FALL 2025, SHORT STORY, 3600 WORDS
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The last time I saw Stepan was at St. Petersburg Central Station. I was hanging out of the window of the Red Arrow express train, kissing Stepan who was on the platform, doing his best to squeeze as much affection as possible from these last few minutes. Mitya, sighing and rolling his eyes, held onto the waist of my jeans to prevent me from falling onto the platform teeth first.
“The train is about to leave,” a very tired engineer said over the speaker. “As soon as the girl in the seventh car stops dangling out of the window. Let him go, honey, I’m sure they have dick in Moscow.”
“That’s you,” Mitya said, unnecessarily, and pulled me into the car. “It’ll be fine, you’ll see him in two days.”
He was wrong on both counts.
Stepan comes to me in a dream, sullen, with a bleeding lower lip split just where his lower canine has been knocked out. He’s wearing a black T-shirt as always, so I don’t notice the blood soaking it right away, and only feel the bone knife handle under his ribs when I hold him.
“Fuck,” I say, with the calmness of my dream self, “what happened to you?”
“Got fucked,” he says. “Got a smoke?”
We are sitting on my dorm bed, and I watch him blowing smoke out of his nostrils, a twin dragon exhale. “Do you think the world deserves to exist?” Stepan asks.
“No,” I answer with the conviction I rarely feel when I am awake. “Are you dead?”
His stupid snorting laugh sounds real enough. “No,” he says. “Are you high? Let’s get drunk and go fuck on the roof.”
I point at the knife handle, and he touches it. “Huh,” he says. “It’s like … I can’t move it. It’s fused to me.”
“We can fuck anyway,” I say.
He kneels between my thighs and leans over me for a kiss. His mouth tastes like blood, and I wake up.
On the train, Mitya wouldn’t let up. He was ten years older, and knew me my entire life—he was best friends with my brother Anton since first grade. And when Anton came back from Afghanistan in a steel coffin, Mitya took it upon himself to fulfill the duties of an older brother as he understood them—including tracking me down in St. Petersburg and bringing me to Moscow where the university exam session was about to start.
“I have a wife and a child,” Mitya said. “I don’t need this. The farmer who had no troubles just had to buy a pig, as they say.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
He sighed, stretched out his legs across the space between our seats. “Zhenya, believe me, I know. I watched you do every stupid thing I myself had done, and I told you in advance how stupid it was, but of course you had to try everything yourself. But please don’t drop out of school.”
I stared out of the window, watching the new high-rises on the outskirts of St. Petersburg fly by. Of course Mitya was correct; it just didn’t particularly help at that moment, when leaving Stepan behind felt like an amputation.
“I am not even going to ask you what you see in that guy,” Mitya said. “Date whoever, punks, hippies, gopniks, I don’t care. But none of them are worth dropping out for.”
He stared out of the window too, and I tried imagining Anton’s round babyface, which I would’ve forgotten by now if it wasn’t for photos, superimposed on Mitya’s bearded visage, reminiscent of early saints—a similarity of which he was aware, and cultivated. Mitya was an artist, and he had an exhibit coming up, and he really didn’t need my shit. I wished he would just give up and let me be, while also realizing that left to my own devices I would make some regrettable choices.
Mitya rose and went to have a smoke in the gangway. I followed.
“You mad?” I asked after he offered me his pack, silently.
“A little,” he said. “I feel like I always have to claw you away from some degenerate who’s trying to drag you down.”
I leaned against the clanging, shuddering wall—it felt like a hide of a magical beast, rasping and roaring. “Not down,” I said. “I’m already down. He is dragging me closer.”
The first time I saw Stepan was two years ago, outside of a bar near the Kazan Cathedral. To be accurate, I didn’t see him—just four guys in tracksuits kicking someone on the ground. When I got closer, I saw a punk kid about my age and was immediately shaken by the fact that instead of curling up into a fetal position as most of us would, he still struggled to get up, and screamed insults at his attackers through split lips.
“Guys,” I tried, but they were not listening.
I threw myself onto the kid on the ground, like a war hero onto a hand grenade, hoping that whatever vestiges of chivalry these gopniks had would prevent them from kicking a lady.
“Fuck it,” one of them said.
I was never sure how soon they left—I was so distracted by staring into Stepan’s one visible eye (the other was swollen shut), blue and deep like Lake Baikal. I wouldn’t know what he really looked like for weeks, his face was so bruised. But that eye …
He stared back, silent.
