Stories

The Eye

Published in Subtropics, Spring 2022

The Writer was invited to give a reading in southwest Virginia, at her alma mater. She hadn’t been back for thirty years, and as the date approached, she grew more and more nostalgic at the prospect of seeing the old grounds, reminiscing about her youth and those few strenuous yet pleasant semesters she’d spent in the Appalachian Mountains. At the time when she had attended the college, it was only for women, with a sprawling campus, redbrick colonial buildings, barns, and stables. Students often brought their equine pets with them, keeping the animals for a year or two or until graduation.

Back then, she didn’t know much about horses or American colleges and had arrived at this one by chance or miracle. She came from a place that didn’t permit individual ownership of land or any large housing property. Even her flat was owned by the state, although her parents and she were allowed to live there until their deaths. She wasn’t expected to emigrate either, to survive or start writing and publishing, to get paid for her thoughts. She wasn’t expected to have thoughts at all, to voice doubts or criticism, to reject fear, to find happiness in a country other than her own. But that had been decades ago, and the Writer remembered very little from her college days. She remembered horses, though, and the extra money she’d earned grooming their manes and tails with soft-bristle brushes that cost more than her shoes. She remembered the animals’ whiskers tickling her skin, dipping into the cup of her hand as she fed them raw apples or dry oats, tufts of prickly hay. She remembered their eyes, too—dark, solemn, almost human, mirroring her face—as she stared into them and conjured her first awkward stories.

The Kyiv Symphony

Published in ZYZZYVA, Winter 2022

On his way home from the grocery store, hands weighted with buckwheat and potatoes, stooping, he shuffles up six flights of steps because the elevator in his building has been broken for a month, since the start of the war. Two men in loose black suits, under which, he thinks, they can easily hide guns or even grenades, smoke next to his flat. They stand back-to-back, one facing the stairs, the other his door. The latter, with a cigarette clamped between his lips, twists the doorknob, then rings the bell. The men don’t seem nervous or even curious. Their somewhat numb, somewhat flaccid expressions make him think that perhaps their visit is intended for another citizen and they came to his flat by mistake.

           Or not.

Once in his living room, offering him a cigarette that he politely refuses, they ask him to write a symphony, a pompous, victorious march to welcome Russian soldiers back home from the war. In their hands—yellowed sheets of music, a requiem to his orphaned youth.

            They discuss his payment, a disquieting sum of rubles he can use to remodel his flat or build a country house, plant an orchard. He loves apples, doesn’t he? Things will be arranged for him: foods, drinks, medicine, trips to the Black Sea, a doctor, a driver.

           “Excuse me, what year is this?” he asks, his eyes drawing in the men’s smiles dry and crooked like old branches.

The Visitor

Published in Fish Anthology, 2022

It began with fish. One sulky, rainy afternoon, a man walked into my store and asked if he could order fifty live salmon. Dressed in leather, he was square-jawed and dark-skinned, with a creased face, gray braided hair, and huge earlobes that reminded me of my grandmother’s. She used to tug at her ears when she told stories about WWII and the concentration camp, where she’d been discovered on a pile of rotting corpses by an American soldier. When she died, her ears were large and floppy, like burdock leaves.

As an immigrant living in Virginia for nearly twenty years, I was used to seeing all kinds of odd customers in my store. They were mostly people like me, expatriates from the former Soviet Republics or other faraway countries, so I tried to place my visitor. Could he be Georgian, Moldovan, or even Armenian? Greek, Turkish, or Middle-Eastern?

I was just about to ask, but he read my mind.

“Native,” the man said in a deep flowing voice that made me think of rivers. “From Spokane.”

The Island of Sodor

Published in Joyland, August 2021

Korovin roused to a stench of cat piss pervading the bedroom. The cat was incorrigible. After a multitude of tests and checkups, which had cost a fortune, the vet assured Korovin of the animal’s perfect health. Korovin was the only soul living with the cat for the past three years after Nancy took off with their four-year-old son and all his belongings, except for an expensive railroad village Korovin had purchased for Daniel’s birthday but never assembled. So, unless the cat remonstrated against its being left behind and sharing the house with Korovin, there could be no other logical reason for it to start pissing every-damn-where. 

The cat was a gluttonous beast, long and scrawny, with smooth black seal-like hide. It had sparse whiskers and sharp yellow eyes that followed Korovin in and out of the room. The animal’s body had no visible deformities, except for the hind legs that seemed too thin and wobbly, the paws turned out. The cat stayed perpetually famished, and when it demanded food, it mewed in the most miserable, pleading manner, which irritated Korovin to the roots of his hair, but also made him aware of his own loneliness in the world. 

Poplars

Published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Summer 2021

It happened a very long time ago, in another century, another country. Cell phones hadn’t been invented yet or color TVs, and to own a city apartment was the same as to own a plane or a ship. We lived in the heart of Moscow back then, in a communal flat, with high ceilings and decorative wooden moldings that resembled garlands of laurel leaves. Before the revolution, the entire three-story structure had belonged to a famous doctor, who, fearing the imminent socialist slaughter, had escaped to Europe. The building was then divided into flats, flats into rooms, rooms into sleeping nooks housing total strangers, who were forced to cohabitate, and who knew all the secrets breeding in the darkness of their neighbors’ dens.

The original oak floors in our flat were burned for heat during the war, and five years later all but a small patch in the kitchen had been replaced with smooth, pale boards that resembled skin. Stepping on them made me think of naked bodies piled in ravines or gas chambers, and how two of those bodies had been my parents. When my grandmother learned the truth, she didn’t speak for a year. Her hair turned to ash overnight; her gait slowed, and her shoulders drooped, as though she were carrying two sacks of bones. But I wasn’t yet old enough to understand loss or grief, how it’s like a fire burning through everything it touches. 

New Life

Published in Electric Literature, Spring 2021

Mrs. Jones was my twelfth-grade biology teacher, whose husband had left her for the ninth-grade English teacher after twenty-two years of marriage. It happened early in the fall, and Mrs. Jones often came to work tired and distressed, often plucking a tissue out of a box and pressing it to her eyes during class. Some students grinned or snickered, but most pretended not to notice as they studied the division of chromosomes and how much energy and labor it took to grow a life. Mrs. Jones didn’t have children, but she nodded and occasionally corrected us, drawing intricate beehive charts on the board. It was my senior year at F. W. High; I lacked friends and had just begun to get acquainted with the surroundings. I was new to the area, new to the country, new to the people.