“Don’t you dare rummage through my bag! What are you, a thief?! Are you looking for dirt on me or money?! I saw you checking my phone when I came out of the shower! You’re a paranoid woman who sees cheating everywhere! Put the phone back right now, or I’ll break your arm! I’m not joking!” the daughter-in-law shouted at her mother-in-law.
Kristina stood barefoot on the cold laminate floor, heavily drawing in the stale hallway air through her nostrils. She had just rushed out of the bathroom at the sound of a zipper being pulled open, barely managing to wrap her damp body carelessly in a rough terry towel. Large drops of water kept sliding from her wet hair, hastily twisted into a knot, onto her shoulders and tense collarbones, leaving dark wet marks on the fuzzy fabric. Her heated skin still gave off the thick, sweet scent of coconut shower gel, which now clashed wildly and absurdly with the caustic, toxic atmosphere that had instantly filled the apartment. Her muscles were strained to the limit, her chest heaved from rapid breathing, and her fingers involuntarily clenched into tight fists.
Opposite her, on a soft pouf upholstered in worn faux leather, Zinaida Petrovna sat heavily. She did not look caught off guard, or even slightly embarrassed. Her bulky figure in a thick wool dress occupied almost all the free space on the narrow seat. On the fleshy bridge of her nose sat massive reading glasses in thick horn-rimmed frames, their arms digging deeply into the sagging skin of her temples. In her plump hand, marked with age spots, she clutched Kristina’s smartphone in a death grip. The device’s screen glowed brightly, lighting the lower part of the elderly woman’s face with a sharp, corpse-pale light. Beside her, right on the bench, lay the daughter-in-law’s open handbag, its inner pockets shamelessly turned inside out.
“I’m exposing a whore,” Zinaida Petrovna hissed, enunciating every syllable, without even thinking of taking her eyes off the glowing display. “An honest person has nothing to hide. And if you’re screeching so hysterically over a piece of plastic, then your conscience isn’t clean.”
She deliberately raised her head slowly and looked at her daughter-in-law over the thick lenses of her glasses. There was not a drop of remorse in her faded watery-gray eyes for such a brazen intrusion. There was only a cold, arrogant certainty in her own right to control absolutely everything in this house. Zinaida Petrovna tightened her grip on the thin metal body of the gadget even more, pressing her thumb hard against the screen in an attempt to swipe away a pop-up system notification. Her short nails, with chipped burgundy polish, made a nasty, dry scratching sound against the protective glass.
“Are you out of your mind? Do you understand what you’re doing?” Kristina took a sharp, threatening step forward, abruptly closing the distance between them.
She literally loomed over her mother-in-law, who sat there sprawled in comfort. Another drop of water fell from her hair and landed directly on the dark wool of Zinaida Petrovna’s dress, but the older woman did not even blink. Kristina could physically feel a dark, muffled rage rising rapidly inside her, irreversibly flooding the last remnants of common sense and self-control. She was not at all frightened by this woman’s age, her social status, or the fact that she was her husband’s mother. Right now, sitting in front of her was nothing more than an insolent, overreaching woman deliberately searching for a dirty excuse to start yet another scandal.
“I am your husband’s mother, and I have a duty to know who he shares his bed with,” the mother-in-law snorted contemptuously, twisting her thin lips into something like a sneer. “Do you think I’ve gone completely blind in my old age? I can see perfectly well how you’re always hiding that phone of yours. How you frantically text in the evenings, turning toward the wall. Who are you cooing with over there? Some lover from work? Or one of your former little boyfriends you used to run around with before marriage?”
“Give me my phone. Now. I’m counting to three,” Kristina forced out through tightly clenched teeth.
Her voice no longer broke into a scream. It had become low, even, and frighteningly firm. It was that deceptive calm that always precedes a destructive physical lunge. She bent her knees slightly, shifting her weight onto her right leg, like a compressed spring. The towel on her chest loosened a little, threatening to slip down, but Kristina did not waste precious seconds adjusting it. All her focus, all her aggressive energy, narrowed to one single target — the glowing rectangle clutched in someone else’s grasping fingers.
“Or what? You’ll hit me? Go on, risk your health!” Zinaida Petrovna defiantly raised her massive chin, her nostrils flaring predatorily. “That will only prove your rotten, depraved nature. A normal woman would hand her phone to her husband herself to prove her crystal-clear loyalty. But you locked everything, put all those clever passwords on it. Unlock the device right now! I want to read all incoming messages!”