“We should probably get up,” I said, and felt him get hard under me. “You need stitches too. Is there a clinic nearby?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and put his undamaged hand on my back. “Who are you, and do you fuck?”
I watched the doctor stitch up his lip and split eyebrow. The doctor was middle-aged, heavy, very sweet. “Keep him out of trouble,” he told me. “I’ve been seeing a lot of … untraditional young men lately.”
“Gopniks were picking on him,” I said. “Fucking wastes of air.”
Stepan took offense. “I was picking on them,” he said. “For being such pieces of shit.”
The doctor finished sewing him up. “Maybe keep yourself out of trouble then,” he told me.
Stepan lived nowhere in particular. There was a squat where he slept periodically, and he had civilian friends who would let him crash on their couches if he asked. Once, a friend of his was out of town for a weekend and left Stepan the keys, and in those two days he was outside of me for maybe fifteen minutes when he went out to get cigarettes.
The swelling in his face was gone by then, and he was beautiful in a disreputable way, but that’s not why I was so in love with him.
Stepan comes to me in a dream. We are in a park, in Moscow somewhere—maybe Tsaritsyno. We are walking hand in hand, and Stepan is drunk and more talkative than usual. “Zhenya,” he says, “I love you so much. Like if love was an explosive, I would probably have enough to blow up the whole world.”
I laugh. “I love you too. Does it hurt?” I point at the bone handle of the knife that seems to be growing a bit dry and desiccated.
He shakes his head and puts his arm around my neck and pulls me close to him; I try to avoid the knife handle as I put my arm around his waist, and feel his T-shirt, wet and sticky and fetid with blood. We walk along a poplar-lined alley, shaded and silent, and it doesn’t look like this alley will ever end.
“Have you ever been in a psychiatric hospital?” Stepan asked me one day—it was soon after we first met, before we ever were apart again. We had nowhere to be, so we went for a walk, and to drink canned gin and tonics by the Neva.
“Yeah,” I said. “A few times.”
“Me too.” He looked at the water, leaden and lazy. It must’ve been early September, since it was still warm enough for him to wear just a windbreaker over his T-shirt. “Promise me something.”
“What?”
“If they ever put you away again … don’t take their pills, don’t let them do any motherfucking therapy on you.” His voice shook just a little. “Don’t put up with any of that bullshit.”
“Why would I start now?”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me into his arms. We kissed furiously, as if there was something threatening to tear us away from each other. He told me that he came to St. Petersburg from Rostov, to apply to the Pavlov’s Medical Institute, but ended up in a psychiatric hospital after a particularly violent and uneven altercation. He emerged a few months later with a finely honed understanding of the world, and the only medicine he was interested in after that was therapeutic bloodletting via streetfights.
When nights grew colder, he forced the lock on the basement boiler room in an old Krushchev-built apartment building, and we stayed there until late September, when I regretfully had to admit that I needed to go back to Moscow since my first year of the university started some weeks ago, without my participation.
“It’s okay,” Stepan said. “I’ll come visit you.”
He traveled using the time-honored method of hippies and demobilized soldiers—riding local trains all the way from St. Petersburg to Moscow, switching at the end of the lines, avoiding conductors by running ahead of them or jumping up on the luggage shelves and waiting them out, because in those years no one ever looked up. It took anywhere between six and ten trains—depending on how proficient the conductors were—and cost nothing. I could always feel him getting closer across those 635 kilometers, by the pull on my heart and the thudding of the trains in my ears, until the whistles and clanging became a steady roar and the security guard knocked on my door asking if I knew this guy. And Stepan would be there, smiling, built like a German shepherd puppy with his long limbs and large hands and feet he would never get a chance to fully grow into.
And then it quieted down, as the screaming of my blood in my ears subsided, and we kissed and fucked and talked, Stepan inarticulately brilliant, as he always struggled to explain things he knew deep in his bones, until the struggle became too much and he slammed his head against the wall and went out to get fucked up and fucked over.
Stepan comes to me in a dream. The bone handle looks withered like an umbilical cord on a day-old kitten, and the poplar alley has finally ended and is giving way to a lush meadow, the kind only possible where rivers are fed with snowmelt and overflow their banks every spring. I tell him about how back home we used to take boats to rescue stranded animals during spring floods, and about a badger who scratched me at first but then settled down and just watched me, judgmental of my handling of the oars.
“If I die,” Stepan says, with emphasis on if, “where do you think I’ll go?”
