(40) Shannon Frost Greenstein: It Was Actually the Fire
“Tell me the story, Grandpop.”
David sighed. Always it was the same while vacationing with his family. He loved his grandchildren as if they were his own, but he never did learn to tolerate the sheer repetition of childhood.
“Are you sure you don’t want another story, scout?” David asked wearily. “I told you that one last night.”
“Nooooo,” whined his grandson. “I want to hear it again.”
The evening was cool, and a gentle breeze rustled the curtains in the bedroom. Looking at the determination in the child’s eyes, David knew bedtime would stretch on indefinitely until he gave in.
“Fine,” he sighed, already mentally enjoying a bourbon on the rocks downstairs in the Lounge. “I’ll tell you the story.”
The little boy settled back on the pillows, satisfied, as David took a breath.
“It was the spring of 1906,” he started, “and I had just moved to San Francisco…”
***
“Myer, let’s go!”
The raucous laughter of their other friends nearly drowned out David’s call, but Myer nonetheless kissed his girl goodbye and trotted over to the train.
“We’re off, cats!” someone shouted as the men boarded and the whistle blew. Excitement traveled through the group like a current, bawdy jokes and exclamations punctuating their chatter. The train chewed through the landscape while the miles disappeared behind the caboose and the call of a shiny future called “California” grew ever more tantalizing.
It had always been David’s dream to see the West Coast, and never before had he been so close. He knew no one in California; his pockets were empty except for the address of a boarding house on Powell Street. But David had his friends, and he had two suitcases safely housing his best designs, and he felt absolutely no qualms about this cross-country move.
“You and me, right, Dave?”
Myer leaned across the aisle, offering a hand to his best friend, and David grinned and shook.
“You and me,” he agreed, clasping his future roommate’s fingers. “San Francisco won’t know what hit it.”
***
“I already know that part, Grandpop,” the little boy complained, and David nodded.
“I know, but that’s where the story starts,” he reminded his grandson. “It’s important to remember, because of what happened the next day.”
“When you were sad, right?” the child questioned.
“That’s right,” David agreed. “All day, things felt strange. It was like there was a raincloud hanging over us. We weren’t excited and happy anymore. No one wanted to go out and explore or find a billiards game.”
“So what did you do?”
David shrugged.
“We stayed inside. We slept. Some fellows read some books. We just weren’t in the mood to go have fun. And no one could figure out why,” he answered.
“Because the earthquake was coming, right?” the child said eagerly.
“Yes, but we didn’t know that,” David responded.
He drew a breath, preparing to launch into the next act, dredging up the memories he had for years buried in his subconsciousness like a Method actor. It was only after his own son was born that David could start to think about San Francisco; it had taken most of a lifetime to come to terms with it. It was something he never thought he’d be repeating ad nauseum for the grandchildren he never thought he’d live to have.
“That was April 17th,” David continued. “We kept on at the boarding house all day. And then, that night, we went to sleep…”
***
Myer was screaming.
David awoke in an instant, the shot of adrenaline to his endocrine system rocketing him out of bed with a pounding heart.
“It’s a cyclone!” Myer shouted.
Disoriented in the dark, David searched for an explanation as to why the dishes on the mantel were falling; why the pictures were smashing upon the floor.
The house wobbled like the hand of God was shaking its foundation, and David stumbled to the open window in his underwear.
“I’ll close it!” he yelled to Myer, plaster raining down on his head, and then watched as the three tenements across the street crumbled down into nothingness.
David knew then, somewhere deep in his lizard brain, that his life was in danger; he knew, as he watched buildings collapse and dust rise and wreckage fly, that it was an earthquake. His rational mind refused to accept this knowledge, however, and thus David stood at the window with his mouth agape. He stared at the empty space where edifices once stood; he stared at the pile of rubble where people once lived.
Glasses shattered and furniture fell and pieces of the ceiling plummeted to the floor, but it took Myer shouting his name to jerk David from his stupor.
“Dave, you’ll be crushed!”
David sprinted back across the room, hearing the screams of the other boarders, and threw himself across his roommate’s mattress.
“Dave, stay here, so in case we die, we die near one another!”
Myer’s voice wavered; there were tears behind the request.
David’s brain was consumed with thoughts of his parents, filled with notions of their grief. He pictured his mother receiving the news of his death; he saw her crumple from sheer loss and blinked away wetness from his own eyes.
Then came Myer’s request, however; and upon hearing the word “die”, David surprised himself by starting to laugh. Even as the remnants of tears dripped from his cheeks, David laughed, and as the world continued to break down, he laughed all the harder.
“Die be hanged, we will live!” David exclaimed. “We’re not ready to die yet!”
David felt suddenly euphoric with clarity. He felt invincible; he felt ready to face mortality itself. It was the will to survive made incarnate, evolutionary biology kicking in at the exact right time, neurotransmitters on overdrive to protect their human host from harm. It felt like power, actually, and just as David delivered this proclamation about his intention to live…the shaking stopped.
***
“Then what happened?” his grandson asked, sounding not-at-all ready for sleep. The child’s eyes were wide, despite hearing the story countless times before, despite it always ending the same way.
David shrugged. Talking about 1906 exhausted him, despite telling the story countless times before, despite it always ending the same way.
“They demolished buildings with dynamite to make a firebreak, so we heard a lot of explosions.”
For the sake of his grandson, David always recounted this next part of the story vaguely, in a mild tone of voice. The boy was only 7, after all; he didn’t yet need to know how bad things in this life can actually get.
