Short Stories

Do you remember that word? 

April 2024 

I am twenty years old, standing in a Russian Orthodox church in Nice. I have no business being there—I haven’t believed in God since the abrupt terminus of my religious fanaticism phase provoked by a trip to Saint Petersburg when I was eleven. It’s silly, really, the idea of God. The idea that someone put you in a distinct location on this planet with a distinct purpose. Churches make me sentimental. I fight an urge to light a candle to the God I do not believe in. I am still not sure why they burn those in Orthodox churches, actually. I was never old enough to understand, I think. We seldom went to church. Only for funerals. You have to go to ZAGS for weddings. 

Being surrounded by so much “Russian” unsettles me. I can feel the anxiety slowly finding a dwelling in my jaw, around the same place as my atrociously impacted wisdom teeth. I’m staring up, seeing as my way in is blocked by a stanchion. For an Orthodox church, it’s excessively blue. I guess they do not call the French Riviera azure for nothing—this ceiling is almost as blue as the water. I send my mom a picture hoping that she will get off my back with “setting a candle”. I don't remember if she does. 

There is an old lady hopelessly trying to explain the chapel opening hours in broken French. She has a Russian accent that could rival the stereotypes; I don’t hear those much around here. Her interlocutor speaks no French whatsoever, so I have the guilty pleasure of observing their careful language barrier dance. It’s creepy, really, to listen in on people’s conversations like that. I have a nasty habit of eavesdropping, it stems from unsuspecting strangers spilling the most devious stories in my language around me for years. When the English-speaking lady starts offering money, I concede. There is only so much cruelty in me. 

“Would you like me to interpret? I’m bilingual”. I hate the word, “bilingual”. While I scurry through translating their rather rudimentary conversation and question how the woman working in such a touristy place speaks no English, my mind wanders. “Bi-lingual”... What does that really mean, though? I speak French decently well, should I be calling myself trilingual? I can’t spell in Russian half the time, should I say I am monolingual? At what point do you consider yourself “lingual”? At that point in my imaginary soliloquy, the “English” lady, who I found out was actually Italian, has learned everything she needed to and is searching the room for the exit. The “grandmother”, who must be at least in her seventies, experiences a sudden burst of gratitude and unhooks the stanchion so I can “pray in peace”. For a moment, I beg the non-existent God to be monolingual. 

“How do you know English so well?” Well, here we go again.

May 2024 

I suffer from blackouts, prolonged lapses in memory. I write woeful poetry and read feminist lit in my studio apartment in Paris. I realize there's very little I actually know. I throw myself into philosophy, and classical literature in hopes of catching up to an unreasonable standard that lives in my head. I even force myself to read in Russian. I try not to think of Before. When I am not, I try to figure out when Before started. 

My childhood is captured in flashbulb memories. Likely actually from the flashbulb; I think I only remember my life in Russia from the photos in my Instagram archive. Don’t tell my grandmother, she will cry. The older I get, the more blanks there are. From what I understand, It's usually the opposite. Do the blanks match the blanks in my Russian? 

What do you like to do in your free time? 

June 2014 

Up until a certain age, I threw my alphabet books around—it was quite a sight. Russian reading is probably one of the easier ones out there, as the language has an insanely shallow orthography. English is hard to read, French is harder, but Russian is much like German, where you just pronounce everything. I appreciate it as an adult, but when I was a child reading was a bane of my existence. 

I grew out of it eventually. Life became too much for me and I seeked refuge in worlds of magic, time travel, and other planets. My tween years were rough, so I looked for a way out. Books gave me that and more. That was the golden age of Russian YA: the books were numerous and of excellent quality, and we were financially stable enough to buy them all. I read by the dozen, it was concerning—I would read anything, not always age or level-appropriate. I had an insatiable thirst for knowledge that I wouldn’t feel for years after. That summer between third and fourth grade, I think I read half of the fantasy section at Chitai Gorod. It was glorious. 

June 2021 

The pandemic breaks some sort of literary curiosity in me. I spend most of my time holed up in my bedroom reading anything I see on TikTok. I read 20,000 pages in a span of one summer without reading a single quality book. By the time I start my senior year, my vocabulary has probably doubled. I write and read quicker than ever before and I am basically an English thesaurus. 

I slowly regain my love of real literature. I read Perkins Gilman, and Atwood, and contemporary romance (which sucks, by the way). I buy the greats. I read the greats. I decode Shakespeare and ponder over the themes in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I like Anne Brontë better than I like Jane Austen, blasphemous, I know. I fall in love with Dickinson.  And I remember none of it.

June 2023 

Albertine is probably my favorite bookstore in New York. Located at the French Consulate, it has the ambiance many other places in the city lack. The guy at the counter convinces me that I must read Annie Ernaux and sells me a copy of Mémoire de fille. It becomes one of my favorite books of all time. 

