— Well, how much did you click up today?” Sergey’s voice from the hallway was rough, soaked through with street-cold and fatigue. “Come on, quit playing with your toys—I’m hungry.”
Marina didn’t answer. She only pressed her headset tighter to her ear, peering at the four faces divided by thin gray lines on her monitor. Her home office—measured and arranged down to the centimeter—was her fortress: a white desk, a powerful computer humming quietly beneath it, stacks of perfectly aligned documents, and the scent of freshly brewed coffee. This was her world—a world of logic, numbers, and crisp deadlines—where she was a respected specialist, the lead project architect. And right now, that world was being rudely shaken by her husband’s heavy footsteps in the entryway.
She heard him yank off his work boots with a thud, heard him toss his keys onto the floor. The air in the apartment began to change, filling with the familiar smell of a construction site: an acrid mix of cement dust, sweat, and cheap tobacco. That smell was a signal to her. A signal that her workday—which to Sergey was just “clicking a mouse”—was supposed to end immediately.
The office door flew open without a knock, the handle smacking the wall. Sergey walked in without taking his shoes off, leaving gray tracks on the pale laminate. He was the living embodiment of physical labor: a red, wind-chapped face, grime embedded under his nails, eyes narrowed раздражённо against the light of the monitor. In his hands he held a crumpled, dust-coated canvas work jacket.
“I don’t get it—are you deaf? Feed me, Marin. I’ve been on my feet since six in the morning,” he rumbled, his voice far too loud for the small room.
Marina lifted her hand toward him, palm out—pleading, stopping. Her lips formed soundlessly: I’m on a conference call. She saw confusion flicker over the faces of the Ural contractors on the screen. She forced a tight smile at them.
But Sergey didn’t stop. He took her gesture as a personal insult.
With a short, angry growl, he stepped to the desk and threw his filthy work clothes прямо onto her papers. Not beside them. Not on a chair. Straight onto the snow-white sheets covered in calculations and diagrams. The dusty canvas lump landed with a dull, heavy smack. A gray puff of dust rose into the air and settled on the keyboard, on the screen, on her hands. The smell turned unbearable—suffocating.
That was the end.
Marina stared at the dirty stain spreading across her work and felt something inside her click into place—something cold, sharp, and solid. She pressed the mute button on her headset.
“Excuse me, colleagues,” her voice came through their speakers even and professional, “a minor technical issue. Give me just a couple of minutes.”
She removed the headset and set it neatly on its stand. Then she stood up—slowly, without a single unnecessary movement. Her face was completely calm, almost unreadable. Sergey, already turning to leave, stopped, surprised by her silence. He expected yelling, reproaches—the usual squabble that would still end with a hot dinner appearing on the table.
When the conference ended, he was already sitting in the kitchen. He sat at the spotless table and demonstratively tapped his fork against an empty plate—rhythmic, grating clicks meant to hurry her along.
Marina walked in. She didn’t look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the dirty jacket she’d brought with her, holding it with two fingers as if it were a dead rat. She подошла to the table. Sergey stopped tapping, expecting her to silently carry the jacket to the laundry basket and start fussing over dinner.
Instead, with a short, sharp motion, she tossed the filthy bundle onto the table—right next to his empty plate. The canvas hit the wood with a dull, dusty thump. Another gray cloud rose and settled on the tabletop.
“What the hell are you doing?” He jerked back, more from surprise than the dirt. “You’ve lost it from all that mouse-clicking?”
She ignored the question. Her voice was flat—no tremor, cold and sharp like a surgeon’s scalpel.
“You think I sit at home and do nothing? Fine. Starting today, you take care of yourself. I’m done. My patience has snapped.”
She paused, letting the words soak into the kitchen air.
“Your food is in the fridge. Raw. Chicken, vegetables—everything you like. Pots and pans are in the cabinet. The stove works. The washing machine is at your service. The instructions are stuck to the lid, in case you forgot how to use it. Your work jacket, as you can see, is already waiting to be washed. And my work—this ‘mouse-clicking,’ as you call it—feeds us just as much as your job does. From today on, you respect my working hours the same way I respect your right to come home exhausted. My office is my workplace. And you will not burst in here with dirty clothes and shouting ever again.”
He stared at her, blinking. The anger on his face shifted into mocking confusion. He snorted, shaking his head.
