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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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— Did you put my things in the storage closet? — Olga’s voice rang out like a fork scraping an empty plate. — Because they shouldn’t be lying around in the children’s room, — Irina replied calmly, but with a chill, drying her hands on a waffle towel. — This isn’t a children’s room, it’s […]
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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 […]
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