diner, a literary journal
Maria Logven was born in 1982 and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. Presently she lives and works in New York. Passionate about art and literature, Maria is a regular at art openings and fiction readings. The Cell of a Soul is her first book.
I lie on the bottom of a pond, motionless. I open my eyes to look at hazy circles on the pond surface caused by my rare breathing. I close my eyes again. Move my tail and feel the swirl of water around my body, wait for it to settle down. There is nothing more to life. The mermaid cannot be happy or sad. She is just a part of the pond’s green, like the seaweed inside it and the forest around it. If drunken men, a group of loud kids, or merry lovers would come upsetting my peace, I’d drown them to make them quiet. I cannot be disturbed.
With my eyes closed, I listen. A pleasant sound of a leaf falling onto the surface from the nearby tree. A cry of a night bird from afar. Quiescence.