“And what else??” the child demanded, never satisfied with his grandfather’s chronicle, always thirsty for more details. David occasionally suspected his grandson requested this story simply to ward off sleep, and he thought longingly of the bourbon downstairs.
“In the beginning, everyone was worried we would run out of food. We were all gathering as much food as we could. The army even came to help.”
…the city was rioting…
“And your house collapsed but you weren’t hurt, right?” his grandson confirmed.
“That’s right,” David concurred, recalling the terror of the aftershocks.
…there were bodies in the street. Some of them were dead, but some were just screaming. Mothers were wailing over their dead children. Someone was begging for help in Yiddish. We brought the wounded in ash carts to the hospital, but the hospital was flat…
“And the whole city was gone, right?? the boy child asked with all the relish of a safe, privileged childhood.
“It was actually the fire,” David explained, “that did all the damage. There were so many, and they burned for three whole days because all the water mains were broken...”
***
Myer squinted through the fine layer of grit coating his eyeglasses.
“What’s that?” he asked David.
Smoke was rising in billows, the sky smothering under a blanket of ash. Everywhere, fires were springing up; everywhere, fires were spreading.
Dave craned his neck to look in the direction Myer was pointing.
At first, they were small, isolated to the piles of rubble that were once hotels and businesses and churches. Then they spread to other hotels and businesses and churches. Broken gas mains nourished the flames; broken water mains thwarted all efforts to contain them.
“What do you see?” he asked. David’s eyes were stinging in the acrid air. The white noise of human agony, that Greek chorus of pain they had been hearing since the quake, was now accompanied by the crackling of the fire as it ate. These two rackets resonated in his fingertips and his back teeth, a melody and a harmony filling him up until there was no room for rational thought; until he felt the stirrings of madness.
Myer was still squinting into the distance, Union Square laid out before them, detritus strewed haphazardly to every compass point. There were guns in every direction: Army; Navy; police; armed vigilantes. The looting had started early as the initial shock passed and fear of hunger spread. The troops had shown up shortly after, claiming permission from Mayor Schmitz to shoot all criminals on sight. Martial law was slowly returning order to the streets, but what harm was there left to do? Everything the earthquake hadn’t destroyed was burning.
“It’s a person,” Myer said vaguely to David, his gaze firmly upon the husk of the Union League building. “It’s a man.”
It was a man, David realized, finally seeing what Myer was seeing, a body drifting in the drafts off the surface of the flames. It was hung from the scaffolding which still stood by the crumpled walls; a warning to the ground below.
“I see it,” David said quietly, averting his gaze.
Myer was still staring at the corpse, its eyes bulging, its face a ghastly gray. David knew he should feel shock and horror. He knew this was an atrocity. But they had seen so much death, and there was so much fear, and the world was turned upside down. David, frankly, felt desensitized to the horror of it all; he was just numb.
“Let’s go, buddy,” David said to Myer, pulling lightly on his arm. Myer followed him meekly, turning back after a moment like Lot’s wife witnessing the destruction of Sodom.
“Should we…tell someone?” he asked. “Should we get a soldier?”
“It probably was the soldiers,” David explained patiently. “The man was a thief.”
This was said coldly, and with certainty; inside, David felt nothing at all. “C’mon…we need to find some food.”
He tugged gently on his friend once again, and they resumed trudging through the ankle-high debris, having nowhere else to go but forward.
***
“And now,” David said, “it’s time to go to sleep.”
He always skipped the part about the man hanging from the scaffolding when he told this story to his eager grandson.
Time had healed many of the wounds from the 1906 quake, both the bodily injuries and the psychological scars. But David had never been able to forget that body rotating slowly on its noose; now, when he thought about it, he felt a great deal.
The bourbon was good for that, too, though.
“But…” protested the boy. “But what about sleeping in the park? I want to hear…”
“That’s enough,” David said resolutely. “It’s bedtime. I’ll tell you about the tents some other time.”
Reluctantly, the child lay back against his pillow. David caressed the boy’s hair for a moment and made sure the blanket was tucked in tight. Then he switched off the light, grateful as always for the time with his family, grateful as always that the children were in bed.
David descended the stairs towards the Lounge and the drink he had earned, grateful as always to be alive.
THE END
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is the author of These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (Really Serious Literature, 2022) and Correspondence to Nowhere (Nonfiction, Bone & Ink Press, 2022). Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter.
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(39) Shikhandin: Thirst
The Brahmin looks at the white man whose eyes are glazed over. His head, almost lolling. He must be thirsty, thinks the Brahmin, and then frowns, shaking his head imperceptibly. Not thirsty, half dead with thirst.
The man is a Tourist, a guest of India. Guests are Gods, aren’t they? That’s what Dharma says. Even when they are infidels. And if he, knowing about a guest’s needs, does not do the needful, would that not tantamount to sin? Paap? But Dharma also demands he retain his purity, remain unsullied by both sin and the touch of the lowborn. The Brahmin shudders. These foreigners are so uncivilised. Rama, Rama. They don’t even know how to drink without soiling the rim of the container with their lips, making it joothha! They don’t know the proper way is to hold the bottle or cup a few inches above their mouths, and throw back their heads to receive the liquid.
He shifts his weight from one sweaty buttock to the next. He is already doing penance by travelling in a train crowded with all kinds of life, low, not so low, and irredeemably low. Rama, Rama, Rama. He will take a bath and sprinkle Ganga water on himself and his bag, once he is home. Forgive me O Lord, he mutters. Forgive me.
