first publication in Hellbender Magazine, Winter 2025 issue.
Who it was
To be honest, I don't know who it was. He just came out and said that he would live with us in the kitchen now. A small piece of a man inside a stone. We decided not to argue, and a small piece of a man inside a stone settled in our house.
Over time, he needed more space to live, so we moved to the basement (we imagined that it was a bomb shelter, and not a basement where we could be buried to death by rubble). The khaki-colored sea was burning with the sun, but we know that the sun doesn't care who it shines for, and the side and the gun don't care either about blood or sperm. An endless sea. Such a space.
If you repeat the same actions every day, time will not stop. Even if you die, time will not stop. The parents got tired of sitting in the basement and went outside into death and old age. Old age smells like a burden, like childhood.
The parents looked around: there were animal corpses and soldiers' guts lying around. I feel most sorry for animals because it is not their fault that they live on a human planet and are not capable of thinking so deeply that they can fall into the abyss. My parents went outside and disappeared like pigeons in a minefield of life (plants and flowers grow on the earth, but the bones of the violently killed lie underground).
The light bulb in my personal basement was constantly blinking, and I was stealing money from my health and talent to pay for artificial light. A friend of mine had a grandmother who was fed condensed milk from the Third Reich by Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation.
My grandmother was not fed condensed milk at all for the first five years of her life. These years just happened to fall on the post-war hungry years. I am increasingly showing signs of diabetes. Perhaps I ate too much condensed milk as a child. And the flowers without graves continued to grow.
And the graves without flowers continued to grow. Graves without names: just remains dumped in a pile (this is called, according to Soviet tradition, the "tomb of the unknown soldier"). Another friend of mine didn't have a grandmother (how his mother was born remains a mystery).
It's very difficult to change light bulbs in the dark. My personal basement was damp, and bones were growing stickily under my bed (at night, the same bones were burning in the red prison sky). My grandmother, or as she called her babushka, will never see this again.
My grandmother didn't see much, for example, the northern lights or the southern Italian embankment. My friend's grandmother only saw endless concentration camps and the rails on which prisoners were transported from a German concentration camp. And straight to a Soviet concentration camp (it's something like an Indian ghetto or slave labor in Africa, only without any connection to nationality).
Sooner or later, they will kill everyone: even themselves. Sometimes, I let the cat out of the basement: it reflexively hunted mice, then played with the corpse for a long time, then gnawed. I could regularly see the mouse remains at the entrance to the basement. And my cat often vomited (usually grass).
I, too, often feel a sense of emptiness at the frozen snowy silence from what I have seen. My cat doesn't see anything and doesn't even know what war is. And I don't tell him about it anyway: what if he starts protecting our house from the blast wave and dies?
It’s funny, I still haven’t figured out the gender of my cat, but by default, I think he’s a boy. Actually, this isn't even my cat, and I don't understand how we ended up on the same ark together. When I first saw him, he was clean and skinny, like a Jew who found himself in the gas chamber of Auschwitz or a Polish prisoner about to be shot by the NKVD.
This all reminds me of a sad fact: someday my cat will die without ever knowing that a war has broken out. What’s more, my cat will never know why the war started. I will probably die, too, without ever finding out why people go to war.
I want to die without finding out that there is a war. my basement was gradually filling with the water of time, and I couldn't swim like a statue of a dead man. Something was bursting in my eardrums of memory.
Sometimes, the crow king would visit me like a picture and peck at my hair. Someone coughed blood into my eyes. Somewhere in the basement, the pipes of tired lungs hummed.
Some god soared up and did not kiss me like Hyacinth (I probably won't come back). Some day, i looked into the mirror of my own world history. The reflection did stirred. To be honest, I don't know who it was.
