Month: July 2025

— No, unfortunately, we can’t hire you. But leave your résumé, in case something changes, — the HR manager smiled that particularly polite smile Vera Petrovna had already learned to recognize. That smile meant: “You’re too old, but I’m too polite to say it.” — Of course, — Vera nodded mechanically, smoothing a crease on […]

Svetlana wiped the sweat from her forehead and looked at the clock. Half past five. There were still thirty minutes left in the workday, but no one was left outside the medical station. The April sun pierced through the blinds, casting striped shadows on the old linoleum. The paramedic stretched, loosening her stiff back. The […]

The blood froze in my veins when I heard the click of the lock on our front door. It was her again — without warning, without a call, like a ghost from the past materializing in my new life. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried to set boundaries — Galina […]

Snezhana walked along the edge of the ancient forest, as if treading the boundary between worlds — past and present, fairy tale and reality. Beneath her feet, the fresh earth squelched, soaked by a recent rain that, like a wise mentor, left behind a generous gift — mushrooms. The air was filled with the scent […]

Deep in an old village, lost among endless fields and whispering pines, stood a house with peeling paint and a roof slightly sagging under the weight of time. In this house, like a root grown deep into the earth, lived Zakhar Mikhailovich for seven decades — a man whose soul was filled with silence, wisdom, […]

The darkness of the December night thickened outside the windows, while inside the old, dilapidated house, a tense anticipation prevailed. Behind the kitchen door, on the floor stained by long-unwashed linoleum, children crowded together — three little ones huddled close like nestlings. Their eyes, full of hope and hunger, were fixed on the crack in […]

— Dash, I wanted to talk, — Semyon started cautiously as soon as she stepped over the apartment threshold. He stood in the middle of the hallway, shifting from foot to foot, and his look — guilty yet filled with some inappropriate determination — immediately stirred a dull irritation in Darya. She silently took off […]

“Ir, how much longer?” Kirill’s deliberately calm voice, though tinged with barely concealed nervous trembling, cut through the cozy evening silence. Irina, sitting in a deep armchair under the floor lamp, didn’t immediately lift her eyes from the stack of bills and advertising brochures she had just taken out of the mailbox and was sorting […]