The train judders. Iron wheels racing on iron lines touching flint, creating momentary sparks. Flint shards fly up. Sparse green fields, bald rock faces, goats and cattle with dung on their hind quarters, mud huts and shallow bodies of pee-coloured water streak past. The faces blur, and so do the defecating buttocks lining the tracks. Sometimes it is hard to tell a face from a buttock. Dusty heat slaps the faces of the passengers through the bars of the un-shuttered windows.
The Tourist groans softly. What possessed him to be a back packer? He is not hard up for cash. He could have travelled in comfort, in cleaner and safer surroundings, visited the regular Tourist spots, and stayed at decent three-star hotels, at least three-star. But no, he had to be different. Go and experience the real India, get an authentic adventure! Pah! What was he thinking!
He scratches his sparse beard. His seemingly vacant glass-blue eyes take in the people around him. God, what would he not give for a can of chilled beer! But he’ll settle for clean water. Especially now. Except that none of the oddly named railway stations in strange and out of the way places, where the train had stopped for many minutes before painfully pulling out, sold bottled water from brands he had been advised to trust by informed people, bloggers, vloggers, friends.
The man sitting opposite him, has a bottle of water in his cloth bag. He can see the shape of the bottle through the cloth, below the man’s hand. The white lines and the vermillion dot on his forehead set him apart from the rest. His eyes seem to be perpetually shut. As if he’s praying. Maybe that’s his way of keeping the heat and dust out. But his hand is clasping the bottle’s top like it would the hilt of a sword.
The Tourist licks his dry lips. He flicks his tongue over the corners of his mouth. Even the taste of his own sweat is welcome. That man has water, that man has water, that man has water… The words roll through his head like the chugging wheels of the train. He rolls his tongue around his mouth, and sucks at the walls of his cheeks. The saliva has thickened, but is still a watery thing. He swallows, coughs and sighs.
The other passengers stare placidly, with innocent curiosity. The Tourist is exotic. Something to look at in this dull space. They don’t wonder at him, the way we don’t wonder at a nursery-grown flower among weeds and trash, but stare instead, drinking in its delicate looks, perhaps mildly questioning why it’s not in its own place, in some neat and orderly garden. And, at the same time, they are not really interested in finding out, their curiosity is idle, just a ‘time-pass’ activity. They don’t look at the Brahmin directly. He is someone they do not wish to offend. They have given him as much space as they can. They would think nothing of taking other people’s children on their laps if it meant getting a place to sit. But Brahmins are given space. They also believe in karma and heaven. The Tourist knows this. He believes in the very same things. After all he came here to learn more about the great Indian spirituality, didn’t he? He wanted truth from India. Now he is learning to deal with thirst.
The last stop is a few stations away. How many hours is that? Will he be able to survive the last leg? The thought occurs at the same time to both, the Tourist and the Brahmin alike.
For the Brahmin it is his home town, native place, as they say. He will reach his own house and courtyard, with its goats and cow, and the holy Basil growing from a special elevated place where he and his wife light lamps at dusk. His obedient and plump wife! He can almost smell the pure, onion-and-garlic-free home cooking, the smoky peaty scent of coal and cowpat cakes, the oil and the ghee. He can feel her dutiful and respectful embrace. Perhaps he should give his bottle of good water to the infidel. That man is a guest of the country after all. He should offer atleast a semblance of the famed Indian hospitality – Athhitee Deva Bhava - and thereby absolve himself of any possible sin.
For the Tourist his destination is a homestay that was highly recommended in online forums by budget travellers before him. A homestay that is far from the towns and cities and all those overdone tourist destinations. One where the fabled, unspoiled Indian country opens up its arms like a virgin waiting to be seduced. That rare affordable homestay where the food is hygienic, and not overly spicy, and the bathrooms are clean though always wet. And, nothing other than branded bottled water is offered, the brands he can trust. The thought gives him strength. He can test his endurance some more. He averts his eyes from the Brahmin. But involuntarily returns with a quick side long glance, before casually looking away again.
The Brahmin sees a station pass. The metallic beat and the rhythmic jerking of the train relaxes his limbs. He leans against the hard back-rest. He taps his tongue on his upper palate making a soft chucking sound. He swallows a smidgeon of saliva, and brings out the bottle. Tilting his head back, he pours the water expertly into his mouth from a distance of six inches. He twists the cap on tightly after he’s done drinking.
The Tourist shuts his eyes. He cannot bear to look. He feels a nudge, a poke against the side of his torso. His eyes fly open again. Startled. Fellow passenger, a raggedy fellow with a streaming face and mouth stained red with betel juice, is elbowing him and tossing an eye over at the Brahmin.
The Brahmin has extended his hand, the one that still holds the bottle. He tilts his chin and indicates the Tourist should take the bottle. The Tourist does so, but first folds his hands, and bows his head into a namaste. The other passengers smile and titter. They know the Brahmin will never drink from that bottle again. But the Brahmin is satisfied. He has obeyed his Dharma and kept it too. The Tourist is thankful. His thirst is too great for him to doubt the hygiene of the water. How bad can it be? The man just drank from it and didn’t die. He is relieved that he can now finish the marathon and reach his destination without collapsing.
