“Your mother calls me at work five times a day asking whether I’m pregnant yet, and all you can say is, ‘Be patient, she just wants grandchildren’?! That is psychological abuse! I am not an incubator for your mother’s entertainment! I want children with a man who will protect me, not with someone who lets me be poisoned day after day!” Alina shouted, hurling her handbag onto the ottoman in the hallway with such force that the metal clasp scraped a mark across the wallpaper.
Her chest rose and fell heavily, and blood thundered in her temples, drowning out even the hum of the kitchen extractor fan. She stood in the corridor, still wearing her coat, feeling a thick, dark rage boiling inside her — a rage she had been holding back for the last six months.
Dmitry looked out from the kitchen. He was holding a ladle, pale broth dripping from it. His face carried an expression of universal calm and mild condescension — the kind of look one gives to a misbehaving child or a broken toaster. He carefully placed the ladle on a saucer, wiped his hands on a linen towel, and sighed, making it clear with his entire posture how exhausting it was to be the only reasonable person in the house.
“Alina, don’t twist everything and don’t start hysterics the second you walk in. Getting worked up is bad for you. Cortisol kills egg cells,” he said evenly, almost monotonously. “Mom isn’t calling to torment you. She’s just anxious. It’s her age. She needs to know that our family line will continue. You’re exaggerating the tragedy. So she asked about your missed period. What’s criminal about that? We’re family. We have one goal.”
“One goal?!” Alina threw off her coat without hanging it up, simply tossing it onto the bench. She went into the kitchen, intending to pour herself a glass of water to wash away the bitterness in her mouth. “She messaged me during a meeting demanding that I send her a photo of my ovulation test! A photo, Dima! Of a strip I peed on! You think that’s normal? You think I should report the functioning of my ovaries to your mother in real time?”
Dmitry shrugged and returned to the pot, stirring the mixture that smelled of celery and something medicinal.
“She just wants to help us catch the right moment. You complained yourself that we’ve been going nowhere for six months. Mom read that modern tests often lie unless you track how the line changes. She wanted to look at it with an experienced eye. She has three children, Alina. She knows what a result looks like.”
Alina nearly choked on her outrage. She spun toward the fridge, yanked open the door to get the water jug — and froze. Her hand, reaching for the handle, stopped in midair.
On the door of their two-chamber Bosch fridge, right in the center where travel magnets and shopping lists usually hung, there was a huge A3 sheet of paper. It was a printed chart carefully divided with colored markers. Red zones, green zones, yellow warning triangles. Some cells had bold exclamation marks. At the bottom, in her mother-in-law’s large, commanding handwriting, was written: “Dima! No saunas, overheating, or beer on these days! Only protein, nuts, and sleep! Strictly!”
“What is this?” Alina whispered, feeling nausea rise in her throat. It seemed to her that the kitchen walls had narrowed, turning the apartment into a medical office.
Dmitry turned, followed her gaze, and even smiled slightly, as if proud of the work that had been done.
“Oh, that. Mom stopped by during the day while you were at the office. She brought the schedule. She said we’re approaching conception chaotically and irresponsibly. She compared your cycle with the lunar calendar, your previous dates, and the recommendations of some professor. Look, the green zones are fertile windows. We need to try specifically on Thursday and Friday, from seven to nine in the evening, when the hormonal background is optimal. It’s convenient, isn’t it? No need to keep anything in your head. You walk into the kitchen, look at it, and immediately understand the action plan. It’s a project-based approach, Alina.”
Alina stared at the red and green squares, feeling as though she had been stripped naked in the middle of a crowded square. Her intimate life, her body, her physiology — all of it now hung out in the open, turned into a production schedule. Her bedroom had become a workshop, and she was the machine expected to produce a part according to state standards.
“You allowed your mother to schedule our sex life?” she said slowly, turning toward her husband. “You let her into our bed with this… this duty roster? Are you out of your mind, Dima?”
