It was dawn, the sky a blank mirror, I picked up a stone and hurled it with fury at it, to shatter it and fill the place with glass, sharp irregular pieces, a storm of edges from this most indifferent witness. It was dawn and if you aren't sleeping, you will hear the hammers of the blacks from the prisons of County, singing on the nails that secured the rails and the woods, a little louder, without voices, just the moan of the strength that the strike demanded from the hammer on the iron.

The short stories in the collection "What's the Name of This Place" by Anastasios Sichlimiris are filled with images that illuminate blindingly like a photographic flash and then sink into darkness, with a writing style that is exceptionally abrupt and sharp. His heroes, defeated ones who don't give a damn and winners who don't care about the prize. Circus performers and gold diggers. Kids dreaming of a Smith & Wesson or a career in "Artistic London". Time, broken into seconds, sometimes becomes the before and sometimes the after.

The rusty silver nail, the fire that extinguished and turned to dust now blown by the wind to the four horizons. Places, the poor neighborhoods of Attica in the ‘70s, the Troumba of the ‘60s, a village in Latin America, London, New York, and the mythical Wild West. Harmonicas, maracas, guitars, three-strings, Hammond, whistling and snapping of fingers.

... and instead of violins, drunken sailors tenderly broke bottles, mumbling female names and curses, with the metronome of this pointless orchestra being the open-close of a ten-inch blade in the hands of a dwarf. Tango, Rumbas, and Blues from an old scratched record slip through the words: "On the corner of the street a blind black man was singing for a few coins, the story of a blind black man singing on the corner of the street for a few coins."