She shook the locked phone in the air defiantly, as if it were irrefutable physical evidence during an interrogation. The bright beam from the display darted nervously across the yellowish wallpaper of the hallway. Kristina stared without blinking at that trembling hand. In her throbbing temples, only one obsessive thought pounded — to rip her property back at any cost. The absurdity of the filthy accusations had finally faded before the very fact of this brazen, open theft.
“One. Two,” Kristina said loudly and clearly, never taking her hard, unblinking gaze off Zinaida Petrovna’s distorted face.
In response, the mother-in-law only clutched the phone even tighter with both hands, pressing it firmly to her enormous chest as if protecting her greatest treasure. She bared her teeth in triumph, showing a row of yellowish crooked teeth, sincerely believing in her own impunity and in the fact that her naked daughter-in-law would not dare move from loud words to real action. That reinforced-concrete self-confidence became her fatal mistake.
“Three.”
The word sounded not like a warning, but like the dry click of a cocked trigger. Kristina did not waste time on swings or empty threats. She lunged forward with the grace and ferocity of a predator cornered, sharply throwing both hands toward her mother-in-law’s chest. Her damp fingers, slippery after the recent shower, locked in a death grip around Zinaida Petrovna’s thick wrist, tightly covered by the prickly, coarse wool of her dark-blue dress.
The older woman drew in a noisy, whistling breath through her uneven teeth from the shock. Her massive, flabby body jerked on the pouf, instinctively trying to dodge the sudden attack, but the cramped seat wobbled, depriving her of support. Zinaida Petrovna reflexively leaned back, pressing her broad back into the hard wooden panel of the wardrobe, but she still did not let go of the stolen phone. On the contrary, she squeezed it with such manic, fanatical force that the joints of her plump short fingers instantly turned white, becoming one solid, strained mass.
“You filthy brat! Get off me!” the mother-in-law shrieked hysterically at a piercing pitch, spraying saliva.
She tried to shove her daughter-in-law away with her free left hand, aiming her spread fingers with chipped burgundy manicure straight at Kristina’s face. One long nail painfully scraped across the girl’s wet cheekbone, deeply scratching the skin and leaving behind a reddening, stinging line. But Kristina did not even blink. Thick, hot adrenaline had already completely flooded her bloodstream, blocking out any sensation of pain and shutting down all the social restraints imposed by society.
“Give it back, I said!” Kristina growled low, directly into the mother-in-law’s distorted face, which was rapidly turning crimson from the strain.
The distance between them had shrunk to a few miserable centimeters. Kristina could clearly smell the sour, nauseating odor coming from Zinaida Petrovna — stale sweat, cheap powder, and sharp minty heart drops. The mother-in-law breathed heavily and hoarsely straight into her face, pressing the palm of her free hand against the daughter-in-law’s bare shoulder and desperately trying to throw her off. The prickly wool fabric of the dress painfully rubbed Kristina’s forearms, and the heavy terry towel had slipped dangerously below her collarbones, threatening to fall to the floor at any moment and leave her completely naked. But both women had long since crossed the invisible line beyond which appearance, shame, or ordinary decency mattered. This was pure, primal, dirty struggle for dominance.
Kristina quickly realized that she would not be able to simply rip the smooth metal rectangle out of the tightly clenched fist of this large, heavy woman. Zinaida Petrovna had a heavy, broad frame and the brute strength of someone used to carrying impossible bags from the market all her life. So the girl instantly changed tactics. Instead of stupidly pulling the gadget toward herself, she gripped her mother-in-law’s broad hand from below and above with her damp palms. She firmly fixed it with her thumbs, braced her bare feet against the slippery laminate, and with maximum force, putting her entire body weight into it, twisted the other woman’s arm sideways and downward, applying a classic, merciless joint lock.
In the cramped, stale space of the hallway, a nasty, dry crunch of strained cartilage was clearly heard.
“A-a-a-a-a!” Zinaida Petrovna tore the air apart with an animal, vibrating howl.
It was not the cry of wounded feminine pride or a frightened scream. It was a deafening, piercing siren, striking the eardrums and shaking the walls. The mother-in-law’s short fingers instantly unclenched, unable to withstand the sharp, paralyzing flash of pain in her wrist. The smartphone slipped from her weakened grasp and fell to the floor with a loud, hard plastic thud, bouncing half a meter toward the front door.
Kristina immediately jumped back, breathing heavily and unevenly through her mouth, as if after a long marathon. Her chest rose convulsively, wet strands of hair had finally come loose from the knot and stuck to her sweaty forehead and cheeks. With a quick, reflexive movement, she grabbed the slipping towel and twisted it tightly over her chest, but she did not take her cloudy gaze off her mother-in-law for even a fraction of a second. She stood over the woman writhing on the pouf, her bare feet planted wide and steady, ready at any millisecond to strike again, even harder, if the older woman dared so much as twitch toward the fallen gadget.