***
Shikhandin is the pen name of an Indian writer who writes for adults and children. Her published books include, After Grief – Poems (Red River, India), Impetuous Women (Penguin Random House India), Immoderate Men (Speaking Tiger), and Vibhuti Cat (Duckbill-Penguin-Random House India). Shikhandin's accolades include runner-up George Floyd Short Story Contest 2020 (UK), winner 2017 Children First Contest (Duckbill) in association with Parag (Tata Trust), winner Brilliant Flash Fiction Contest 2019 (USA), two-time Pushcart Prize Nomination, and much more.
(38) Sarah Perret-Goluboff: Tastes Like
Hostess Cupcakes taste like summer nights’ gas stations, like the feeling of being nudged awake in a warm bucket seat, the car slowing to a stop and the whisper of “you want anything?” and even though you tell her not to get you anything she gets you just the right thing, Hostess Cupcakes, which arrive in pairs and taste like bonding, the two of you, mother and daughter, explorers, and you don’t even mind when she comes back with the bottles in one hand because the other hand has Hostess Cupcakes, which taste like co-conspiracy when the flashing lights pull you to the side of the highway and she asks you to hide her opened bottles in the backseat with you, where you place them in the middle console, covering them with a blanket and the crinkling wrapper of Hostess Cupcakes, the first of the plasticized icing still clings to the backs of your baby teeth tasting like victory when she pulls right back onto the road have a nice day, officer-ing, laughing, asking you to pass the sixpack back to the front, clumsy in your small hands, so you pick up the second Hostess Cupcake, which tastes like the sides of your stomach, lurching with the swerves of the car, trilling with the charge of her lapsed silence and her clenching jaw and what the fuck are you doing back there getting crumbs everywhere, the bile in your throat rising is tinged with the sweetness of Hostess Cupcakes, which taste like white knuckles on the armrest because you hadn’t buckled your seat belt after the stop and you know you can’t move now and when the car pulls to a stop, your heart settling back against your lungs, pressing its beat like a gavel, you grab the wrapper of the Hostess Cupcakes, which taste like keeping your head low and your mouth shut, shut, shut, wondering if next time you could do the whole trip without stopping for gas at all and never once tasting a single Hostess Cupcake.
Sarah Perret-Goluboff is an emerging writer based in Chicago. Her writing can be found in Bridge Eight Press, 805 Lit + Art, Five South, and is anticipated at Drunk Monkeys. Most recently, her work was nominated for Sonder Press’ Best Small Fictions 2021 Anthology. Follow her on Twitter
(37) Rachel Belth: Mетро
Китай-город metro station, Moscow, any day in June 2011. I descend the shallow steps off улица Маросейка to an underground bazaar—green-tented shops selling pastries, clothing, and gadgets; the dank smell of a basement plus freshly baked butter and jam. A flock of pigeons takes flight around the low ceiling when I walk near. At the turnstile, most people brush their purse or bag against the scanner, but I’m too nervous to have my purse away from my body, even so briefly, so I pull my metro card from the outside pocket of my purse.
An escalator stretches into a tunnel of which I cannot see the bottom for a whole minute. I know this doesn’t sound like a long time, but for me, it’s a long time to have no idea of an endpoint. Along the wall toward the ceiling, the same six or seven advertisements repeat—the same faces, the same smiles, the same bright colors in a hypnotizing pattern. Everyone else on the escalator seems comfortable in this limbo—a middle-aged woman reads another chapter of her book; a teenage couple is French kissing; a suited man with a briefcase rushes down the escalator on my left.
It is a journey unto itself, and I reach the bottom a new person. I live here now, in underground tunnels like a worm. I am greeted by a marble hallway and a bronze bust of Viktor Nogin, a leader in the Bolshevik revolution, still here even though the Soviet Union is long gone.
All of a sudden I’m in the great hall of a courthouse or some important municipal building: high, white-domed ceilings, dark metallic crown molding with lighting built-in, geometric marble columns and marble tiles on the floor and walls. My new sense of self is disturbed. I have grown used to dark, narrow tunnels and now I am greeted by an expanse of light and beauty. Am I above ground or below? What am I supposed to do? Where do I go? Then I begin to register the sounds and smells: the bustle of a crowd and the clack and whine of a metro train intensifying into panic, the smell of sweat.
***
I still have my metro card, a retro design with diagonal blue stripes, and the red block M. I keep it, along with a few leftover rubles and kopecks, in a wooden puzzle box my sister gave me from her trip to Romania that same year.
It was my first trip overseas, with a group of thirteen American college students visiting Moscow for a month to meet Russian college students. In that time, I got to know only a few places: the block or so around our hostel in Китай-город and a few stations of the metro: always starting in Китай-город and ending at Охотный Ряд, at Юго-Западная, at Новые Черёмушки, at Измайловская, at Коломенская.
***
The Moscow metro system is erratic in-depth, stations ranging from surface level to the deepest in the world in the span of 3 kilometers. Partly this is to go under the Moscow River or to access the layer of clay that provides better support for construction, but also it is characteristic of Soviet metro systems that they are deep.
November 6, 1941: Stalin gives a pep talk from the Маяковская station. The Axis army has invaded Russia and air raids are demoralizing the city of Moscow. As in London and other cities, hundreds of thousands of Muscovites take shelter in the deeper stations of the metro whenever there is an air raid. For the anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin and several party officials give speeches from the platform at Маяковская. The carpet is laid out and a large podium set up at one end of the platform, dignitaries seated on either side.