June 2024 

Back in our family home in Brooklyn, I stare at pages after pages of classical literature. I check out a stack of books at the BPL in hopes that something will pull me in. Nothing really does. I read book after book, chasing some sort of high I once felt. All three languages. None truly understood. 

Can you repeat that? 

March 2024 

I am in Prague, going out to bars with my brother and his high school friend. He just wrapped up his last semester of college before the law school applications really begin; I am in the midst of my semester at Paris 8. We are not nearly the same age, but as we are in similar stages of life, for once, we get along. The drunker I get, the less coherent my Russian becomes. I would much prefer speaking English, but Danil mostly speaks Czech and Russian, and Alex is a “pure Russian proponent,” whatever that is supposed to mean. They make fun of me, it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I code-switch the best I can. 

What is your routine? 

July 2012 

I look at the sparkling lights of the Volga River and say to myself that no life could ever be better than this. There is nothing better than being home. 

July 2021 

I look at the sparkling lights of the Volga River and think to myself how much better the lights of the Narrows must look tonight. Three weeks of Samara are two weeks too many. I miss home. 

July 2024 

I look at the sun slowly lowering over Staten Island. In this life, it looks like home. But, before this life, there was another. There was a Before. There was the Na Naberejnoy ice cream, and Chasodei books, and late-night mall drives, and summers at dacha, and so many things I fail to recall. Most people’s lives exist in a continuity, where they can trace most of the events in a semi-smooth line all the way to their birth. My line is jagged. I’ve lived two whole lives before I even reached my twenties. 

In this magical Before I had childhood friends that saw me grow up. I had my family, family friends, and friends of family friends down the street. My parents’ roots sprouted like those of trees, spanning generations. Mine haven’t swallowed like those of a succulent yet. 

I rarely think of Before. The After has often been so unbearably full that it seems like there is no room out there for anything else. The Before haunts the shadows of my mind like a book I read in another lifetime—the details pop up in your head, but you fail to visualize them. But, on days like today, when I think of my friendships, and love, and family, I think of what my life would have been like in the Before. 

I would have gone to Korea and worked on a modeling contract at fourteen. I would have done all my homework in the model apartments in the evenings after long days of castings and shootings. I would have earned an unfathomable amount of money for a teenage girl and then would have gone on to work in China. There, I would have fallen into a diabetic coma mid-contact and, after a stay in the hospital, gotten shipped home. I probably would have quit modeling after that. 

I would have buried my first friend at fourteen, my first grandparent at nineteen, and my first cousin at twenty. I would have seen their bodies descend into the ground as the tears ran down my face. I would lose people to illness, and war, and, worst of all, to themselves. I would have to stare death in the face after nearly escaping it in China. 

I’d read fantasy books by Rossman and foreign classics in the translation published by ACT that always catch my eye in the Brighton Beach bookstore. I would have never read an Atwood, or a Perkins-Gillman, or an Ernaux. I would have read War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and whatever else they read in Russian high school. 

This year, I would be graduating college. I probably would have gone somewhere in Moscow. I would be getting my degree in something that people find incredibly useful there,  like International Relations or English, and going on to do whatever Foreign Language grads do in Russia. 

I would have a boyfriend and probably be waiting for him to propose by now. We would live together in a one-bedroom in Moscow that we definitely could not pull with our college jobs. He would vape in our bed and would probably join. I would have superficial college friends with whom we would get lip fillers at the medi-spa and go to pilates. I would secretly hate them all.

I think what I am trying to say is that if there was no After, if there was just a Before and a Now, my life would be miserable. But I say this from the high horse of After. In the After where I have friends, and prospects, and so much love despite my shallow roots. Maybe from the perspective of Before, I would have traded that for deeper ones in a heartbeat. I am in my twenties, single, living with my parents, and a size medium. The Before me would want to die right about now, I think. 

But when I think of Before I think of the glossy spines of Shcherba books, and raspberries from the bush at my 

grandma’s dacha, and dandelion crowns. I think of the childhood I never got to have in the After, with my 

grandparents around, foolish laughter, carefree schooldays, and childhood friends. I think of what could have been. 

There is no alternate universe where this is happening. My life happened how it did and there is no fictional Now in the Before, but rather only a Now in the After. People’s lives went on without me, they found new best friends, and new classmates, and new neighbors. They had their own Befores, Afters, and Nows. Their days passed, and new ones started, and lives went on, and on, and on into a continuum that is foreign to me. A different life is not a bad or good one. I watch as the sun sets on the other side of the Narrows. A hint of recollection sparks in me and extinguishes before it makes it into a full-fledged thought. I bike home before the darkness swallows me whole. As I said, I don’t think of Before. I don’t miss it. But, I think it might miss me.