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“Try to understand, Mashenka, this is only temporary, just until you get back on your feet,” Nina Pavlovna said, carefully placing porcelain figurines into a box, wrapping each one in newspaper with painful precision. “We’ll rent out the apartment, the money will be good, we’ll pay for a semester right away, and then, who knows, […]

“Have you cluttered your desk with all this wastepaper again? Didn’t we discuss the complete digitalization of document management in plain Russian at the last planning meeting? And here you are again with folders, binders, colorful sticky notes. You might as well bring a wooden abacus from home!” The voice of Veronika Andreevna, recently appointed […]

I stared at the two lines and couldn’t believe it. My hands were shaking so badly that I almost dropped the test. Pregnant. Igor and I had dreamed about this for three years. For three years we had tried, gone to doctors, taken tests. And now — it had happened. I rushed out of the […]

“Have you lost your mind?” Irma stood in the bathroom doorway, clutching a slippery, acrid-smelling silicone bowl in her hand. Albina, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, did not even flinch. She lazily adjusted the rustling foil on her hair and flicked ash from her cigarette straight into the sink. “Oh, don’t start. So […]

“Are you seriously sitting there choosing a TV for my mother for forty-eight thousand?” Irina asked so quietly that even the kettle on the stove hissed as if it felt guilty. Oleg looked up from the laptop. On the screen gleamed a huge black panel, so important and smooth it looked as though it was […]

— Did you really give her the keys? To my apartment? Anton, just say yes or no, without that “well, listen” of yours. Anton stood barefoot in the middle of the hallway, wearing stretched-out house pants, with the face of a man who had not been woken up on a Sunday morning, but summoned to […]

“Call your village bumpkin over. Let’s give people something to laugh at!” Eleonora Genrikhovna adjusted the diamond brooch on the lapel of her jacket and measured me with a contemptuous look. “Respectable people from the city will be gathering at my anniversary celebration. They need contrast. Let them see what hopeless backwater my son pulled […]

Arseny had always been used to achieving everything in life on his own. Back in his school years, he earned extra money washing cars, and later he ran around in the evenings handing out advertising flyers at different locations. The pay was not much, but it was his own money, and he could spend it […]