Category: Fiction

We finished work at five. No time for dinner. The weather was bleak and getting bleaker, windshield wipers swatting sleet and sleet still coming, brake lights strung like beads along a northbound red zone—Google Maps rerouting. Thirty minutes turning into forty, forty into forty-five, but this could be our lucky break. We were determined to arrive.

Frustrated, I swiped up on my phone and went back to Instagram. I had to triple-check if it was her account because all I could see was that she had no posts. But it didn’t make any sense, there was just the one with her cat, the earlier one with her baking cookies, the one where she was at the gym with her cousin, the one where she and the same cousin were hanging outside her house, and the one where she and the same cousin were at a garden, with him helping her feed the koi fish. It was all gone.

She blocked me.

He loved blaming the “Damn Protestants” for any misfortune, like when the rotary tiller broke down. Mom says his dislike for them was really about their ban on playing cards.

"...Relationships with other people are just not my forte, I suppose. I do have a relationship with my job. I love my job. I fix computers..."

- Where are you from, kids?

“We are from Chernobyl,” the girls answered in chorus, meaning that they were victims of the nuclear accident, although they were not from Chernobyl itself.

And then the woman jerked her companion by the hand, shouting loudly, "Let's get out of here quickly! These children are radioactive; you can't stand near them. They emit radiation, which means death."

I posted this essay recently on Litbreak but then withdrew it, finding it excessively dogmatic and ranting. I was reluctant to delete it altogether, so I inserted it in my private journal instead.

But it bothered me that I took it down. An editor should face the music. So I reread the essay and edited it slightly...especially removing a prominent swear word. So here it is again: excessively dogmatic and ranting.