“Why do you have to be so crude? ‘Sex,’ ‘bed’…” Dmitry winced, tasting the stew for salt. “We’re talking about conception. No one is interfering. It’s just science and statistics. Mom said random attempts exhaust my sperm count and your resources. We need discipline. You’re a manager, you should understand planning efficiency. We’re simply optimizing the process.”
“Optimizing?!” Alina tore the sheet from the fridge. The magnets clattered to the floor; one heart-shaped magnet split in two. She crumpled the thick paper with satisfaction, crushing the green and red cells until the schedule became an ugly ball. “This is my life! This is my uterus, not public transport running on Larisa Petrovna’s timetable!”
“What are you doing?!” Dmitry dropped the spoon and lunged toward her, trying to snatch the ball of paper, but Alina threw it into the trash, straight onto wet potato peels. “Mom worked hard on that! She drew and calculated for half a day! You’re acting completely irrational! No wonder nothing is working for us. With this kind of hysteria, your uterus is constantly tense. Sperm cells simply can’t survive in such an acidic environment! You need sedatives, not screaming.”
“Oh, so your mother talked about the environment too?” Alina narrowed her eyes, her voice becoming quiet and cruel. “Did your mother also explain why she checked my pharmacy purchase history today? I got a notification that my bonus points had been used. I called customer service, thinking my card had been hacked. The operator told me the purchase was made at the pharmacy near her house. She used my phone number to see what I bought last month. And do you know what she accused me of over the phone an hour ago? Murder. Because I bought Nurofen.”
“And she was right,” Dmitry muttered, turning off the stove. He was genuinely offended by what his wife had done to the schedule and now would not even look at her. “Painkillers suppress ovulation. They block the release of the egg. Any idiot knows that, and you poison your body with chemicals. You silence the pain and kill our chances along with it. Mom is simply monitoring things so you don’t harm the process out of stupidity. Someone has to look after your health if you’re this irresponsible.”
“Irresponsible? I have migraines, Dima! I work ten hours a day so we can pay the mortgage on this apartment! My head hurts so badly sometimes I can’t stand light!”
“You could endure it for the sake of a child,” he said, sitting at the table and serving himself brown stew. “Mom gave birth to three of us and never took a single pill. She endured. A woman should know how to sacrifice comfort. That’s nature. But you only think about yourself. Her head hurts… And Mom’s heart hurts because the nursery is empty. Sit down and eat. It has celery and pumpkin. Good for the endometrium. Mom found the recipe herself and brought the ingredients.”
Alina looked at her husband chewing stewed celery with the expression of an obedient martyr, and she saw not a man but some limp appendage of Larisa Petrovna. An organ that functioned only on external command. She felt frightened — not because of the shouting, but because of the calmness with which he justified total surveillance.
“I am not eating that,” she said dryly, feeling something crack inside her. “And I threw your schedule away. If your mother enters this apartment again without my knowledge and sticks something on my fridge, I’ll change the locks. And I don’t care that she helped with the down payment.”
Dmitry froze with the fork near his mouth. Slowly, he raised his eyes to her. In them was sincere, pure surprise, gradually turning into cold irritation.
“You won’t change the locks, Alina. Because on Saturday morning Mom is coming over. She wants to inspect our food supplies and household chemicals. She said you have too many preservatives, too much sugar, and too many toxic cleaning products in the cupboards. All of that affects hormones. Be kind enough to greet her properly, smile, and don’t embarrass me. We are doing something important together.”
He lowered his gaze back to the plate, making it clear that the audience was over. Alina stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to her husband chew rhythmically, and understood that Saturday would not simply be a day off. It would be the day when they would finally try to pack her life into a sterile specimen container.
Saturday, which should have been an island of quiet and rest, began with a sound like an air-raid siren — a long, insistent ring at the door. It was eight-thirty in the morning. Alina, still half-asleep, pulled on her robe and shuffled into the hallway, already knowing who was behind the door. Dmitry did not even move in bed. He only pulled the blanket over his head, as if hiding in a trench before inevitable artillery fire.
