Else poisoned her husband as a token of her love for Erika. Alone in her prison cell Else relives who and what had brought her there – Erika and their secret language, Erika’s enabling mother, Else’s jealous mother-in-law, her abusive husband and his appalling secret, the words of oppression.“Elsechickgorgeousyou you are like a blank white sheet of paper on which I am the Word. You are like the nothingness that I first efface because I have Words to put into the emptiness. Because I am the Word so-to-say.” Elfriede Czurda was born in Wels, Upper Austria and now lives and writes in Vienna after returning to Austria in 2007 from a lengthy period living and working in Berlin since 1980. After studying Art History and Archaeology in Salzburg and Paris, she has been a freelance writer since 1976. She has spent extended periods as Writer in Residence and Guest Professor in both the USA and Japan. A versatile and innovative artist, her oeuvre encompasses novels, prose collections and prose pieces, volumes of poetry, essays, visual poetry exhibitions, photography and short video works. The quality of her work has been acknowledged over the years by numerous awards, most recently the H.C. Artmann Prize of the City of Vienna (2014) and the Alice Salomon Poetik Prize in Berlin (2016). Kathleen Thorpe is a freelance literary translator and Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Here she was formerly the Head of German Studies and Modern Languages in the School of Languages Literature and Media, with a special interest in innovative prose and the contemporary Austrian novel.