[{"content":" Published in: Luna Station Quarterly Date: September 2, 2025 Read (External) ⤴ We all remember the last harvest before the Dragon descended upon our land. Before he flapped his wings victoriously from the town hall, where our nation’s flag had once flown. Before his roar sounded from the engines of the foreign tanks rolling down our streets. Before his fuming breath coughed dust and gravel under the boots of the soldiers who had defeated our fathers.\nIt was the end of the Before times, but since we didn’t know it yet, it was only the end of summer. To Lena and Zlatan, like many of us, it was also the day before their fathers marched off to the front, but even this came second to the apple harvest. The two of them sat in the shade of the old garden and watched produce carts creep up the serpentine road, workers and mules groaning under the weight of the last Lategolds in the sweltering afternoon sun. Lena and Zlatan could see the whole valley from there, and, in that moment, they couldn’t imagine anything other than the harvest could ever move, shake, or turn this patch of land that made up their whole world.\n“Did you know the golden apple tree, the one from the story, stood right here in this garden?” Lena said. “My Babka told me so.”\nLena’s grandmother had lived her whole life in the old house, and, under her husband’s laborious efforts and her son’s enterprising prowess, had seen its land grow from a fallow field into the largest orchard in the valley.\nZlatan, who was a year older than Lena and had a reputation to maintain, didn’t seem convinced. “Your Babka’s wits are as sharp as puree. Just yesterday, she forgot again who I was. Tried to chase me off with a rolling pin. Get outta here, you dirty thief!” He imitated her, waving around a stick.\nZlatan’s family worked for Lena’s father as “fruit tramps.” Each spring, they traveled down the valley,following the harvest north to south, orchard to orchard.Come fall, they headed back, playing their music at town fairs and weddings, and selling their hands’ labor to whoever would buy it. For Lena, the harvest’s end was a time of bittersweet emotion; the joy of going back to school was always tainted by the sadness of seeing Zlatan go.\nThis year was different. War had come to the north, and instead of the colorful caravan train, the harvest parade would be seeing our town’s men off to fight.\n“Imagine though, if we still had the tree,” Lena insisted. “The Dragon would come to steal the golden apple.” For all his pretense of mature skepticism, the idea excited Zlatan. His stick transformed from a rolling pin into a knight’s sword. “If you slayed the Dragon, then maybe Tata would let us marry when we’re older,” Lena added.\nZlatan stopped wielding the stick, and gave her a mournful look. “Fairy tales have filled your head with hay. Our fathers will never allow us to marry. I’m a gypsy, and you’re gadjé. It’s pesh.”\nZlatan had developed a preference for his own Babka’s Romani tales and their bittersweet endings. “I will dance at your wedding, though. Like the fiddler from our story.”\nThat evening, Lena’s father sat her on his lap and read fairy tales to her one last time. She wanted to hear the one about the fiddler, but it wasn’t in the book. Romani tales rarely were, but if there was one place they should be, Lena thought, it was in The Golden Apple and Other Tales from the Golden Valley. After all, the valley wouldn’t be called that if it wasn’t for the fruit tramps blessing every apple orchard on their caravan path with the golden touch of their calloused hands.\nLena was contemplating asking her father about it when her Babka waddled into the living room, carrying a small box lined with velvet the color of pines—like her father’s uniform.\n“Your Diadek wore these in the first war,” she said to Lena as she attached the gold cufflinks to her father’s army coat sleeves. “They are enchanted with the magic of our ancestors. They will keep your Tata safe.”\nThis gave Lena an idea.\nThe next morning, we watched our men parade up the town road, marching and singing while the rest of us cheered atop market carts. Zlatan and his cousins had taken on the role of fruit boys: running up and down the stream of shiny uniforms, handing out fruit and homebrew flasks to the soldiers for courage.\n“Zlatan!” Lena called out from the crowd. She ran up to him and took his hand. Zlatan felt a small metal object in between their clutched palms. “I went to the Old Witch last night. I nursed her reptiles and she gave me a magic amulet.” Zlatan opened his palm. Lena had given him a gold lizard-shaped brooch. “It’s for your father. To keep him safe.”\nLena and Zlatan had looked for the Old Witch in the woods many a time before, and at one point each had claimed to have found her chicken-legged house without the other. Zlatan was too old to believe such nonsense anymore, and had even seen Lena’s mother wear the brooch before. But Zlatan was also old enough to understand the meaning of gifted gold.