Larisa Petrovna burst into the apartment like a storm front. She held heavy bags in both hands, smelling of dampness and something sour-milk. She did not take off her shoes. She marched straight into the kitchen, leaving dirty autumn boot prints across the laminate floor.
“Well, sleeping beauties?” Her voice was disgustingly cheerful. “While you’re lying around, your bodies are starving. I brought a proper breakfast. Farm cottage cheese, real and fatty, not that palm-oil plaster you poison yourselves with. And celery. Lots of celery.”
Alina silently watched her mother-in-law unload the food onto the table. The cottage cheese looked grainy and dry; the celery stuck out of the bag like miserable green sticks. Larisa Petrovna opened their fridge with the authority of an owner, grimaced when she saw a stick of sausage, and firmly pushed it into the farthest corner to make room for the “healthy” food.
“Dima! Get up!” she shouted toward the bedroom. “You need to close your protein window! Alina, put the kettle on. But don’t boil the water that’s already inside. Pour in fresh water, settled water. Heavy metals have already sunk in that one.”
Dmitry appeared in the kitchen five minutes later, sleepy, wearing only his underwear and scratching his stomach. He obediently sat at the table, where his mother had already piled a mound of cottage cheese covered with some grayish liquid — apparently homemade sour cream.
“Eat,” Larisa Petrovna commanded, not sitting down herself. “And I’ll check what you’re breathing and washing yourselves with.”
Alina choked on her first spoonful of cottage cheese. It was sour and made her mouth tighten.
“What do you mean, ‘check’?” she asked, feeling yesterday’s wave of protest rising again inside her. “Larisa Petrovna, sit down, have some tea. Don’t go anywhere.”
But her mother-in-law was already in the hallway. A bathroom light switch clicked, followed by the sound of cabinet doors opening. Glass clinked. Something fell. Alina jumped up from the table, throwing down her spoon.
“Dima, tell her!” she hissed at her husband. “What the hell is she doing rummaging through my bathroom?”
Dmitry, chewing cottage cheese, shrugged calmly.
“She said she wanted to look at the ingredients in your shampoos. Alina, sit down. Mom was trained as a chemist originally. She understands this stuff.”
Alina did not sit down. She hurried to the bathroom and froze in the doorway. Larisa Petrovna was sitting on the edge of their acrylic bathtub. On the washing machine, like on an operating table, lay all of Alina’s cosmetics: creams, deodorants, face washes, expensive serums she ordered from abroad. Her mother-in-law held a jar of night cream, squinting as she read the tiny print and shaking her head like a pathologist discovering an inoperable tumor.
“Have you seen this?” Larisa Petrovna jabbed at the label. “Methylparaben. Propylparaben. Alina, are you insane? These are preservatives! They build up in tissues and imitate estrogen. Your body thinks it has enough hormones and stops producing them. You’re sterilizing yourself with your own money!”
With those words, she threw the jar, which had cost five thousand rubles, into the trash bin under the sink. The dull thud of plastic hitting the bottom sounded like a gunshot.
“What are you doing?!” Alina rushed toward the bin, but her mother-in-law blocked her with her body, continuing to methodically sweep bottles from the washing machine.
“I’m saving your reproductive system, silly girl!” she barked, grabbing the deodorant. “And what is this? Aluminum! It blocks the sweat glands, the toxins can’t get out and go straight into the lymph, into the breasts, into the uterus! You’re sealing yourself like a tin can! Into the trash!”
The antiperspirant flew into the bin, followed by mango-scented shower gel — “nothing but phthalates, fragrance causes mutations!” — and then volumizing shampoo — “sodium lauryl sulfate destroys the protein structure of the egg cell!”
“Stop it!” Alina tried to snatch her cosmetics bag from her hands, but Larisa Petrovna gripped it with a dead hold. “These are my things! Get out of here!”
