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“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 […]

Liza had never known what maternal love was. Oksana, her mother, was home very rarely, and even during those brief moments, it seemed as though she did not notice her daughter at all. Liza knew nothing about her father either, and she never asked. And while for other children that question usually mattered deeply, Liza […]

I had always considered myself a grown woman. At twenty-eight, I was the chief accountant at a small but stable company that dealt in wholesale supplies of building materials. I had a husband, a two-room apartment with a mortgage, and a clear plan for how we would get out of debt in exactly five years. […]

“If you don’t want to help Alina, then move out of the apartment by the end of the month,” Galina Ivanovna said so calmly, as if she were asking someone to pass the sugar bowl. Vera did not even immediately understand the meaning of what had been said. On the table stood cups of cooling […]

“You’re obligated to help your younger sister — she has children!” my mother snapped, forgetting one detail from my childhood. “You’re obligated to help your younger sister — she has children!” Klavdia Petrovna exclaimed indignantly, theatrically pressing her plump hands to her chest. “Have you gone completely hard-hearted with all your numbers? We’re family! You’ll […]