“Valhalla,” I answer. “I mean, assuming you die in battle.”
He carefully fingers the withered knife handle. “Yeah. But I don’t think you should go with me.”
“I’ll walk you partway.”
Our fingers entwine so hard it hurts. It is always bone-on-bone with him, ribs on ribs, femur on femur. Our bodies lack the most basic defenses against each other, and the more we love the more we cut.
We walk across the lush meadow that looks like it will never end. The sun above us is gray and the grass looks black in this light, whispering under our feet.
Mitya came to visit soon after the exams were over. It was real spring by then; the air was still blue and thick at 10 p.m., and you could smell the lilacs all the way up on the fourth floor of the dorm.
“How did you do?” he asked.
“Fine. I passed everything. Qualified for the stipend, even.”
He breathes a huge sigh of relief. “Zhenya, I don’t tell you this enough but you are really smart. Anyone dumber would’ve failed out already, you fuck around so much. And now just two more years.”
“How was your exhibit?” I asked. “I went Wednesday, it seemed really well-attended.”
“It’s good.” He sighed. “You know how it is—what I like and what everyone else likes don’t overlap.”
I knew what he meant; I liked his abstract stuff too, but the exhibit was all paintings of churches and Slavic aesthetics that became suddenly popular. “You do have a child to feed.”
He lit up a cigarette and offered me one too. “Thanks for not calling me a sellout.”
“At least they’re buying. Nothing sadder than selling out for free.”
He smiled then. “Good point. Yeah, I sold like fifteen large pieces. And I also got you something … in case you didn’t fail out.”
He pulled a thin folder out of his bag. It was a pencil sketch of Stepan, sitting in his habitual crouch, long arms dangling over his knees, smiling. Just a few quick lines managed to capture him so perfectly that my mouth went dry with longing. I also couldn’t miss the clear affection that went into this drawing.
“You like him,” I said. “Thanks.”
“How is he? I thought he’d be here.”
I shook my head. “He’s dead, Mitya.”
Mitya met Stepan one of the first times he came to Moscow. We were drinking beer in bed, and when Mitya knocked on the door we scrambled to get at least partially dressed.
“Who are you?” Stepan asked, sizing up Mitya. His hand grasped the neck of the empty beer bottle habitually.
“An artist,” I said, just as Mitya said, “Her brother.”
“Self-appointed,” I clarified, “but yeah. Stepan, don’t start shit.”
Stepan studied Mitya and his blue-and-white striped shirt, the kind sailors usually wear, and that was popular with certain St. Petersburg bohemians. “You’re from Peter?”
“No,” Mitya said. “But I was a paratrooper. More importantly, who are you?”
“This is Stepan,” I said. “Mitya, don’t you start either. Want a beer?”
“Okay.” He settled on the chair by my desk and studied Stepan some more.
Stepan wasn’t wearing a shirt, so long violet bruises on his ribs were starkly visible, and he stared back, defiantly.
I pulled on my jeans and went to the fridge in the shared kitchen to get a Baltika 4 for Mitya.
I came back to Mitya in his full brotherly gopnik mode. “And what do you do? I mean besides having shit kicked out of you.”
Stepan shrugged. “I sometimes unload trucks, liquor stores mostly.”
“Of course. Ever took anything that didn’t belong to you?”
“If it wasn’t nailed down. Oh, and a bunch of my friends are musicians, so I help with equipment. My arms are long enough to carry two amps at once. So I get paid sometimes.”
“That’s very impressive,” Mitya said with less venom than I expected, and took the beer. “Do your parents know where you are?”
Stepan shrugged again. “We don’t talk. But I am nineteen, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Not worried about the conscription?”
“Nah. Exempt on psychiatric grounds.”
Mitya always had very expressive eyes, so he managed to telegraph his disappointment at me while drinking his beer. “All right,” he told me. “I have a newborn at home, I have to go.” He then nodded at Stepan. “I don’t care what you do, but if there’s any collateral damage to her, I will gut you like a fish.”
“No shit, bro.” Stepan reached out his hand. “I’ll die before I put her in harm’s way.”
Mitya considered but shook the offered hand. “I’ll see you around, bro. Don’t burn up, okay?”
After the meadow, there is a forest. It doesn’t look like any real place anymore—the trees are all bare, craggy branches, twisting themselves into the black sky. There’s the barest dusting of stars but it’s not dark, just dim. There is nothing alive around us, and we both shiver but continue walking, our arms around each other for warmth. The bone handle of the knife is nothing but a rough bump under his sticky T-shirt.