“What is this—an ultimatum? A mutiny on the ship? You seriously think I’m going to cook for myself after a twelve-hour shift pouring concrete? In two days you’ll come running back when you realize what a stupid thing you said.”
Marina didn’t argue. She opened the fridge, took out a yogurt and an apple, grabbed a clean plate and a knife, and—silently, methodically—started slicing the apple into thin wedges, laying them neatly beside the yogurt. Every movement was deliberately calm, deliberately separate from him, from his hungry irritation and the filthy jacket on the table. It said more than any words could.
The war had begun.
The first day of their new life started with silence. Usually, Sergey’s alarm at 5:30 was only a prelude. His real wake-up call was always the smell of fresh coffee and the soft rustle of Marina moving around the kitchen. But today the alarm screamed into emptiness. No coffee smell. No rustling. The apartment sat still and mute, like it had died. He lay there for a few minutes, waiting for the familiar ritual to start—thinking maybe it was just a glitch. But nothing happened.
With an annoyed grunt, he got up and shuffled into the kitchen. The table where his jacket had лежала the night before was empty. But the rest of the kitchen had become a silent reproach: Marina’s plate, knife, and the empty yogurt cup were washed and set on the drying rack. And beside them, in the sink, his own plate and fork sat orphaned, crusted with dried buckwheat. He snorted. Kindergarten. What, he couldn’t fry himself an egg?
What followed wasn’t cooking so much as vandalism. He slammed the biggest cast-iron pan onto the stove so hard the burner clinked жалобно. He poured in oil with the generosity of a man deep-frying for an army. He cracked the eggs прямо on the pan’s edge, dropping shards of shell into the sizzling fat. The kitchen filled with furious crackling and smoke. Five minutes later, something like a black rubber disk speckled with yellow sat on his plate. He swallowed it without chewing, washing it down with yesterday’s cold tea straight from the pot. The filthy pan, plate, and fork he tossed into the sink on top of yesterday’s dishware, laying the foundation for a future mountain.
An hour later, when Marina came out of her office, she froze in the kitchen doorway. The air was heavy with the stink of burnt grease. The table was slick with oil, eggshell littered the floor. She stepped around the battlefield without a word. She took her favorite mug, rinsed it though it was clean, poured coffee into the cezve and brewed it, filling the apartment with the only чистый, бодрящий scent. She drank her coffee by the window, looking out at the courtyard. Then she washed the cezve and mug, put them away, and returned to her office, closing the door firmly behind her.
She didn’t say a word.
And that silence infuriated him more than any shouting.
In the evening it repeated, only bigger. He brought home dumplings. Didn’t even look for the right pot—grabbed the first one he saw. The water boiled away, the dumplings burned. He ate what he could scrape off the bottom, straight from the pot, standing in the middle of the kitchen. The pot joined the dishes in the sink. In the living room he turned the TV up to full volume—news, sports, some action film—explosions and screams becoming the soundtrack to their evening. Marina worked in headphones.
By the third day, their cold war took on new forms. He ran out of clean socks. Without thinking, Sergey scooped up all the dark laundry—work jacket included—and stuffed it into the washing machine. He dumped detergent straight into the drum, chose the hottest, longest cycle. Two hours later he pulled out a gray-brown mass. His favorite black T-shirt had turned dull gray and stiff as sandpaper, and everything else was streaked with white порошок разводами. He hung it all on the drying rack in the living room, right in front of the couch—an унылая installation of his failure.
The sink became a monument: a greasy, food-encrusted tower of plates, pans, and pots almost reaching the faucet. A thin кисловатый stench began to rise from it. It was his banner, his stubborn flag. He deliberately pretended not to notice, each time taking a new, still-clean plate from the cabinet. He was waiting—certain she would crack. That her built-in need for clean order wouldn’t выдержит this handcrafted chaos.
But Marina didn’t crack. She became a shadow in her own apartment, moving along precise routes, not touching his territory. She ate what required no cooking: cottage cheese, fruit, store-bought salads in plastic containers. She took out trash in a separate маленьком bag. She built an invisible sterile cocoon around herself—and the more noise and filth Sergey produced, the more impenetrable her оболочка became.
On the evening of the fourth day, while he was picking at yet another burnt sausage, he finally snapped and threw at her back:
“How long is this цирк going to last?”
She turned. Her gaze was calm and холодный, like an entomologist studying an insect.