Of any station in the metro, Маяковская feels the least like what it is—a tunnel deep under the earth. The platform is wide, flanked with delicate steel colonnades. The high ceiling consists of a series of cathedral-like domes with inset blue mosaics depicting the “Soviet sky.” The insets are lined with filament lights, giving the effect of a skylight at noon. The whole place is spacious and brightly lit enough to be a palace. The symbolism is clear: Stalin as Russia’s god and king, imposed not chosen, but god and king nonetheless. Stalin as Russia’s sun, shining even in the dark, even underground.
In all this splendor, Stalin’s audience fills the platform, standing room only. They listen and applaud energetically. It is strange to see a static crowd in this place as if someone pressed pause on the usual bustle. One half expects a metro train to fly in at any moment and overwhelm the speech with its roar, the crowd to shove its way through the doors.
“The German invaders want to have a war of extermination with the peoples of the USSR,” Stalin declares. “Well, if the Germans want a war of extermination, they will get it.” He receives an (already) standing ovation.
***
In 2011 I had weathered my first year away from home, unmoored from my family in Indiana and not yet belonging at college in Ohio. I felt loneliness and despair, disjointed from the friendly Midwestern culture around me. I had this romantic idea that I could go someplace new and find immediately that I belonged there. Having read and resonated with a handful of Russian novels, I thought that place was Russia. It had been the only place on my mind for several years. I was nineteen. (Was anyone ever so young? I am still very young.)
The complicating factor is that it did feel that way. Finally, I found myself in a place where I was not expected to smile in greeting to every passerby, a place that allowed for contradiction and incongruity. For example, there remains no official logo for the Moscow metro. Despite halfhearted efforts at standardization, it remains a red M in your choice of block font.
***
It is up for historians to debate whether the original metro stations were designed deep enough to double as bomb shelters or whether it was an added benefit that appeared in 1941. But after the war, the Soviets continued building metro stations for this double purpose. Only now it was the Cold War with the threat of nuclear bombs, so they had to go even deeper.
1953: A new Арбатская opens, parallel to the Арбатская destroyed in the war. The original station was 8 meters underground; the new one is 41 meters deep with an extra-large platform. The tunnel is an unusual elliptical shape, supported with thick arches, all in white with red marble at the base. The ceiling is decorated with floral reliefs and lighted with chandeliers. One can imagine Pushkin—who once lived on улица Арбат directly above—walking this platform, an underground funhouse mirror of its counterpart above ground.
***
It is commonplace that Russia is a mystery, but I disagree. Russia puts on no pretenses. She does not put on a good face for you; she could not care less what you think of her; she does not try to make a cohesive story of her history. She is nothing but herself right from the start.
***
1986: Construction begins on Парк Победы, the deepest station in Moscow (fourth deepest in the world) at 84 meters—about 20 stories—underground. The ceiling is plain white. Thick square pylons are faced with red and gray marble, the floor a matching red and gray checkerboard—everything is simple, clean, and heavy. The back walls at the ends of the tunnel are deeply colored mosaics of the Great Patriotic War and the 1812 French invasion of Russia.
I have not been able to find the reason it is so deep. Maybe this type of thing is why people call Russia a mystery.
Парк Победы is also home to the longest escalators in Europe, 126 meters long and about 3 minutes to ride. They are in a plain white tunnel with spherical light fixtures on sticks between the two escalators like an infinite line of glowing lollipops.
***
In The Underground by Hamid Ismailov, the Moscow metro is the home of dead things, including the novel’s narrator, Kirill. Even though a large minority of the novel’s action takes place above ground, the metro is the frame of reference for the entire story. It is the shadow cast over every scene. For Kirill, the metro is significant as a personal refuge and as the place where his life begins and ends. But it also illustrates a deeper truth: that Moscow has an unusual relationship with her metro, at once independent and codependent. Each station of the metro that Kirill spends time in is described with fastidious care, from Комсомо́льская to Новокузнецкая to Домодедовская. Because each station is uniquely designed and decorated because the tunnels are so deep—physically removed from the city above—the metro takes on a life and personality of its own.
The escalators exaggerate this sense. Moscow stations are deep, and they feel even deeper because Moscow almost exclusively prefers escalators over elevators. (Much could be said here about Russia’s infrastructure excluding people with disabilities, but I am not the person to write that essay.) Every journey, every excursion into the city, begins and ends with a long escalator ride.
Unlike elevators, escalators force you to feel the depth (or height) to which you are going. You experience the slow crawl underground for 6 or 10 or 20 stories. You are forced to look into the endless tunnel and contemplate its depth, experience its lack of an ending. When I think back to my time in Russia, it is one of the things I long for the most. That disorienting journey to the underworld.
Rachel Belth is an instructional designer, creative nonfiction writer, and poet. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Crack the Spine, and The Critical Flame, among other places. She writes from an east-facing window in Columbus, Ohio.
