Author: admin

The air in the garden seemed frozen in time. It was dense, heavy, as if saturated not only with the scents of summer but also with something bitter and acrid—the smell of burnt plastic and a sickly sweet rot, nauseatingly familiar, like an echo of the past suddenly bursting forth from the locked doors of […]

Marina was going through the students’ notebooks when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was six o’clock on a Saturday evening—not the best time for calls. On the line was Anya’s worried voice, her neighbor from the stairwell. “Marin, are you sitting down right now?” “What’s wrong, Anya?” “I saw Igor today near the […]

Anna lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to calm her racing heartbeat. Just a few minutes ago, she had experienced one of the most terrifying moments of her life — a conflict with her own husband, Alexander, and his mother, Olga Petrovna. Their little daughter Sonya was sleeping peacefully in her crib, […]

It all started with that ill-fated cauldron. My husband Anton bought it a week ago and hasn’t stopped being happy about it since. A real Uzbek cast-iron cauldron, twelve liters. It cost as much as my monthly salary, but he was as happy as a child with a new toy. “Len, can you imagine what […]

Lena stood in front of the crooked little house, clutching a crumpled piece of paper with the address in her hand. The wind tickled her neck, ruffling her light jacket, and inside she felt empty—like the windows of this abandoned dwelling. Twenty years had passed inside the walls of an orphanage, and now she was […]

Ekaterina slipped off her work sneakers and breathed a sigh of relief. After ten hours of hard work in the sewing workshop, her back ached, and her fingers tingled from constant machine work. The room was stuffy — orders for school uniforms kept pouring in one after another, and the seamstresses had to stay late. […]

Raisa nervously paced from one corner of the room to another — her heart felt unbearably heavy, as if everything inside her had been turned upside down. Yesterday she had been at the notary’s office… And now she couldn’t understand what was happening to her. Her father had died. The very same father she hadn’t […]

Andrey pushed the apartment door open with his shoulder since his hands were full. In one hand — a briefcase, in the other — a box with a new smartphone he had bought on the way home. Inside, everything tightened with a familiar feeling of guilt, but he forced himself to straighten his shoulders. Successful […]