The worlds of the Uzbek writer Sukhbat Aflatuni are as bizarre as mirages in the desert. They skillfully mimic reality, but as soon as the reader seems to have approached and is ready to immerse himself in an ordinary, specific genre, the author dispels the haze, and it turns out that stereotypes do not work here. The stories presented in the collection are clear confirmation of this. In “Clay Letters, Floating Apples,” a new Teacher comes to a distant village to teach children an ancient, mysterious alphabet and use it to return to the people the water that the greedy Chairman had taken away. In the story “Penuel,” the patriarch, the head of the once large Jacob family, is, of course, the biblical Jacob. On the one hand, he survived the entire controversial and bloody twentieth century and died at the age of one hundred and six. On the other hand, his ordeals and life aspirations are not unique, everything is repeated and has analogies right up to the Old Testament history, and the main thing for a person has always been the prolongation of the family. In “The Year of the Ram” the story about “new times” turns into a parable about how everyone will be rewarded according to their sins.