(36) Pavel Frolov: Moscow Apartment
1
Sometimes I dream
of the Apartment I grew up in
One-Twenty, Prospect of Peace
City of Moscow
17 story
1950s Stalinka
Two Towers like a castle
a grocery market
used to be up front;
for residents three street doors:
in the back and
on each side –
the back is where I entered
the back is also where
tall trucks unloaded produce
fruits and vegetables
of the second freshness
on occasion, smell of rot
often in these dreams
don’t even make it to my floor
to unlock one of the four doors
don’t run into any neighbors
Instead stuck in the lobby
downstairs, staring at my mailbox –
full of childhood toys and
clothes my mother sewed me –
so, I climb inside
the mailbox, and
there is a cave…
sometimes that wakes me up
2
other times I’m stuck
inside an elevator
the dungy one of the two
never reaching my fourth floor
There were two elevators:
one large and dungy
with a double-door –
it stopped on regular floors; another –
small and dimly lit
with just a single door – it stopped
in between the floors:
I liked to hop
on down from
in between the fifth
and fourth
so, when I’m stuck inside the dungy elevator
behind that double-door
inside the smell of urine
and cheap vodka…
sometimes that wakes me up
3
In another dream
I make it to the fourth floor
but the wrong apartment numbers on the door –
fifty, not one-forty-five
I knock and someone unlocks –
a big fat cat
stands on its paws and
curses me in Russian
I dash downstairs
passing Anarchist delinquents
who sit on windowsills
between the floors
and sniff strong glue – a Russian household
brand called Moment
they leave behind squeezed out tubes
and clear plastic bags they put
on their heads...
that part wakes me up
I never tried this Moment
But used to sneak my stepdad’s Dunhills
Out the window in between
the fifth and
the fourth floor
when I was thirteen
4
Once I dreamt
I made it back inside
the apartment
was the same
as I remembered:
the long and
narrow hallway rambled
past the stern Front Door
on the right: the bedroom blur
behind a stained-glass door,
the living room – its armoire wall
further down
the hallway
up the corner with a
backed up garbage chute
next to an always locked Back Door,
and further down
the hallway – on the left:
a water closet and a bathroom
yes! Not one but two! adjacent rooms –
in the floor and in the ceiling
still were holes on each side
of the wall between
where haunted-looking toilet stood
and where sink and tub
both withered uninvitingly
Hot! Hot! water pipes were missing
like a metaphor for Soviet life
and finally, the kitchen
arid but unchanged
inside the fridge were leftovers –
some did not belong to time and place
so, I washed and peeled a few
potatoes with a knife and boiled them
on the stove
just like I used to as a kid
In the living room –
I sat on that green couch
with wooden handles on each side
its huge firm cushions
I used to put aside and sleep on
the foldout mattress
for a year before I’d left for New York
I fast-forwarded
some VHS tapes –
80s blockbusters bootlegs
Badly dubbed in Russian
Rocky, Aliens, Terminator
Played some early 90s CDs
on the giant Panasonic boom-box
Take That, Roxette, Vaya Con Dios
Pet Shop Boys suggest – Go West
I fell asleep on the couch and
when I woke up (still inside the dream)
I saw that it got dark
Outside through the window
so, I strolled
the long and
narrow hallway
where I used to hear at night
my late Great-Grandmother’s
Footsteps
after she had
Passed
the Big Apartment
down the Line to me and my mother
and later when
the Iron Curtain colla–
psed, we
kept it
through privatizations
that swept over
the newborn Russian
Federation
I heard no footsteps
as I strolled
the long and
narrow hallway that time
but instead – a commotion on the stairs
I wondered if an anarchist delinquents’ party
was inviting itself in but no
nobody was behind the door
so down the windy steps
I floated into the dark lobby
where someone twisted out
the lightbulbs from the ceiling
dropped one
running outside and
left ajar the street door
so bright daylight
spill –
blinding
that’s when I woke up in Brooklyn.
Originally from Moscow, Russia, Pavel Frolov is a queer-identified New York City-based performer and writer. He recently completed his BA in Communication at CUNY Brooklyn College. Pavel's two recent poems, "The Fall" and "Quiet Cars" have appeared in Beyond Words and Ariel's Dream literary journals.
This episode was sponsored by:
Betterism
Betterism is a laid-back learning community seeking contributors & consumers dedicated to collective growth and mindsets of gratitude. There's both a blog and a podcast where the labels "student" and "teacher" are united to help people thrive at whatever it is they're building. Swing by and join creator & host Glen Binger as he shifts the paradigm around what it means to self-educate. By teaching together, we learn together.
(35) Nancy Jorgensen: Decisions
Cookbooks overrun my kitchen table, spines cracked to buns and brioche. Spots of greasy butter and yellowed milk gather among the words. Which recipe should I make? A healthy oat bread? A practical sandwich loaf? Or a decadent buttered-and-sugared cinnamon roll, rivers of icing trickling its folds. Just as I tuck my finger under the creased corner of a page and circle it to the opposite side, my daughter Gwen FaceTimes. Once again, she says, “I really want you, Dad, Elizabeth, and me to live within twenty minutes of each other.” The problem is that Gwen, a professional runner, needs a more temperate climate than ours, and she lives a thousand miles southwest. “If everyone moved to Colorado,” she says, “we could all be together.”
I consider the trade-offs if we left our Wisconsin hometown of sixty-some years. Gliding on two wheels over the Glacial Drumlin Trail would be exchanged for booted treks on a snow-capped mountain. Playing piano accompaniments for my trumpeter friends would be replaced by Wednesday-night dinners with our daughters. Morning chats with my aging mother would be swapped for bedtime stories with my four-year-old grandson, my nose thrumming with the scent of baby shampoo, then a tuck-tuck of cotton sheets, and a whisper of lips on his forehead. The options swing like a pendulum, forward and back in two equal arcs—driving a clock that won’t tick forever.
When Gwen says goodbye, I imagine yeasty loaves, hot with melted butter, shared every week with my daughters. But, I need a loaf today, so it’s back to my breadboard. Perhaps the push and pull of creating something strong, yet delicate, will lead me to an answer. What should today’s bread be? Maybe sourdough, fed and tended, then shaped and warmed until it rises up beautiful and brown. Or rolls, each with a style, shape, and look of their own. Perhaps multigrain, the nutty and sweet, the colorful and nourishing, all in a single loaf. I settle on challah, rich with egg and sweet with honey. My fingers fashion four strands, smooth, but never perfect or exactly the same, to plait into a golden braid.
