“What are you doing?!” I screamed, staring at the monitor as the screen instantly went black. Tamara Borisovna was standing by the socket under the desk, holding the plug of the power strip in her wrinkled hand. “You’re wasting electricity, and the country is in crisis,” my mother-in-law grumbled, without even bothering to take off […]
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Taisiya came home earlier than usual on December thirtieth and immediately noticed that Stepan’s jacket was missing from the coat rack. Nina Pavlovna’s downy shawl was gone too—the one her mother-in-law had spent the whole autumn drying on the radiator, then complained about because the fluff kept falling off it. On the kitchen table lay […]
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“Quickly apologize to my mother and serve the hot dish,” Sergey said so loudly that everyone at the kitchen table immediately fell silent. “Mom didn’t come to this birthday party to listen to your whims.” Larisa stood by the stove with a towel in her hand and looked not at Sergey, but at Nina Pavlovna’s […]
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“Lizochka, please don’t be angry with me,” Lyudmila Semyonovna’s voice was so honey-sweet that Liza felt like checking whether someone had replaced her during the night. “I understand everything. I’m a mother, I can feel these things. You’re like my own daughter, you know that.” Liza stood in the hallway and looked at her mother-in-law. […]
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Lena thought she was marrying for love. Her older sister Vika thought otherwise. And she brought a flash drive to the wedding that changed everything. Lena was ironing her dress on the balcony when Vika called. “Are you absolutely sure?” “Vik, we’ve already discussed this.” “I don’t mean the wedding. I mean him.” Lena hung […]
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“Enough already. Stop pretending you’re the lady of the house. Mom is coming, and that’s final. She lives alone, her health is terrible. She’s moving in with us.” Nadya raised her eyes from the children’s drawings she had been sorting into a folder. Anton was standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, looking off to […]
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Olga did not immediately understand why her husband had started coming home from work in silence. Then she saw his correspondence with his sister. Seven days later, Viktor went to the bank, and everything fell into place. Olga noticed it because of the spoon. Viktor had always stirred his tea counterclockwise, slowly, thoughtfully, looking out […]
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Galina Petrovna stood on the doorstep with two suitcases and a banana box. She was sure her son would take her in. She did not know the apartment was registered in her daughter-in-law’s name. The doorbell rang at half past eight in the morning, when Rita had not even managed to finish her coffee. The […]
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Alisa sat in the dispatch office, staring blankly at her sneakers. The right one had come slightly unglued where the sole met the shoe, and whenever the street turned into a slushy mess of melting snow and road chemicals, her foot instantly got soaked. Gluing her shoes back together with superglue on Sundays had already […]
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My mother’s visit caught me off guard, even though she had warned me about it in advance. … The phone call from Stuttgart had come in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier, filling the room with her feverish, ringing voice, threaded with that peculiar triumph people have when they have suddenly […]
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