Pretending to Sleep: A Communism Survivor's Short Story

By Monalisa Foster

Based on actual events, this short story provides a quick glimpse into life under Ceaucescu's brutal communist regime. Like so many Romanians, ten-year-old Renata lives in fear of Securitate (Ceaucescu's secret police). They don't always take you in the middle of the night. In a world where the living envy the dead, not all examples are made in the shadows. Some are made in the light of day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monalisa Foster
• Release date: Feb 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393019008

Monalisa Foster

Monalisa won life’s lottery when she escaped communism and became an unhyphenated American citizen. Her works tend to explore themes of freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility. Despite her degree in physics, she’s worked in several fields including engineering and medicine. She and her husband are living their happily ever after in Texas. Her primary genre is science fiction--from hard sci-fi to alternate history to space opera. She has also written some contemporary fiction, as well as dystopian and military sci-fi. She describes her work as science fiction with heart, because life is too short without at least a bit of romance in it. 

Book preview

Pretending to Sleep

Also by Monalisa Foster

Stand-alone works in the Ravages of Honor universe:

Novels

Ravages of Honor

Novellas

Enemy Beloved

Featherlight

Dominion (upcoming)

Short Story

Bonds of Love and Duty (available April 7, 2020)

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—Short Fiction—

Pretending to Sleep: A Communism Survivor’s Short Story

The Heretic

Catching the Dark

Bellona’s Gift

Promethea Invicta: A Novella

Cooper

Equality

Dolus Magnus: The Great Hoax

Collective Responsibility

—Non-fiction—

Rejection 101: A Writer’s Guide

Pretending to Sleep

A Communism Survivor’s Short Story

Monalisa Foster

Polite Society Enterprises LLC

Copyright © 2020 by Monalisa Foster

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover art: Copyright © 2020 by Monalisa Foster

Brilon font: Copyright 2019 by Tobias Saul and used under license.

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Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Epilogue

Newsletter Signup

About the Author

Ravages of Honor

Enemy Beloved: A Ravages of Honor Novella

Featherlight: A Ravages of Honor Novella

Dominion: A Ravages of Honor Novella

Bonds of Duty and Love: A Ravages of Honor Short Story

Catching the Dark

The Heretic

Bellona’s Gift

Promethea Invicta

Foreword

This story is based on actual events. For those who might wonder Which parts of this are true? my answer is that all the important parts are.

Prologue

Here and now…

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It's interesting the details the mind chooses to remember. Decades later some moments are still so crystal clear that you can see them as if they were happening right now. Your gut tells you it's happening. The sweat on your skin tells you it's happening. That hammering inside your ears—the one that the distant logical part of your mind insists is just your heart—tells you that it's happening.

It wasn't a dream, not in the sense that I was sleeping, but it was a nightmare. An extended, living nightmare, that came alive thanks to unguarded moments like, Renata, that's a nice story, spoken by a stranger from across the table. She said