Dmitry came running at the noise. He stood in the doorway, chewing a piece of bread, looking back and forth between his wife, red with fury, and his mother, flushed with righteous zeal.
“Dima!” Alina shouted. “She’s throwing away my cosmetics! Do something!”
Dmitry pulled out his phone and began typing quickly.
“Wait, Alin,” he said calmly, not looking up from the screen. “Here, Wikipedia says: ‘Parabens may have a weak estrogenic effect.’ Mom is right. It says ‘may.’ Why should we risk it?”
“Are you an idiot?” Alina stared at him with wide eyes. “You’re googling the ingredients of my cream while your mother destroys my property?”
“This is not property. It is poison!” Larisa Petrovna snapped, sending a bottle of acid toner into the bin. “Look at your skin, Alina! Gray, porous. That’s your liver screaming for help. You smear yourself with this chemistry, it gets absorbed into your blood and poisons the fetus before conception even happens. Do you want to give birth to a mutant? Or an allergic child? I will not allow my grandson to suffer because you want to smell like artificial mango!”
“What grandson?!” Alina’s voice broke into a shriek. “There is no grandson! And there won’t be one if you keep crawling into my underwear and my cosmetics bag!”
“That’s exactly why there isn’t one!” her mother-in-law declared triumphantly, pouring the contents of the last bottle directly into the sink. Thick liquid slid down the drain. “Because you are poisoned. We are switching to baby soap and laundry soap. I brought a bar; it’s in the kitchen. And I bought you fluoride-free toothpaste, herbal. Fluoride suppresses the thyroid.”
Alina stood with her back pressed to the tiled wall. She looked at the empty shelf, at the overflowing trash bin where the fragments of her morning routine, her small pleasures, and her right to be a woman rather than a breeding mare lay mixed together.
“You’re not normal,” she said quietly. “You’re sick.”
Larisa Petrovna straightened, dusted off her hands, and looked at her daughter-in-law with icy contempt.
“I am a mother who wants healthy offspring. And you are a selfish woman who cares more about her pimples than the future of the family. Dima, take out the trash immediately. Right now, before she pulls that filth back out.”
Dmitry silently came forward, tied the bag into a knot, pressing down with his foot on a protruding serum box, and picked it up.
“Mom, why so harsh…” he muttered, but obediently headed for the exit. “Although I’ve heard aluminum is harmful too.”
Alina remained alone in the bathroom. Her face was reflected in the mirror — pale, distorted by helplessness. Suddenly she understood something terrible: to them, she was no longer a person. She was a container. A dirty, improper container that needed to be scrubbed with bleach, cleaned with a brush, and prepared for the loading of precious cargo. Her body no longer belonged to her. It had been nationalized by her husband’s family.
Larisa Petrovna poked her head into the bathroom again from the kitchen.
“And I threw away your pads too, the scented ones,” she said casually, as if reporting the weather. “Next time I’ll buy you gauze. You can roll them yourself. It’s more hygienic and lets air through. Go eat your cottage cheese before it sours.”
Alina slid down the wall onto the cold floor. Inside her, instead of rage, a cold, calculating emptiness began to grow. This was the point of no return, though neither her husband nor his mother had understood it yet.
The family dinner, which Larisa Petrovna called a “strategic meeting,” began at seven in the evening. Around the table, covered with a white tablecloth stiff with starch, sat the “inner circle”: the self-appointed mistress of the situation, Dmitry, Alina, and the invited support group in the form of Aunt Lyuda — a loud, heavyset woman with a perm — and her husband, Uncle Kolya, who had already knocked back a shot of vodka “for appetite.”
The table sagged with food, but the abundance was distributed with cynical selectiveness. In front of the guests and Dmitry were bowls of Olivier salad, herring under a fur coat drowning in mayonnaise, and a platter of golden roasted chicken thighs. In front of Alina, on a separate plate with a blue rim, sat a lonely mound of steamed broccoli without salt and a piece of boiled turkey that resembled cardboard in both taste and texture.