“Exactly as long as it takes for you to learn where the clean plates are and how a dish sponge works.”
And she turned back to her laptop.
He understood she wasn’t going to give in. Which meant it was time to move to more active combat.
Marina’s passive defense acted on Sergey like slow poison. He expected an explosion—a screaming match, tears—anything he could crush, anything he could meet with the привычная male force. But her icy, methodical ignoring of his domestic revolt knocked the ground out from under him. The mountain of dishes he’d built with such stubborn pride no longer felt like a banner of protest. It was just a dirty, stinking mountain of dishes that even he walked past with disgust every morning. His home was turning into a pigsty—and the only person suffering from it was him. Marina, meanwhile, seemed to live in another dimension, in her clean office, leaving it only on short raids for food, like an astronaut stepping out of a sterile space-station module.
The realization that he was losing this war on her field hit him on the fifth day. He understood he had to переносить the battle to his own territory—not the kitchen buried in trash, but the sphere where he was strong, where his actions had weight and consequences.
He decided to hit her work.
He landed the first blow on Tuesday, around three in the afternoon. He knew that at this hour Marina always had an important call with the project’s главного investor. He waited until he heard her steady, confident voice through the office door, listing numbers—and then he went into the hallway, opened the электрический panel, and without hesitation flipped the main breaker down with a loud click. The apartment fell into half-dark silence. The fridge died. The hallway light went out. From the office came a quiet but distinct sound—the beep of the UPS, buying her a few minutes to shut everything down properly.
A minute later, the office door opened. Marina came out. Her face was pale, but calm.
“What happened to the power?”
“No idea,” Sergey shrugged, putting on a worried act. “Must’ve tripped. I’ll check.” He theatrically fiddled with the panel and flipped the breaker back up with another loud click. The lights returned. He saw the way she looked at him—long, studying. There was no panic or anger in her eyes. There was something else: cold analysis. She didn’t say anything, just went back into the office.
But he knew—she didn’t believe him.
He staged the next sabotage on Thursday. He had to hang a shelf in the bathroom—something he’d been putting off for six months. He chose the perfect time, in his opinion: four in the afternoon, when Marina’s online presentation for clients began. He took his powerful hammer drill, a tool he was proud of. The dull whine of the motor turning into an ear-splitting, vibrating scream as the bit tore into concrete was music to him. The wall between the bathroom and her office was thin. He imagined the vibration traveling through her desk, through her laptop, the sound breaking into her headphones, drowning out her voice. He drilled for a long time, with relish—making unnecessary holes just to stretch the moment.
When he finished, he went to the kitchen for water—and saw her. She was at the stove, heating her dinner. She didn’t even look his way. That composure drove him crazy. He wanted a reaction. A scream. Anything.
“I hung the shelf,” he announced loudly, as if bragging. “About time.”
“Okay,” she answered softly, without turning around.
That night, when he was sure she was asleep, he approached her office. The door was slightly ajar. Moonlight lay over her workspace. Everything was perfect, as always. But something had changed. On the router on the shelf, the familiar blue Wi-Fi light wasn’t blinking. It glowed a steady orange. Connection error. He smirked. Looks like her “technical issues” were continuing.
In the morning, after his burnt breakfast, he sat on the couch with his phone out of habit. But pages wouldn’t load. The Wi-Fi icon showed full connection—no internet. He tried his laptop—same. The TV, running through интернет, threw a network error. His whole evening downtime, his entire link to the world after work depended on that blinking light. And now the light had betrayed him.
He walked to her office door and opened it without knocking. Marina was at her desk, and everything on her monitor was working: graphs, chats, video calls.
“What’s wrong with the internet?” he demanded, fighting to keep his voice from breaking with anger. “Nothing works for me.”
Marina slowly turned her head. She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time.
“The internet works perfectly,” she said crisply. “For my work. I created a guest network. Specifically for you.”
“What’s the password?” he hissed through his teeth.
“The password is very simple.” She smiled slightly, but the smile never reached her eyes. “When-the-house-is-clean-and-quiet. All one word. No hyphens.”
He shut the door. Not slammed—closed it slowly, hard, until the lock clicked. He stood in the hallway, looking at the pile of his dirty laundry on the rack, at the greasy dishes visible from the kitchen. He understood he’d been cornered—cornered with his own weapons. It was a declaration of full-scale war.