\nEverything changed soon after, but it was all which remained the same that haunted us. Our men didn’t return from the front—killed or captured, nobody knew—but new men came and took their places. They were strange men, foreigners. The enemy. They walked our streets, frequented our pubs, and slept in our houses. We told ourselves we had no choice but to let them. It was easy enough to believe: those who protested were taken, beaten, never heard of again. We had become the Dragon’s maidens—prisoners in his dungeon, tending to his whims until a brave knight came to our rescue. But all the brave men were gone, and we were alone with the monster that had made his lair in our bedchambers.\nWhen the Dragon came to Lena’s doorstep, she began to learn about the price of gold.\nHer mother rushed into the kitchen, covered up to her knees in mud. She had run straight from town, cutting across the field to get there before they did.\n“Quick, Lenuchka,” she put her arms on Lena’s shoulders, “I need you to go upstairs and find my jewelry box. Take everything and hide it in the cellar. You know how to get in from the barn?”\nLena nodded. More than once she had beaten Zlatan at hide-and-seek thanks to the secret trap door.\nAs two billeted officers settled into the old house and made it their own, driving Lena and her mother out of the upstairs bedrooms, and confining Babka to round-the-clock kitchen duty, Lena understood the difference between the Old Witch and the Dragon. The Witch was scary-looking and tempestuous, but she was fair. She only punished the lazy and careless who came into her house looking for treasures, but didn’t bother with her reptiles. Those who left their prejudice at the door and treated her beasts with kindness were showered with gifts of gold.\nThere was no such reasoning with the Dragon. He had taken their village, melted all the gold he could find into more weapons for his conquests, and they only had one choice: learn to live with him, or face his wrath. Lena’s mother had been smart. When meat and cheese became luxuries reserved for the soldiers, even the scraps jealously guarded behind endless lines and ration coupons, it was her mother’s golden earrings that kept fresh food on the table. When winter came, and the last of the chopped firewood turned to ash in the upstairs bedrooms, it was Babka’s pearls that kept the rest of the house from freezing.\nLena’s mother was not the only one that winter to turn gold into pork and timber, but not all of us were afforded the use of this practical magic. The caravan camp at the edge of town where Zlatan had stayed with his mother and aunts was raided and stripped of all valuables before they could even think to hide them. Gypsies were known for their scheming and sorcery, the major who had taken over her parents’ bedroom told Lena one night as he sipped on her father’s homebrew. Their gold beads and evil eyes could cast blood curses on the advancing armies. Their savagery was poison to the new order, and needed to be weeded out to keep the rot away from fertile ground. Lena didn’t understand how the people who tended her family’s bountiful orchard, and whose music brought joy to her town’s harvest parade each year, could be blamed for poisoning the land by the men who had stolen it. But many among us understood, or pretended to. When segregation orders hung from baths, pubs, and classroom doors, we averted our gazes. When those were replaced with entry bans, we kept staring down at our shoes that would get us through winter, fiddling with the coins in our pockets we would be allowed to spend.\n“Stop! Why are you doing this?” Lena shouted at the soldier who led Zlatan and the other caravan kids out of the school building. The rest of us understood and watched from afar.\n“It’s alright, Lena, go back inside.” Zlatan winked at her. “Never was much for schooling anyway.”\nLena cried herself to sleep that night. The idea of seeking out the Old Witch didn’t even cross her mind this time—she no longer believed in fairy tales. Yet, it was her mother who did precisely that the next morning.\n“You can’t tell anyone about this, Lenuchka, not even Babka,” she said as they walked up the narrow forest trail behind their house. They could see in the distance the road on which the officers had driven off to a campaign at dawn.\nThe Witch was younger than Lena had imagined, although her tangled hair and rugged clothes suggested she had roamed the woods for a while. She knelt beside Lena and said, “Doing good in our current world is like casting a spell: it must remain invisible, except to those who believe in it. Do you understand, child?”\nLena wasn’t sure she did, but she nodded.\nEach next time they met the not-so-old Witch, she gave them a new errand. Sometimes, it was a stack of spells—pamphlets, Lena’s mother called them—they had to secretly deliver to people in town who still believed in magic. Other times, someone needed to disappear, and they smuggled the enchanted ingredients—papers, seals, disguises—that would turn them into someone else.\nThanks to their hidden gold, Lena’s family was among the few who could still afford fresh meat. Their daily trips to the market provided cover for the secret missions, and sometimes, a chance for Lena to see Zlatan again. Sneaking behind market carts, she brought him food baskets, and told him stories of the Witch’s assignments. Zlatan was too old for fairy tales, but each night, he stood by the campfire and retold the stories to his people, adding a flask of hope to Lena’s offerings.