“Shit,” he says. “I am really sorry.”
“No, I am sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have left you.”
He laughs. “I am not a baby.”
“Yeah, you’re just a fuckup.”
“Yeah.” He stops and turns me toward him, and bends down to kiss me. That’s what he does when words fail him, as they regularly do. Affection and self-harm are the only things he is capable of, and his arms are the awkward crossroads between the two. “It really fucking hurts,” he says, and I know that he doesn’t mean the blade, and I wonder if that’s withering too, or growing sharper inside of him.
Mitya took the news harder than I expected. He sobbed for a good long while, his hand over his eyes. He didn’t have to say it, I understood that it wasn’t just Stepan—but also Anton, and Mitya himself, and me. If I still had the capacity, I would’ve cried too, because of how random it was that Mitya was alive and not Anton, and how stupid it was of him to make me his atonement project.
Instead I got us beers, and we drank and smoked, the window open into the cooling night.
“Fuck,” Mitya said. “Sorry for losing my shit like this … I live with my wife, my mom, and two sisters, it’s like a sea of estrogen over there.”
“Sure, blame the women.”
He smiled a bit. “What else am I going to do? Plus you, here. Will you be okay?”
I wanted to tell him about how Stepan visited me in my dreams, about our long and cold walk, about how real he felt. Instead I said, “What else am I going to do?”
He sighed. “Why are you kids like this?”
I gestured with my cigarette at the window, at the world outside. “Rapidly contracting horizons, I guess.”
Mitya finished his beer. “You know, when I was your age, I was madly in love with this girl. On nights like this, we would be just walking around, for hours, just talking about everything.”
“And what happened to her?”
“Fell out of love.”
“It’s a good night for being outside. Come on, I’ll walk you to the subway.”
The grounds around the dorms were thick with couples, and as we turned to the boulevard, even more of them sat on benches. May was always like that.
“Fuck,” Mitya said. “Life goes by too fast.”
“You’re barely thirty.”
“And it’s not going to slow down from this point on.” He squeezed my elbow. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I won’t end up in Kashchenko again, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Good. I don’t ever want to find you in a pool of your own blood again.”
“Someone else’s blood is okay though.”
He laughed. “Better them than us.”
We stopped in front of the subway station. “Thanks, Mitya,” I said. “Don’t worry so much.”
“Well, with you I don’t think I have a choice. Just call if things go south.”
“I promise.”
I find Stepan waiting for me at the edge of the forest. He nods wordlessly, his sharp chin pointing at something ahead. We walk onto the riverbank hand in hand, and walk along the embankment, and gray granite becomes white sand under our feet, the leaden waters of the Neva turn into the Styx or whatever underworld river Stepan needs to cross.
He stands by the water, looking into the darkened air, listening to something I cannot yet hear. I sit on the sand, watching him, the silhouette my eyes learned to snatch from any crowd, any mosh pit, any street fight. Wide shoulders, the edge of unevenly chopped off T-shirt sleeves, hips cocked, his weight on one leg, always ready to leap into whatever melee presented itself. Already untethered from the world and barely tethered to me.
“It’s a nice place,” I say.
He turns around and sits next to me. “It is. I wonder what’s on the other side.”
“I don’t think I can come there with you.”
“Yeah.” He thinks. “I could stay here though. For a bit, you know.”
“I could come and visit.”
“I mean, that’s what we’ve been doing anyway. I wonder how long we can last.”
I laugh. “Like that time you put novocaine on your dick.”
He laughs too. “No, I mean, here. How long I can wait, how long you can visit.”
I rest my head against his shoulder. “Until one of us gets tired. You know one of us will.”
He wraps his arm around my shoulders. “It always happens. But not yet.”
The water is thick and black, and finally, finally I hear the splashing and creaking of oars, and I wonder if that’s how that stupid badger felt watching our boat grow solid out of the mist.
Kat Sedia is a critically acclaimed writer of speculative fiction and noir, and a World Fantasy Award winning editor. Their novel The Alchemy of Stone was nominated for the Tiptree Award, and Heart of Iron was shortlisted for the Sidewise Award. Their short story collection, Moscow But Dreaming featured a number of their short stories originally published in venues such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, and several anthologies. Kat currently resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey, where they teach biology at a state university, and run a rescue for medically needy cats. They are a communist, an abolitionist, and support free Palestine and Land Back.