Zinaida Petrovna awkwardly bent in half, convulsively pressing her injured right hand to her large stomach hidden beneath the dress. Crimson blotches spread across her fleshy face, and her massive reading glasses slid crookedly down to the very tip of her nose, miraculously held in place by her wide, flaring nostrils. She rocked rhythmically from side to side, continuing to howl monotonously and unbearably loudly. She deliberately stretched out the vowels so the sound would be as full, oppressive, and penetrating as possible, reaching every corner of the apartment. There was not a drop of real physical tragedy in that endless howl — only concentrated, fierce malice and a manipulative desire to draw as much attention to herself as possible.
“You broke my arm, you rabid beast!” the mother-in-law screamed furiously, interrupting her deafening siren for a second. “I’ll rot you for this! I’ll bury you for this! You’ll wash yourself in blood, you gutter prostitute!”
“Just try reaching your claws toward it one more time,” Kristina completely ignored the stream of filthy insults flying at her. Her voice sounded incredibly hollow, even, and hard, without a single note of remorse or doubt. “I’ll twist your other joint the wrong way too. And I don’t give a damn how old you are.”
Kristina took a short, decisive step toward the phone lying on the laminate, intending to pick it up from the floor, but she did not make it in time. Suddenly, and very loudly, a long key turned in the mechanism of the front-door lock. The metal latch clicked dryly, and the heavy steel door moved inward with a faint creak of hinges, casting a long rectangle of dim stairwell light directly onto the fallen gadget.
Anton’s tall figure appeared in the doorway. He froze on the threshold, one foot still raised in a heavy winter boot. His cold, sharp gaze instantly focused on the wild, surreal scene unfolding before him: his crimson-faced mother howling on the pouf and clutching her arm, his disheveled, heavily breathing wife with a scratch on her face, wrapped in nothing but a towel, and the black rectangle of a smartphone lying exactly between them.
“She’s killing me! Crippling me right here by the door! Sonny, she broke my bone!” Zinaida Petrovna instantly changed her tone from a guttural animal roar to a piercing, vibrating shriek as soon as she saw the dark silhouette of her son in the doorway.
With agility incredible for her massive size, she slid off the pouf, clumsily collapsing onto her side, and theatrically pressed her right hand to her enormous, heavily heaving chest. The mother-in-law began rocking on the dirty doormat, deliberately smearing the sparse tears that had appeared from the strain across her face. Her voice trembled and rose with tragic notes, as if she were performing the main aria in a cheap provincial play. But the eyes hidden behind the horn-rimmed glasses that had slipped askew remained absolutely dry, sharp, and triumphant. She looked up at Kristina from below with undisguised gloating: the trap had snapped shut, the audience had arrived, and now she could play the innocent victim card all the way to the victorious end.
Anton slowly stepped over the threshold with frightening leisure. The click of the lock closing behind him sounded like a gunshot in the silence that hung for a second. A gust of cold, damp November air managed to rush into the apartment from the stairwell, immediately striking Kristina’s bare legs and making her shiver. The girl stood with her back pressed to the wallpaper and felt a small, nasty tremor shaking her from within. She could not find words. All this absurdity was happening in her own home, but now she felt like a stranger there, an uninvited guest who was about to be thrown out.
“What is going on here?” Anton’s voice sounded dull and lifeless.
He did not even try to rush toward his mother lying on the floor. Instead, he leaned tiredly against the doorframe, methodically unwinding the scarf from his neck. His face, drawn after a hard working day, took on an earthy hue under the dim hallway light. Deep shadows lay beneath his eyes. Kristina realized with horror that there was neither concern for his mother nor a desire to understand the situation in his gaze. There was only the dull, sticky irritation of a man being forced to deal with other people’s problems at the very moment when all he wanted in the world was to lie down and close his eyes.
“Antosha, my own blood!” Zinaida Petrovna wailed, realizing that her son was in no hurry to show the proper sympathy, and began to rise with a groan, leaning on the shoe shelf. “I came with my whole heart… I baked you pies, with cabbage, just the way you like them. I thought I’d make my children happy after work. And your… your… shrew! She started driving me away from the doorway! And then she shoved me! Right in the chest with both hands, Antosha! I flew back so hard I thought I’d break my spine on the doorframe!”
