Literary stories and psychological parables about meeting yourself. Entries: 28.
Gleb hung upside down. The world flipped three seconds ago. Before that, Gleb was a successful architect in a two-thousand-euro suit, rushing to a meeting to present a model of a forty-story needle. Now Gleb was a chunk of flesh trapped in the chewed metal of an Audi lying in a ditch. The seatbelt pressed into his collarbone with the enthusiasm of...
Olga stood in line at the gas station with a pistol in her hand. A fuel pistol. Premium 95. In her other hand - a breast. The left one. Three-month-old Vanya was latched onto it, strapped in with some elaborate harness system that turned motherhood into an extreme sport. The tank showed 23 liters and 38 kopecks when Vanya bit down with his teeth....
Mark was eating soup. Loudly, or so it seemed to Lena. She sat across from him, looking not at him but through him. In her head, invisible to the human eye yet heavy as a tombstone, lay the Instruction Manual. Item 42: "When I come home tired, he must notice within the first three seconds, come over, hug me, and ask what happened before I even...
Vasya had been sitting on the toilet for twenty minutes now, even though he'd finished his business by the third. It's just that out there, behind the door, in the kitchen, Marina was sitting and waiting for him for an "important talk." An "important talk" meant things were fucked. Vasya knew this. After eight years of marriage, he'd learned her...
On Tuesday, Vadim was fired. It was done with the grace of a guillotine: swift, cold, and under a "thanks for your cooperation." Vadim walked outside. November slapped his face with a wet rag. His phone buzzed in his pocket - his wife asking him to buy peas and mayo. Vadim looked at the screen. He was thirty-eight, he had a mortgage on a concrete...
Pavel woke up at three in the morning with the thought that he was a counterfeit person. As if the real Pavel had gotten lost somewhere along the way. In the darkness, he fumbled for his phone and typed into the search bar: "how to know if you don't know how to live." Google suggested depression tests. Pavel closed the browser. At work, he was...
Anya loved sliders. Not the soft cotton ones newborns wear. Anya loved the sliders inside her dating app. They gave her an intoxicating sense of control, as if she were not a lonely girl in a rented studio but a deity creating Adam with a single swipe. Swipe right: height from 185. Cut off the short men who could never fake a stone wall. Swipe...
When Fons first launched, the slogan was silly and honest: “Fon - the one who is always on your side.” At first it was just another clever AI helper on the phone. Then in the earbuds. Then in the lenses. Then simply everywhere you happened to be. Lev got his Fon at thirty. Until then he considered himself an old-school adult: real conversations,...
After Sasha left, Ira had three things: a cactus, the charger from his laptop, and the feeling that someone owed her money for time. The cactus stared from the windowsill as if to say, “I am not involved.” The charger lay on the table like a tiny piece of evidence. And the sense of debt was already serious. \- Four years, - she told the cactus. -...
Alexei was a brilliant architect. He just didn't build structures; he built worlds for other people. He knew how to listen. Not the polite nodding kind—waiting for his turn to speak—but listening with his whole being, as if he were an archeologist and another person's soul were an unexplored tomb full of treasure. He remembered everything. The...
He stood at the window and watched the rain. It was an ordinary, gray city rain. It drummed on the windowsill, slid down the glass in crooked threads, gathered in puddles on the asphalt. People outside hurried along, hid under umbrellas, hunched against the cold. And he stood there and envied the rain. He did not envy its freshness or its...
The phone alarm rang at 7:00, just like yesterday and a year ago. Oleg, eyes still closed, reached out and slapped the button. Five minutes of silence. Then the alarm rang again. At 7:05 he sat up in bed, and the world obediently slipped back onto its rails. Bathroom. The rush of water. Toothpaste with its familiar mint taste. Automatic motions of...
Mark finished the final solo. His fingers, obedient as trained animals, raced down the neck, pulled a last, wailing bend, and froze. A heartbeat of silence detonated into a roar. In the glare he saw hundreds of raised hands, mouths open mid-scream, faces slick with sweat and awe. They got what they came for. He gave it to them. He smiled the...
He found it at the bottom of a box of old university notes. An audio cassette. Cheap clear plastic, a paper insert streaked with faded violet ink. Her handwriting. Tilted slightly left, with a tiny heart instead of the dot over the “i” in “Nothing.” He hadn’t seen that cassette in twenty years. He thought he’d thrown it away. Or lost it. Most...
Anna kept an editing room in her head. She didn’t so much live her life as she re-cut it after the fact. Reality was nothing but raw, awkward footage that ended up in the hands of her inner director-a cynical, ruthless genius who always knew how it should have been . Here’s today’s material. A park. A rare sunny day. She’s on a bench with a book....
Gregory didn’t suffer. Suffering was for the unproductive. Gregory was productivity incarnate. His life was a perfectly tuned assembly line for manufacturing a better version of himself. He was the Perpetual Student, and his soul resembled a meticulously catalogued library of certificates: “How to Scale Your Startup,” “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,”...
Cashier Lena sat inside her plexiglass aquarium and watched “movies.” Eight hours a day the black river of the conveyor rolled past her, carrying other people’s lives shrink-wrapped in cardboard. The scanner’s monotonous beep was the only soundtrack. Lena was a seasoned viewer. She’d long since learned to call the genre from the opening shots....
Old Ivar sat on an upturned dinghy, mending a net with a thick needle carved from whale bone. The air smelled of salt, rotting fish, and cold water. In front of him, at the new pier, a twenty-year-old who’d come from the city for summer break fussed around his yacht-dazzling white, slick, flawless. Its name was Serenity. The kid found a tiny...
Before her, my life was a single-player game polished to a blinding sheen. I knew my map by heart: the gray subway line, the humming office open space, the three familiar bars that rotated menus every Friday. My skill tree had long been leveled to absurdity: “Sarcasm” at level 100, “Art of the impassive face” at expert, “Ability to tell good...
Listen. You wake up and the first thought is, "Something's off." Not with the world, not with the weather-it's you. Yesterday you decided to be perfect. You looked at your coworker Petya, apostle of clean eating, and thought, "There. I should be like Petya." And today you overslept, and the grated carrot salad you swore you'd eat for breakfast...
"I am an explorer describing what I see. Each text here is a mirror reflecting one facet of human experience; one ray of light falling at a particular angle. This is not the ultimate truth nor a universal diagnosis. There are no final answers here. Only an invitation to reflect."