“Well, to our gathering!” Aunt Lyuda boomed, spearing a piece of herring with her fork. “Alinka, why are you sitting there like you’re at a funeral? Dig in while it’s hot! Oh, right… You’re not allowed. Larka said you’re all clogged up with toxins down there.”
Alina silently poked the broccoli with her fork. She wanted to get up and leave, but her legs seemed rooted to the floor. She felt like a laboratory mouse put on display before a medical council.
“She’s not clogged with toxins, Lyuda. Her endometrium is thin,” Larisa Petrovna corrected her sister loudly, wiping her lips with a napkin. “Like cigarette paper. I told you: seven millimeters on the fourteenth day of the cycle! Chickens would laugh at that. Where is a fertilized egg supposed to attach? It just slides off.”
Uncle Kolya choked on his vodka and coughed, but immediately reached for a pickle, pretending that discussing his niece-in-law’s mucous membranes at dinner was perfectly ordinary. Dmitry, sitting beside Alina, did not even flinch. He ate chicken with appetite, nodding to his mother in rhythm with his chewing.
“Dima forwarded me her smear results and hormone panel yesterday,” his mother-in-law continued, taking a tablet from the bag standing directly on the chair beside her. “I wasn’t lazy; I printed them for clarity. Lyuda, take a look.”
She laid several A4 pages covered in numbers and charts onto the tablecloth, right between the sauce dish and the bread basket. Alina saw her surname at the top of the medical laboratory form. The blood drained from her face.
“What are you doing?” Her voice sounded muffled, as if coming from inside a barrel. “Take that off the table.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Aunt Lyuda asked with sincere surprise, picking up the lab results with greasy fingers. “We’re family. What’s there to be ashamed of? Wow, progesterone is at the lower limit! Larka, she needs to drink Duphaston by the bucket, not chew broccoli.”
“I told her!” Larisa Petrovna raised a triumphant finger. “And she talks to me about the liver, side effects… Here, look at this disgrace.”
Her mother-in-law rummaged through the folder and pulled out a black-and-white ultrasound image. The glossy paper flashed under the chandelier light.
“Here is the left ovary. See? It’s asleep! A lazy ovary, barely any follicles. At thirty years old!” She pointed toward the image with a fork, almost touching it with the prongs. “This is called depleted ovarian reserve. We feed her, we treat her like glass, and she’s empty as a drum.”
Alina looked at her husband. Dmitry sat bent over his plate, carefully gnawing a bone. He heard every word. He saw his aunt touching his wife’s intimate medical images with oily fingers. And he remained silent. More than that — he poured himself more berry drink, as if what was happening were a boring biology lecture that simply had to be endured.
“Dima,” Alina called quietly. “You allowed your mother to print my ultrasound and show it to guests over dinner?”
Dmitry lifted his eyes to her — full, greasy, completely empty.
“Alin, don’t start. Aunt Lyuda worked as a midwife for twenty years, even if she later sat at reception. She knows what she’s talking about. It’s collective wisdom. We’re solving a problem.”
“A problem?” Alina repeated.
“Of course, a problem!” Aunt Lyuda interrupted, placing the ultrasound image directly on the bread plate. “Girl, your uterus is retroflexed, tilted backward. You can’t do it in the classic position at all. Only the ‘birch’ pose! Afterward, you throw your legs up against the wall and lie there for forty minutes so it flows where it should. But I bet you run straight to the shower to wash yourself, don’t you? That’s why everything leaks out.”
“Exactly!” Larisa Petrovna joined in. “Hygiene can wait. The result is what matters. And Kolya, tell them about castoreum.”
Uncle Kolya, having finished his pickle, perked up.
“Yes, yes! Beaver castoreum tincture. The guys in my garage used to buy it; all their wives got pregnant within a month. It stinks horribly, of course, but it’s worth it. I’ll bring you a jar. For you, Dimon, for strength, and for her — to warm the insides.”
