CERN ZOO

The Dawn at Tzern
by Mark Valentine

This story is a charming tale of an enclave called Tzern, the death of an Emperor, a postman's loyalty to the deceased's immanent spirit by retaining in defiance the old stamps with the Emperor's head, a priest who likes his tobacco and reads things, not into its leaves, but into the wrapping in which it is delivered, who also reads a breviary or what one assumes to be a breviary. A retreating army, one of whom is a young man who thinks himself invulnerable. And that's only scratching the story's surface. It's gorgeous. Thought-provoking. And resplendent with the resurrectional power of a story's soul.
The story's ending, that I will not give away other than to call it a 'dawn', gives justification to my form of real-time reviewing of books. You see what you see. And I see Tzern as in Cern Zoo. And that gives me all manner of readings from and into the story's innermost being and outermost wrapping, readings with which I will not bother you. But they are there.