by Kalman Nadia
Katya jumped off the ladder. “It looks good, right?”
Leonid sneezed, nodded.
Katya linked an arm through Roman’s. “Here is the path upon which hundreds of millions of people have already followed, and upon which all of humanity is fated to tread,” she said in a strangely mannish voice.
Roman was laughing before she’d even finished. “Most dope.”
Leonid held up an arm and staggered into the living room under the weight of an impending sneeze. It bellowed out of him, and his eyes ached, and his fingers — oh, God — were now webbed with mucus. He’d left his tissue pack in the car. “Are you okay?” Katya called. He had to get out of this house.
Leonid had a strange sense of being watched, from above, by some benign but not at all disinterested party, not God, definitely not his Grandfather Mendel, who’d called him a “soft boy” and died before Leonid got into Harvard, which would have shown him.
— A white handkerchief floated before his eyes, and fluttered, with a strange sideways motion, into his open hand. “Batyushka, moy spacitel,” my lord, my savior, emanated from parts unknown.
The end
Acknowledgements
With many thanks to the following people, magazines and residencies:
Aharon Levy
Amanda Rea
Anne Kadet
Barbara Jacomba
David Leavitt and Subtropics
Deborah Schupack
Elena, Lev and Mikhail Kalman
Iffat Islam
I-Park
Jeff Parker, Michael Iossel and Summer Literary Seminars
Joe Taylor, Tricia Taylor, and Connie James of Livingston Press
John Crowley
Jonathan Dee
Josip Novakovich
Kathryn Davis
Lazar (of blessed memory) and Rachel Chalik
Alma Cales-Colon, Ernest Logan, and NYC CSA
Melissa Range
Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez
Rachel Monahan
Robert Stone
Roger Skillings
Salvatore Scibona
Sam Lipsyte
The ‘Fords
The Antigonish Review
The Bards
The Crab Creek Review
The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown
The Gettysburg Review
The Levys and Levy-Maizies
The Madison Review
The Ragdale Colony
The Teachers & Writers Collaborative
The Walrus
The Wendy Weil Agency
Victor LaValle
Photo: Kambui Olujimi
As a child, Nadia Kalman emigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union, and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, a town locally famous for once having had the second-largest mall in the country. Her short stories have appeared in publications both large and small, but mostly small. She now lives in Brooklyn, with her soul, more or less.