“Do you hear yourselves?” Alina pushed her plate away. Somewhere inside her, near the solar plexus, a cold, heavy lump was growing. “You’re discussing my sex positions, my uterus, and beaver castoreum while chewing salad. You see me as a breeding mare that needs to be mated properly?”
“Not a mare, but a woman who is failing to fulfill her purpose!” her mother-in-law snapped, her voice hard as a whip. “You live in my son’s apartment, eat the food I buy, and still dare to turn your nose up at help? Look at yourself! Pale skin, narrow hips, underdeveloped pelvis. As an incubator, frankly, you’re not much, but we are trying to squeeze at least something out of you! And you still talk back?”
Silence fell over the room, broken only by Uncle Kolya’s chewing; he had clearly decided not to interrupt his meal for a scandal. Alina looked at Dmitry. She waited. For one phrase. “Mom, stop.” “Don’t you dare speak to my wife like that.” Anything.
But Dmitry only sighed heavily, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said:
“Mom, well, the ‘incubator’ part was harsh, of course… But essentially she’s right. Alin, let’s not ruin the evening. Aunt Lyuda is right about the birch pose. We’ll try it tonight. What does it cost you to raise your legs?”
At that moment, something clicked inside Alina’s head. Loudly, clearly, like the cocking of a gun. The picture came together: the ultrasound image lying beside half-eaten bread, Aunt Lyuda’s greasy fingers on her lab results, and her husband offering for her to “raise her legs” on command from relatives.
This was not dinner. It was a public autopsy. And the patient on the table was still alive, though everyone around her had already begun dividing up her organs.
Alina slowly stood. The chair scraped across the parquet, sounding like a knife dragged over glass.
“Where are you going?” Larisa Petrovna frowned. “We haven’t had dessert yet. I brought hematogen bars. You need to raise your iron.”
“I’m full,” Alina said. Her voice was perfectly even, stripped of emotion. She looked at her mother-in-law not like an enemy, but like an insect. “Full of you, your broccoli, and your care.”
She turned and went into the bedroom.
“Hysterical woman!” Aunt Lyuda shouted after her. “Leaving your man hungry!”
“Let him eat beaver castoreum,” Alina threw back without turning around. “It’ll be good for him. For the strength of the backbone he doesn’t have.”
She entered the room and closed the door. Not locked it — there was no point anymore. Locks no longer worked here, because the enemy was not outside. The enemy slept in the same bed with her.
Alina did not cry. Inside her, it was as if someone had switched off the circuit responsible for emotion, leaving only the cold, bright light of an operating lamp. She opened the wardrobe, yanked out a sports bag with a bang, and began methodically throwing things into it. Jeans, sweaters, underwear — everything flew into the dark mouth of the bag in heaps. She did not care if they wrinkled. The only thing that mattered was that they should not keep the smell of this home, the smell of boiled celery and the stale air of other people’s expectations.
The bedroom door flew open without a knock. Dmitry stood in the doorway, chewing a hematogen bar. His face showed a mixture of irritation and boredom.
“What is this performance now?” he swallowed a piece and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Mom brought out the tincture, Uncle Kolya is making a toast to our future offspring, and you’re rattling bags in here. Enough circus, Alin. Come out, apologize to Aunt Lyuda, and we’ll close the subject. You still need to do the birch pose later.”
Alina zipped the bag with a sharp sound, as if dragging a blade across glass. She straightened and looked at her husband. Her gaze was dry and assessing, like that of a pathologist before an autopsy.
“I will not be doing the birch pose, Dima. And I will not apologize to your traveling circus either. I’m leaving.”
Dmitry rolled his eyes, as though he had heard a bad joke.
“Where are you going? At night? Running to your mother to complain? Alina, don’t be ridiculous. We have a mortgage. We’re planning a child. Mom already made an appointment with a fertility specialist for Tuesday. You can’t just pack up and leave because someone told you the truth about your lazy ovary.”
“The truth?” Alina smiled. It was a frightening smile, one that made Dmitry stop chewing. “You want the truth? Come on. I’ll show you the truth. I’ll show all of you.”
