Stories
The Eclipse
Published in Southern Review, Summer 2026
Grey Gardens, what she thinks when she first arrives at her mother’s home in Virginia after years of absence. A decay of life. A kind of forlornness that reminds her of the 1975 documentary, where everything—the dilapidated house, the dunes, the concrete garden walls, the sea mist, and even the women’s faces—has an ashy hue, as though coated with layers of dust. The air, too, is gray, like a veil of smoke or fog, thick before her eyes. She navigates along the empty hallway, drawing shallow breaths, afraid the air will stay inside her and weave cobwebs around her lungs, a cloak of fine, soft filament.
In the kitchen towels lie in heaps, dirty dishes with dried moldy remnants, a ham sandwich, crumbs of cookies or bread, candy wrappers and smashed boxes of crackers, a soggy tub of ice cream, and what once used to be a pasta dish—a lasagna—inside a corrugated aluminum tray. A squalor of cigarette butts, empty wine and beer bottles, a few tall Cokes still unopened on the counter. The endless trails of coffee mugs, pots and pans, oily cans of tuna and chicken.
The floorboards squeak and groan; the wind whistles in the windowpanes. It seems as though the house is about to fall down, turn into mounds of brick and mortar, burying her childhood memories that still reside between those walls, hidden in trunks and shaky cupboards, the dark mustiness of closets, where, as a little girl, breathing in the acrid smell of mothballs, she used to hide from her mother behind the stored-away winter garments. She used to put them on, too, used to wrap her mother’s shawls around her shoulders, to don on her fur hats and wobble in her platform shoes, resembling a bird, a proud heron, her pale scrawny legs sticking out of her short dresses visible under the bulky coats. She used to pretend to be an actress, somebody famous, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, waiting for her mother to notice her, to say in her deep, smoky, heavy voice: Here’s looking at you, kid.
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 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.
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.