“Anton, that’s a lie. I didn’t even touch her,” Kristina’s voice treacherously trembled.
She hated herself for that weakness. She wanted to sound confident, sharp, to put everything in its place, but only a miserable, defensive whisper escaped her throat. She looked at her husband the way a drowning person looks at a lifebuoy. It seemed to her that he had to understand — he simply had to. After all, he knew his mother. He knew her tendency toward intrigue, her manipulation, her constant desire to dominate and destroy their fragile family peace.
“She didn’t touch me!” the mother-in-law shrieked, finally getting to her feet and shaking off her enormous wool coat. “You looked at me like a she-wolf! Always watching for what else to steal, what else to ruin! Antosha, she’ll drive you into the grave! Look at her! Standing there, shameless eyes bulging!”
“Enough,” Anton said quietly, but very weightily.
He finally took off his jacket, hung it on the hook, and walked heavily into the kitchen, right in his dirty boots, leaving muddy, wet tracks on the light laminate. Kristina looked at those tracks, and something inside her finally snapped. That gesture, that disregard for her work, for the cleanliness she had spent the whole morning creating, told her more than any words could. It showed who the real master of this house was, and whose opinion meant nothing here.
“Anton, why are you silent?” Kristina stepped after him into the kitchen, stopping at the threshold. “You understand she’s putting on a show, don’t you? She came here on purpose to start a scandal. She said I’m a bad housewife, that I don’t deserve you!”
“And isn’t that true?!” Zinaida Petrovna shouted triumphantly from the hallway, heavily shuffling her slippers toward the kitchen. “A man comes home from work, hungry and tired, and her floor isn’t washed, there’s nothing to eat, and on top of it all she beats his own mother!”
“I said enough!” Anton roared so loudly that the glass in the kitchen cabinets rang.
He sat down on a stool, rested his elbows on the table, and hid his face in his hands. A heavy, oppressive silence fell. The only sounds were the steady dripping of water from a loosely closed faucet in the kitchen and Zinaida Petrovna’s loud, wheezing breathing in the hallway. Kristina stood half-dead with fear and shock. She was waiting for the verdict. Her heart was pounding somewhere in her throat, pulsing in her temples.
“Mom, go into the room. Lie down and calm yourself. I’ll bring you some water in a moment,” Anton finally said without raising his head.
“Antosha, but how can I…” the mother-in-law tried to object, but catching the steel in her son’s voice, she instantly changed tactics. “All right, all right, son. I’m only doing this for you. My heart grabbed so badly… I’ll go lie down. Maybe I won’t die before morning.”
She theatrically clutched her chest and, throwing Kristina a devastating look full of superiority, slowly wandered into the living room. The door closed behind her. Kristina was left alone with her husband. She waited for him to raise his eyes, for at least a shadow of sympathy to appear in them. For him to say, “I’m sorry, I know she’s unbearable.” But Anton remained silent. He slowly took his phone from his pocket, unlocked the screen, and began mindlessly scrolling through the news feed.
“Did you believe her?” Kristina asked quietly, feeling a hot, unwanted tear roll down her cheek. “Do you really think I’m capable of attacking an elderly person?”
“I think I’m tired, Kristina,” Anton’s voice was flat, devoid of any emotion. “I work like a damn slave twelve hours a day. I come home to rest. And instead I get scandals, screaming, and fights out of nowhere.”
“Out of nowhere?!” Kristina choked with indignation, feeling those cruel, unfair words scrape her dry throat. “Your mother bursts into our home with keys that you secretly gave her behind my back. She insults me, tramples over everything I do, and then puts on this cheap farce with falling down! And you call that ‘out of nowhere’?!”
“Stop the hysterics, Kristina,” Anton finally looked up from his phone, but in his gray eyes, faded with exhaustion, there was only cold, dull irritation. “You’re acting exactly like her. Both of you are draining me dry. I’m asking for only one thing: let me live in peace. Is it really so hard to just keep quiet when she comes over? So she said something wrong — let it go in one ear and out the other. Be smarter. You’re younger.”
Kristina recoiled as if from a physical blow. She looked at the man sitting at the kitchen table and suddenly, with frightening, crystal clarity, realized that she was seeing an absolute stranger before her. This tired, bloated man in a wrinkled shirt was not her protector. He was not her wall. He was simply a coward who had chosen the path of least resistance. It was far easier for him to let his mother wipe her feet on his wife than to slam his fist on the table once and defend the boundaries of his own family.
“Be smarter?” Her voice suddenly lost all its trembling, becoming unnaturally quiet, ringing like a stretched string. “So I’m supposed to let myself be humiliated in my own home just so it’s convenient for you? So your evening peace isn’t disturbed?”