She grabbed the bag, threw the strap over her shoulder, shoved past him with her shoulder, and went into the corridor, then into the living room.
The feast was in full swing. Uncle Kolya had already turned red, Aunt Lyuda was picking her teeth with a fork, and Larisa Petrovna held the ultrasound image in her hands, explaining something to the guests. When they saw Alina with the bag, they fell silent. The silence was not ringing, but heavy and sticky, like spilled syrup.
“What is this now?” Larisa Petrovna frowned, setting the image aside. “Where do you think you’re going? We haven’t approved the vitamin schedule yet.”
Alina approached the table. She set the sports bag on the floor, opened the side pocket of the handbag she had thrown in the hallway, and pulled out a small flat blister pack of pills. More than half of the slots were empty.
“Here is your schedule, Larisa Petrovna,” Alina said, throwing the blister pack onto the table. It slid across the starched cloth and stopped directly in the plate of herring under a fur coat, crashing into a mayonnaise flower. “Jess Plus. Birth control pills. I’ve been taking them for six months.”
The room fell so silent that the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen became audible. Larisa Petrovna stared at the pills as if they were anthrax. Her face slowly filled with crimson.
“What?..” she rasped. “You… You were taking contraceptives? While we… While Dima…”
“While you were drawing charts on my fridge?” Alina cut in harshly. “While you were digging through my underwear and trash bin? Yes. I took them every morning. I hid them at work, in the car, in the pockets of winter coats. Because I knew that if I got pregnant in this madhouse, I would lose my mind.”
Dmitry, who had followed his wife in, stood frozen like a pillar of salt. His mouth hung slightly open, making his face look even more foolish and helpless.
“Alina… Why?” he forced out. “We were trying… I was drinking that damned zinc…”
“You drank zinc, but forgot to grow a pair, Dima,” Alina turned to him, and metal rang in her voice. “I looked at you and thought: do I really want to reproduce this genotype? The genotype of a man who allows his mother to discuss his wife’s vagina at dinner? Who sits and chews while his woman is humiliated? I am not an incubator for your mother’s entertainment. And I am not a sow for your breeding farm. I wanted children with a man who would protect me. You can’t even protect yourself.”
“You filthy creature!” Larisa Petrovna shrieked, jumping to her feet. The chair crashed to the floor. “Wretch! Empty shell! You stole our time! You killed my grandchildren! Get out! I don’t want your defective feet in this house again, you broken little mattress!”
“Don’t trouble yourself. I’m leaving on my own,” Alina calmly zipped up her jacket. “And by the way, Larisa Petrovna, my gynecologist said I am perfectly healthy. Your ‘lazy ovary’ is something you invented because you don’t know how to read ultrasound images. The problem is not me. The problem is that your seed simply doesn’t take root here. Nature is wiser than you. It doesn’t allow reproduction in captivity.”
“Dima!” his mother screamed, clutching her heart. “Hit her! Do something! She’ll put me in the grave!”
Dmitry stood with his hands lowered, red, pathetic, crushed. He shifted his gaze from his mother to his wife, but never moved. He was used to obeying commands, but now the system had malfunctioned.
“You see?” Alina said to her husband, picking up her bag. “Even now, you’re waiting for your mother to tell you what to feel. Goodbye, Dima. Live with your mother. You’re the perfect couple. And I’ll find myself a man, not mommy’s project.”
She turned and walked toward the door. Behind her came her mother-in-law’s curses, promises to “leave her without a penny,” and Uncle Kolya’s drunken muttering. Alina opened the front door, letting fresh stairwell air into the stuffy apartment that smelled of medicine and malice.
She did not slam the door. She simply closed it carefully behind her, cutting off that part of her life like a gangrenous limb. The click of the lock was quiet, but to Alina, it was the loudest sound of freedom.
She called the elevator, and only when the cabin began moving downward did she take out her phone and block Dmitry’s number.
Forever.
