Elsa Korneti – The Lost Children

Korneti LE P&W February 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025

The Lost Children, story by Elsa Korneti.


The Lost Children

Once upon a time – they recall it well when it happened – there was neither quiet nor peace. There was just the vertigo of speed and frenzy. And there was a vain rushing around. Everyone was either rushing, or claiming to be rushing. Many of those people would say they were rushing in order to appear important and competent. If you weren’t always rushing, you were, to them, lazy and a failure, and they looked down on you.

They rushed with a frenzied speed in every direction and no force could be found to stop them, or even to slow them down. ‘Tranquility’ was an unknown word, the pace was always dizzying, the career ladder and the receipts and payments tables, the steps and the switches went up and down, the ridges went without mountains and the EKGs without hearts. Everyone wondered if there was a place on Earth where people could live in peace. And the place was found, when the whole world hit the brakes on the meaningless vortex swirling around itself.

Now that the reckless rushing had stopped, now that the dizzying speed had dropped to zero, there was no longer any alibi available – they all stood mute, deactivated by the fear of immobility. Everything stopped and everything froze. There came a transition from the rushing of existence to the braking of the soul and the quietude that everyone had been searching for, but few had managed to find. And they could only look quietly at themselves every day in their mirrors and to fill their time with contemplation: No one is nostalgic for his youth, but rather for lightness. Gravity is the weight that ages you.

And they take up sidewalk chalk and draw the most perfect circles, nests, to curl up in like little chicks, tucked up into the center of the circles hoping to shrink down smaller. But nothing happened. They stayed the same, unchanged, and on top of that, they stayed stopped.

Days passed on repeat, cyclically, as if rolling, weighed out, off the waterwheel of a mill, and they looked at their reflections in mirrors, knowing that there was no go-between in this relationship, no one to intervene between themselves and their reflections. But the mirrors, as time went on, grew ever more hazy, until they could no longer make out their reflections; they were becoming invisible to themselves and to others. In vain they sought out each other’s gaze, to look upon them and make them visible, to feel real. They remained nonexistent, unseen by others, and had no knowledge of how to swim in a sea of fog.

These stationary, unexisting, invisible wretches, continuously searching out the gaze of others – who for their part couldn’t see them at all – tried to work out what was to blame, why no one could see them, not even they themselves in their own mirrors. They all went about changing out the glass, but that too quickly blurred away, and when they tried, by every means, to clean them, the haze upon them grew thicker, as if sunken in a cloud of fog that refused to budge.

These stationary, unexisting, invisible wretches, who continuously searched out the gaze of others to exist, grew well and truly agitated, and not able to move past the rut of their nonexistence, started to grieve and to mourn.

They had no desire left to dress themselves, to put on their shoes, to wash themselves, and to comb their hair. Feeling abandoned, they roamed about in a pitiful state, with unmatched clothes, in sweatpants, pyjamas and nightshirts, rumpled as if startled awake, their hair in a mess, dirty, pallid and thin; some were swollen and distorted in their fatness, ghosts of their former selves. Nothing about their appearance mattered to them any longer, neither how they looked to others, nor what others might say about them.

Since no one could see them, and they couldn’t even see themselves in the mirror, they began to seem as if every meaning and every mission had fallen away. Nothing gave flavor to their bland existence, nothing held meaning anymore, why rush about, why make themselves up, since no one else could see them, when they couldn’t admire themselves in the mirror, or impress others and draw attention to themselves.

In time, they grew accustomed even to this. Nonexistence became part of their daily routine. Something like brushing their teeth robotically every night. Trying to work out whence descended the fog that fixed itself upon their mirrors and in their lives, they began to think and feel all the more, taking stock, appraising, and then in repeated flashes they remembered that they had wished so powerfully for their childhood, the children they used to be. And they began like voles to dig through time, to burrow into it in tunnels they scratched themselves, looking to find it. Where could it be hiding?

Hunting through their scratched-out time tunnels for their lost child selves, upsetting their old childhood toys, to their surprise they discovered that in the frenzied years, they had forgotten their own children and then they began, distraught, to search for them, opening up little dollhouse doors, wooden castles and plastic towers, matchbox cars and train sets, tearing open soft dolls and robots, overturning board games, plastic parking lots, highways, blocks and cooking sets, looking through all these piles of children’s toys stacked up in houses in boxes, in closets, in lofts, in attics. The children, though, were nowhere to be found, vanished.

Then they thought to look through their electronic devices: their houses brimmed with them – mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and computers.

And there they were. They found their lost children stuck to screens by the face and by the fingers. But these lost children who having been found were no longer lost did not respond to their voices and their cries. And when they tried to attract their attention, pulling on their legs and their hair, they discovered that their children had become lizards and frogs in human form, with suction cups on their fingers and toes, and they could not come unstuck from the screens by any means, because their absorption into the digital environment was such that it had sucked them in; their disinterest in reality was so great that they preferred to remain where they were, having a good time, stuck to the screens.


© Elsa Korneti

Active in organizing readings and events with other poets, Elsa Korneti was born in Munich, Germany, but grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece where she still resides. She is a Greek poet, essayist and poetry translator from English, German and Italian.  Her career has been similarly diverse: studies in finance were followed by work as a journalist for well-known newspapers and magazines. She has published poetry, short stories, essays, book reviews and translations. She organized several successful poetry slams in her city and in Athens; she inspired and organized events, and staged original poetic performances. She has published fifteen books of poetry, short stories, essays and translations. Two of her poetry collections have been distinguished as shortlisted, nominated for the National Award of Poetry. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and is also featured in various foreign anthologies and magazines. Recent publications: Poetry, The hero is falling (2021), Short stories: Rooms with teeth and other sharp stories (2023).

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