~~~

The next day Joanna ignored the vial of grey vasic and walked out of the room that looked like a prison cell, that had been designed conceptually as a prison cell, and onto the streets of Ljubljana.

It was eleven in the morning and, even though the Triple Bridge was only a few streets away, it felt like it would take a decade for her conscious self to drag her there, a decade of passing one Slovene face every ten minutes, of the castle trap the night before, of the slight pang of disgust and failure and inability to trap the thing, of other distinct moments that weren’t quite distinct enough to override the horror show at least a year old now.

She thought it out and came to the conclusion that

a] the day was just a regular day

b] disgust was pointless

and

c] the things Slovenes did at eleven in the morning on what might’ve been a weekday were boring.

She turned on an actual heel and walked back to the hostel, picturing the vial of grey vasic in her head, but half a street in she got jumped by a bookshop, a bookshop she hadn’t noticed before despite being in Ljubljana for nearly a year, and inside the bookshop was a book on Slovene folktales and on page 57 was a chapter headed Krsnik.

As with the other books she’d read, it was all in Slovene so she edged over to a woman nearby and was about to ask her to translate but then she noticed a young man with a green bubble jacket and she asked him instead and because she was alone and it was a weekday the man said, ‘okay, I’ll do it because you’re pretty, but why…

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