The week ended in a dull, ringing silence. The internet never came back. Sergey spent two evenings тупо staring at the black TV screen or wandering from corner to corner like a caged animal. His phone had become a useless slab of plastic that could only tell time. His whole digital life—funny videos, sports news, group chats with friends—was cut off by an invisible wall with a mocking password. He felt humiliated, gutted. The boiling rage inside him turned into a sticky, dirty apathy. He’d lost. And the worst part was that he’d handed her the weapon himself—built his own prison walls out of dirty plates and crumpled socks.
On Saturday morning he woke up hungry—not the simple desire to eat, but a gnawing, angry hunger that demanded real, hot food. The last clean utensil—a teaspoon—had been used yesterday. A couple of lonely sausages sat in the fridge, but there was nothing clean to cook them on, and he’d have to eat them with his hands. He went to the sink. The dish-mountain looked even bigger. The sour smell of old food had gained a new, nauseating note of early rot.
It was the bottom.
He stared at that mountain and something inside him flipped. It was no longer protest, no longer a banner—it was just disgusting, sticky chaos he had created and now had to live in. Marina, as always, stepped out of her office, took a hidden clean plate from the cabinet, made herself a salad, and went back inside. She didn’t even glance at him standing by the sink. As if he were part of the dirty still life.
And then he started.
Not because he surrendered—because he couldn’t endure it anymore.
He rolled up his sleeves, turned on the hot water, and with disgust pulled out the first plate. Greasy cold water splashed onto his hands. He soaked the sponge in dish soap and scrubbed with anger. The rasp of sponge on ceramic was the only sound in the kitchen. Plate after plate. Fork after fork. He didn’t think—he just worked. Physical labor, familiar and clear, but this time not to build something new—rather to destroy the ruin he had created.
About an hour passed. The mountain slowly shrank, revealing the bottom of the sink. And there, under a layer of greasy pans and pots, lay it—their cup. The one they’d bought on their first vacation by the sea. Simple white, with a clumsy blue dolphin drawn on it. He remembered how they’d laughed choosing it from a dusty souvenir stall. Marina had said coffee from it would always smell like the sea.
He pulled it out—and saw a thin dark crack running from the rim almost to the bottom. He didn’t know when it had appeared. Maybe he’d thrown it into the sink too hard in one of the first days of his “revolt.”
He held the cracked cup in his hands, and suddenly all his anger and stubbornness seemed small and stupid. He hadn’t been fighting her job or her “mouse-clicking.” He’d been fighting her—the woman he once laughed with over a silly dolphin on a cup. He wasn’t smashing her world. He was smashing theirs. And that crack was a scar he had left.
He didn’t stop at the dishes. When the sink shone clean, he scrubbed the stove, scraping off old grease. Then he washed the table, the floors. He bagged up the trash that had piled up over the week. He took down his stiff gray laundry and folded it neatly. The apartment slowly filled with the smell of cleanliness and detergent. He worked for three hours straight—worked the way he did on construction sites: silently, stubbornly, sweating through his shirt.
When it was done, he stood in the middle of the sparkling kitchen. He was dead tired, but for the first time in a week, he felt relief. He put Marina’s cezve on the stove—the one only she ever used. He measured her favorite coffee. He knew how she liked it: no sugar, with a pinch of cinnamon. The aroma filled the transformed apartment.
He poured coffee into two cups. One—the cracked dolphin—he kept for himself. With the other he walked to her office door. He didn’t barge in. He knocked softly, almost soundlessly.
The door didn’t open right away. Marina looked at him cautiously, ready for a new attack. But all she saw was him—exhausted, in a sweat-damp T-shirt, holding two cups of coffee. Her gaze slipped past his shoulder to the kitchen, shining with cleanliness. Her face didn’t change, but something in her eyes wavered.
“I… made coffee,” he said. His voice was hoarse. That was all he could force out. Not an apology—just a fact. A statement of peace.
She was silent for several long seconds, looking from him to the cup in his hand. Then, slowly, she reached out and took it. Her fingers brushed his for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“The Wi-Fi password is ‘new-start.’ One word. With a hyphen.”
She didn’t close the door. She went back to her desk and took a sip. He returned to the kitchen and sat at the clean table. They drank the same coffee, each in their own world, separated by the hallway.
The war was over.
The truce was fragile—as fragile as the cup with the cracked dolphin—but it was a beginning.
A new, clean beginning…