Nancy Jorgensen is a Wisconsin writer. Her memoir, Go, Gwen, Go: A Family's Journey to Olympic Gold, is co-authored with daughter Elizabeth Jorgensen and published by Meyer & Meyer Sport. Her choral education books are published by Hal Leonard Corporation and Heritage Music Press. Other works appear at Prime Number Magazine, River Teeth, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, CHEAP POP, Brevity, and elsewhere.
This episode was sponsored by:
Betterism
Betterism is a laid-back learning community seeking contributors & consumers dedicated to collective growth and mindsets of gratitude. There's both a blog and a podcast where the labels "student" and "teacher" are united to help people thrive at whatever it is they're building. Swing by and join creator & host Glen Binger as he shifts the paradigm around what it means to self-educate. By teaching together, we learn together.
(34) Erin Edwards: Economising
“Daydreaming is free, dear.”
That was what Mama always said.
At the start of every school year, I would sit and listen to another round of stories from my classmates. My ears would sing with adventure tales of ski trips to France, safaris in Africa, and cruises across the Mediterranean until teachers begged for us to return our attention to the board. Tanned and freckled students commanded the first few days of term.
Friends pressed trinkets from afar into my hands. I kept them safe in my pocket, dipping my fingers in to check they were still there every few minutes until I got home and lined them up in a neat row on my windowsill. Snow globes, woven bracelets, tiny animals made of shells. I had magnets from places I’d never been, novelty pencils from places I’d never get to go.
I spent my summers at the park down the road. Cassie gamely went with me, playing along with my made-up games in a way only older sisters could. We would stay until the sun set, until it felt less like a playground and more like the start of the horror films I wasn’t allowed to watch. Whenever Cassie saw dark figures at the tree line, she grabbed my hand and dragged me home.
There was nothing wrong with the park down the road, but it wasn’t a holiday. You couldn’t buy your friends souvenirs at a gift shop, and you didn’t leave with any stories that would capture an entire classroom’s attention for a whole lesson. So, every summer, I asked.
“Can we go somewhere?”
“Daydreaming is free, dear.”
It was difficult to imagine a place you’d never seen. I sat down in front of my windowsill and traced my finger over each collected trinket, trying to envisage the place they’d once called home, but the only home I’d ever known for them was my bedroom. The leather bookmark stamped with the image of a castle in Ireland could tell stories of my flute practises, but nothing of lush green landscapes and what was at the end of a rainbow. The wooden elephant encrusted with beads and mirrored shards of glass knew more about the books I read into the early hours of the morning than it did the other animals on the savanna.
When I cut my thumb on the elephant’s ear, a sharp edge of glass slicing through my skin, I had to explain to Cassie what I’d been doing while she cleaned off the blood.
“I wanted to hear their stories,” I said, my cheeks flushed as I realised how stupid it sounded.
“What stories do they have to tell?” Cassie asked, without missing a beat. She was deadly serious as she stuck a Little Mermaid plaster over the cut.
“Where they came from,” I explained. “Places that aren’t here. Mama said to daydream, but I don’t know how to visit places I’ve never seen, even in my head.”
Cassie gave me a strange look I didn’t understand, before pressing a kiss to my forehead and telling me to get my coat.
It was too close to nightfall for a trip to the park, and we’d already been out to pick up food for school lunches, but I didn’t ever argue with Cassie. I quickly did as I was told, shoving my arms into my coat sleeves and waiting impatiently by the door while Cassie laced up her boots and scribbled out a letter to Mama so she wouldn’t panic if she came back to an empty house.
We were right outside the doors of the library before I realised that was where we were going. Usually, Cassie would walk me there once a fortnight and wait while I exchanged one stack of books for another. She’d roll her eyes when I chose too many hardbacks, but she always helped me carry them home. I liked the library, but I wasn’t sure it counted as somewhere to travel. None of my classmates would be wowed by tales of plastic-wrapped new releases.
Cassie smiled at the librarian behind the desk and asked how long we had until the library closed. Apparently, half an hour was ‘perfect, thank you’. Perfect for what, I wondered. We hadn’t brought any books to return.
Depositing me at a large table, Cassie disappeared into the stacks with a secretive smile on her lips. I picked at the peeling laminate tabletop and ran my finger over the writing carved into the plastic. EM loved NH, apparently. Or they had done, once upon a time, intensely enough to permanently record the feeling on public property.
Cassie’s arms were shaking when she returned, straining under the weight of a tower of books. Not paperbacks, not even hardbacks, but the huge, glossy art books that no one ever read cover to cover. On top of the stack was one of the laptops you could borrow from the front desk.
“Okay,” Cassie said, dropping the books to the table with a thump. “We’re starting with New York.”
She started opening the books, flipping through them until she landed on a picture she liked. Eventually, I had half a dozen spread out in front of me, open to images of Manhattan – Rockefeller Centre, the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower. Then Cassie turned on the laptop and loaded up a website with a video feed playing.
“This is Times Square right now,” she explained. “Right in the middle of the city.”
Tourists passed across the frame, oblivious to the camera as they read from their phone screens, sipped coffees, and swung shopping bags. Occasionally someone would stop and wave towards the lens, laughing into a phone as they talked with someone back home. I waved back at the screen.
