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The Old Izbushka

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2022

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30 Followers
67 Following

7 Stories

188 karma pts

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The Tether

“Why does a cosmonaut need a gun, Papa?” The corner of his father’s mouth rose. He followed Pavel’s gaze back through the museum doors to the display case holding the survival pistol.“How old are you now—eight?” he said playfully.“Eight,” Pavel said with glowing accomplishment.“But why do they need one?”“Ah— I can tell you the real story about why every Soyuz spacecraft has one. Come on, it’s beginning to rain.”For his birthday, Yosif brought him to the Kosmonaut Museum—a brutalist block of concrete, thick-walled and windowed like a bunker, ...

5 likes 6 comments 6
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The Pulse Beneath the Moss

Weekly Contest #353

Vera had been cataloging the death of things for eleven years. She never used that word in her reports. She wrote things like photosynthetic decline, premature senescence, biosphere instability, or vegetation regime shift—language that kept the data at a distance, language her colleagues and her funding committee in Novosibirsk required. But in the field, alone in the Siberian taiga with her instruments and her notebooks, she allowed herself the accurate word. Death. Her babushka had called this forest Lesovik’s country. The spirit of the ta...

21 likes 24 comments 24
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Eye Hunger

Weekly Contest #352

The pledge took forty‑five seconds. Elias had timed it. He knew this because timing the pledge was the only thought he was permitted to have during it—his mouth moved through the words without choice or consideration: “I commit my perception to the Harmonized Society. I surrender distortion. I embrace dynamic equilibrium. Through clarity, we are one.”Then the screen flickered on. The President had been dead for nineteen years. Elias knew this too, though no one had ever said it aloud. The footage was always the same one minute and forty-thre...

20 likes 12 comments 12
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Twenty-Three Years in a Sentence

Weekly Contest #351

For Mr. Wiggins, a story’s last line always came first. Everything else had to earn its way toward it.He always wore formal attire, no matter the occasion—even when carrying out his daily garbage—the same rigid formality he brought to his writing, where he finished every story as if it were a moral obligation.He needed to know where things were going before he allowed them to begin. That was the paradigm through which he saw everything.Yet one story, long forgotten and never completed, had been waiting for him all these years.He blew the dus...

21 likes 17 comments 17
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The Unexpected Return of Petar Knežević

Weekly Contest #350

“It’s 5:05 a.m., and I have to pee.” In Skadarlija—the cobbled, bohemian quarter of Belgrade where the air carried food from kitchens and music from open doors, most of it better than anything he had at home—lived an old man named Petar Knežević, who had reached the age where even his boredom had routines.Yes—this is what happens when a man lives long enough, he thought, groaning as his knees and wrists offered their special good‑morning greeting. He sat up with effort. He had every intention of sleeping in, yet his body had other plans. Chi...

14 likes 7 comments 7
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The Silent Witness of Hospital No. 9.

Weekly Contest #348

My name is Victor. I repeat it as if it’s the one thing that proves I am still human—that I am still here.Breath still moved through me. I could hear sounds, though they reached me in a water-muffled, distorted type of way. Slowly over an unknown stretch of time—minutes or hours, I could not tell—these senses began to swim back into focus.My mind remained lucid, but my body no longer obeyed. I feel like a hollow ghost sealed inside a concrete shell; the only proof my body is still attached to my brain is the sweat-soaked mattress beneath me....

13 likes 4 comments 4
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The Unregistered Garden

Weekly Contest #341

Some days, opening his eyes was the hardest thing about life. Dmitry Kaprovitch knew that he was in the winter of his life. Though his body was weak, his mind was thriving and sharp. Lately, he had a hard time reflecting back on his life. His soul had become clouded with remorse. Every time he shut his eyes, he would instantly see his son’s face. As soon as these images popped into his mind, it felt like his heart had been stabbed. That morning, it happened again. Dmitry sighed deeply and looked outside his window. Through that half-broken a...

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