"Grandma used to say that devils would emerge from the cracked earth in summer, and that it was the road to hell."

The author grew up near the ponds - artificial reservoirs carved out by human hands, which over time became so seamlessly integrated into the landscape that they were no longer noticeable. For most of his life, he didn’t pay attention to them - just as one does not notice things that have always been “in their place.” And yet he remembers his grandmother’s voice warning him about that place: You mustn’t go there. Something troubled her, as if there were more to that water than just the reflection of the sky, old nets, or the remains of dead fish floating to the surface.

Ponds become a surface on which things that usually remain in the background are revealed - not as a clear image, but as a disturbance, a distortion in which what was meant to remain invisible suddenly begins to show through.

In this story, the devil is not a character, but a way of understanding - a language through which we attempt to grasp what lies beyond us. Perhaps it is precisely in this crack, where order breaks down and what has been rejected begins to show through, that something comes into view which we try to name: a strangeness that cannot be dispelled.

Edition © 2026 Rust Publishing

ISBN 978-83-970856-8-8

Photographs: Łukasz Zając

Design: Jakub Szachnowski

Sequence: Jakub Szachnowski

Text: Katarzyna Szachnowska

Prepress/DTP: Jakub Szachnowski

Papers: Refit Wool Blue, Pergraphica Stormy Grey, Munken Pure

Print run: 300

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