Once she’d assembled everything, Cassie started to talk me through our day, flipping through the books when she needed new images for inspiration. We started with breakfast in Central Park, then a trip to the Guggenheim, with Cassie reading the tiny captions from the book with all the aplomb of a tour guide. We went on a boat trip, then a helicopter ride, then took the subway from Coney Island to Brooklyn. It was the longest twenty-four hours I’d ever known, but I was entranced, hanging on to each word of what Cassie said.
“And when we’re finished with dinner-”
“Don’t we have to pay first?” I asked.
“My treat.” Cassie smiled. “Even though you chose three puddings.”
“You said I could pick anything,” I protested with a laugh. We never went to restaurants. If I had the option, I was going to make the most of it.
“I did,” Cassie admitted. “And once you’ve recovered from how sick it makes you, we’re heading to a Broadway show.” She turned to a picture of a theatre auditorium, taken from the stage. “Right in the centre, at the front.”
She dug out her earphones from the bottom of her bag and untangled the cord, handing one to me and putting the other in her own ear. She pressed play on a YouTube video, and the beginning notes of a familiar overture burst to life.
We only made it three minutes in before the librarian came to let us know it was closing time. When we’d helped clear the books from the table and stepped outside into the cool air, so far from the busy streets of New York, I hugged Cassie tightly.
“Where are we going tomorrow?” I asked because there was a whole world to visit.
“How about Morocco? Australia? Paris? The choice is yours.”
I grinned, contemplating the possibilities. Cassie’s worlds were so much better than anything I’d ever seen able to conjure up in my own head. If I couldn’t go to these places in real life, her kind of daydreaming was the next best thing.
Erin Edwards is a dedicated Londoner and compulsive writer, most often found in an archive or at the theatre. She is currently working on far too many different projects at once. You can find her on Twitter.
(33) Courtenay S. Gray: Exits and Entrails
When Mark told me that he was sick, I couldn’t tell up from down. The room kept spinning and spinning until I had no idea who I was. He sprung it on me during a three-course meal at a posh restaurant. This was so I wouldn’t be able to cry and make him start welling up. We would be the weird couple sobbing into their Duck a l'Orange. Imagine if a waiter came to refill our glasses, and we were just hanging on to each other, snot dripping into the beef conserve.
We discussed Mark’s impending death over steak and eggs one morning when a piece about Switzerland came on the radio. That’s when we both knew.
“I want to go. You understand, don’t you?”
I didn’t want him to go so soon, but how could I have argued?
“I do.”
***
We jumped the gun a bit on Switzerland. Even if we put both of our finances together, we wouldn’t have enough to fly out. Asking for outside help was out of the question, so I did a bit of brainstorming. Running out of ideas, I did some research on modern-day sex work. It seemed the easiest option for fast money that wouldn’t be all that diminished by taxes.
Focusing on that, I sat Mark down and told him about my plan. I thought he might be angry, but he didn’t mind. He encouraged it.
“You might meet someone new, and then he can give you the world…”
He started crying again.
“Because I can’t.”
***
I dipped my toe in the water at first, stripping off on camera. Donations came flying in, and I had £700 within three hours. It quickly progressed to more explicit content, such as filming myself performing acts that viewers had requested. I invested in two phones to keep that life and my real life separate, but just the sheer notion of having two phones felt like getting high. Anyone would get addicted to being paid for your beauty/body. Who doesn’t want to feel good about themselves?
One evening, I met up with a guy, but I felt awful afterward as Mark had to be taken to hospital. He tried to call me, but I was too busy ripping a stranger’s clothes off for money. Even though I was doing it for him, it didn’t make those moments less painful. I think it started to affect Mark, but he couldn’t say anything because it would stop his suffering. What’s worse is that I began to neglect him. The kick I got out of doing sex work took over our lives. He started drinking to cope with it all. I hated him when he was drunk. It made him aggressive and violent. That was not the Mark I knew.
***
We had a major physical fight a week before we were due to fly out to Switzerland. I shoved him into a chair, and he slapped me across the face. We ended up on the floor with him holding me down and me kicking him in the stomach. I said many things I didn’t mean, and so did he. My wrists were bruised for days, and he had to pack on my foundation to cover his bruises.
I didn’t stay after that. An old friend let me stay with him for a while, and we ended up sleeping together. I switched my phones off too, so I didn’t find out that Mark changed his flight to earlier in the week. Karlson told me he wanted to leave me a note, but he didn’t think I could take my eyes off other men long enough to read it. He wasn’t wrong, and I’ll never forgive myself for that.
***
“I may not have been by his side when he left this world, but I earned that fucking money. And, I will not apologise for it. Yes, I was selfish, pig-headed, but I didn’t let him suffer any longer than he had to. You may disagree with how I earned said money, but that’s tough shit,” I cried.
“You’re a degenerate slut, and I’ll fucking hate you for as long as I live. You were the worst thing that ever happened to him,” Karlson screamed.
Karlson had been Mark’s closest friend. He hated me from the moment we met, but I always figured it was because he hated women. I didn’t realise just how strong a bond they shared. Perhaps I just didn’t care. He didn’t hate women at all, he was afraid that I would take Mark away from him, and I did.
Courtenay S. Gray is a writer from the North of England. You'll find her work in an array of journals such as A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Misery Tourism, Expat Press, Red Fez, and many more. She will often post on her blog: www.courtenayscorner.com and on Instagram and Twitter.