“Don’t start,” Anton grimaced, lowering his eyes back to the smartphone screen as if some rescue bunker from all life’s problems were hidden there. “She’ll leave tomorrow, and everything will be like before. Right now, go and apologize to her. Otherwise she’ll clutch her heart and moan until morning. I can’t take that.”
“Apologize?” Kristina shook her head in disbelief, feeling an icy emptiness spreading rapidly inside her. In that emptiness there was no longer room for love, resentment, or hope. Only ashes remained. “For what? For the fact that she broke my life? No, Anton. I will not apologize. Not to her, and not to you.”
She turned around and walked out of the kitchen on stiff legs. Passing the living room, Kristina glanced through the half-open door. Zinaida Petrovna was not lying there in exhaustion. She was sitting calmly in the armchair, wearing her horn-rimmed glasses, watching some talk show on television with lively interest, the volume turned down to a minimum. On her massive knees sat a bowl of the very same pies she had brought. Seeing her daughter-in-law, the mother-in-law froze for a second, and then her lips stretched into a thin, triumphant, almost snake-like smile. She had won. She had shown who the main woman here was, whose word was law, and whose tears were not worth a broken penny.
Kristina did not answer that look. Suddenly, she no longer cared at all. She went into the bedroom, firmly closed the door behind her, and took an old, worn travel bag from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Her hands moved mechanically, with frightening precision. Jeans, several sweaters, underwear, a cosmetics bag, documents. She was not packing all her things; she was taking only what she needed for the first while. The rest could be dealt with later. Or never. Right now, the main goal was simply to breathe. And in this apartment, soaked with the smell of someone else’s triumph and male cowardice, there was no air left for her.
The zipper on the bag closed with a sharp metallic rasp. That sound seemed to pull Anton out of his phone stupor. He appeared in the bedroom doorway at the exact moment Kristina was throwing her autumn coat over her shoulders.
“What kind of circus is this now?” His eyebrows climbed upward, and in his voice there appeared notes of real, unfeigned alarm mixed with annoyance. “Where are you going at this hour? Kristina, stop this childish nonsense! I don’t have the strength to chase you around the city. Put your things down and take off your coat.”
“You don’t need to chase me anywhere,” she raised her eyes to him. There were no more tears in them. Only calm, bottomless indifference, from which Anton suddenly felt genuinely uneasy. “You just need to stay here. With your mother. You’re perfect for each other. You both feed on other people’s pain.”
“Are you out of your mind?!” He took a step forward, trying to block her path. “You’re destroying a marriage over some domestic quarrel? Because two women couldn’t share a kitchen?! You’re just hysterical!”
“I’m destroying the marriage?” Kristina smiled sadly, brokenly. “The marriage wasn’t destroyed by a quarrel in the kitchen, Anton. It was destroyed by your dirty tracks on the floor I washed to welcome you home. It was destroyed by your silence when I was being trampled into the mud before your eyes. I cannot live with a man behind whose back I do not feel safe. Let me pass.”
There was something in her tone that made Anton involuntarily step aside. He remained standing in the doorway, blinking in confusion and watching as the wife he had lived with for three years walked confidently down the hallway toward the front door.
The floorboards creaked in the living room. Zinaida Petrovna, sensing something was wrong, poked her head into the hallway.
“Oh, and where are we off to at this hour?” the mother-in-law sang in a syrupy, sugary voice, although little devils of undisguised triumph danced in her small eyes. “Running off to your lover, I suppose? Antosha, look at her! I told you she…”
“Shut up, Zinaida Petrovna,” Kristina threw over her shoulder, not even honoring the older woman with a glance. “And enjoy your meal. Don’t choke on your pies.”
She picked up the bag, turned the lock latch, and flung open the door. A cold, piercing November wind from the stairwell struck her face. Half an hour ago, it had seemed frightening to her, but now that air was the most delicious, the cleanest thing she had ever breathed.
The door slammed shut with a heavy thud, cutting her off from her past life forever. From the smell of another woman’s perfume in the hallway, from dirty boots on the light laminate, from the betrayal of the man she had loved. Kristina went down the stairs, stepped out of the entrance into the clammy autumn night, and drew a deep breath. Fine rain settled on her face like mist, mixing with her dried tears. Ahead lay uncertainty, an empty bank account, rented apartments, and loneliness. But for the first time in a very long time, walking along the wet asphalt away from that cursed home, Kristina felt that she was free. She had finally returned herself to herself…