\nSummer was on its last legs, but there was no harvest to celebrate. The fruit tramps were barred from working, and what little produce our fields reluctantly yielded without the loving hands of their faithful laborers was to feed the troops in their insatiable conquests. In the absence of festivities, the Dragon prepared to flood our streets with his own victory parade.\nAnd in the shame of our subjugation, some of us had forgotten who the enemy was, falsely recognizing its fire-spitting grimace in the faces of our former friends.\nThis was how Zlatan’s people ended up at Lena’s doorstep on that fateful night. Some claim it was the Dragon, but we all know it was our own torches that set fire to their camp. We all know it was only the officers’ preoccupation with the upcoming fanfare that allowed Lena and her mother to hide everyone in the cellar. The cellar that Lena’s father had only built and stocked with homebrew because the gypsies had blessed his land with more fruit than he could sell.\n“It’s not fair!” Lena sobbed as she and Zlatan led the women and children up the dark forest path, her mother keeping watch at the tail. “The Witch was supposed to help us defeat the Dragon, not just smuggle you to the Free Zone.” She didn’t know where the Free Zone was, but it was where Zlatan was headed, and she wasn’t.\nZlatan squeezed her hand. “I told you gypsy tales have bittersweet endings.” He didn’t notice Lena slip the last of her family jewels, her Babka’s wedding band, into his pocket.\nLena’s family moved after the war, and nobody could agree how her and Zlatan’s story ended. Some say they found each other and married in the Free Zone, under the branches of a golden apple tree. Others claim Zlatan sold her Babka’s ring for a fiddle, became a famous musician, and played at Lena’s wedding. We all tell and retell these stories, the happy and the bittersweet. We do it because there will always be those who tell other stories—ones of thieving tramps and evil eyes—and we had all believed them once, clutching our gold and sharpening our pitchforks.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/the-price-of-gold/","summary":"It was the end of the Before times, but since we didn’t know it yet, it was only the end of summer.","title":"The Price of Gold"},{"content":"Before I was Wolfdog Mike, and before he was Domn Lupescu, we were just two poor dhampir boys on the corner of 218th and East Ave. Published in:Dirty Magick Magazine Date: September 1, 2025 Read (External) ⤴ The full text of this piece will be available here after the embargo period expires. This ensures the original publisher maintains exclusive rights during their specified timeframe.\nAvailable to read on my website: September 1, 2026\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/undeath-and-taxes/","summary":"Before I was Wolfdog Mike, and before he was Domn Lupescu, we were just two poor dhampir boys on the corner of 218th and East Ave.","title":"Undeath and Taxes: Wolfdog Mike’s Prison Confessions"},{"content":" Published in: Sci-Fi Shorts Date: May 8, 2025 Read (External) ⤴ Ever since Elvira Akhmatova could remember, travelers had shared her home.\n“We Ossetians — friendliest people on planet!” her father would say in thick-accented English to the Western lunatics who’d decided the Wild Nineties were the time to backpack around the Caucasus. He’d adapted to the new decade: before, it had been “friendliest people in USSR” in thick-accented Russian.\nSeemingly undisturbed by the violence now rattling neighboring Chechnya, the foreigners gushed over Mount Kazbek’s beauty and fyddzhin pies.\nFolk wisdom held that mountain air had this amnesic effect, but Elvira remembered everything. She recalled September 20, 1988 — her eighteenth birthday — like it was yesterday. She was out for wood, Murtaz the Mule trotting beside her. Suddenly, the ground shook. Snow flurried into the air. Elvira froze, scanning the peaks for avalanches.\nWhen she looked down, a man lay in the snow. He wore tight overalls, like a Bolshoi ballet dancer. He wasn’t old, but the frost in his hair and eyebrows made him look like a wise shaman.\nElvira’s Russian folktale-fed imagination whispered “Fairy King Morozko”. Her Soviet pragmatism suggested a lost skier. Caucasus wisdom screamed bride kidnapper.\n“Stay back!” she said, swinging her axe. “If you think I’ll go to your village and be your captive, you’re sorely mistaken!”\nThe man’s violet eyes locked with hers. His entire face burst into laughter, breaking the frost on his eyebrows. “Darling, where I come from I couldn\u0026rsquo;t take you even if I wanted to,” he said.\nElvira frowned. “What do you want then?”\nHe rose and took a step toward her. “I’m\u0026hellip; a messenger,” he said, his face serious. “You must leave Karmadon before your thirty-second birthday.” A tear streamed down his face, stopping frozen on his cheek as the ground shook again. “I must go. Please, Elvie, promise you’ll get out.”\n“How—”\nThe mountain grumbled. Snow whirled into the air. Morozko was gone.\nSince freshman year in the Time Institute, Xander had suspected he’d end up in the same time-topos as Yujin for their Sabbaticals. It made sense — they’d shared a dormpod, first places in class rankings, and for one doomed half-semester, a holo-tattooed not-quite-girlfriend.\nStill, the coincidence was uncanny. Yujin was a History major. Xander, as Yujin loved reminding him, had sold his soul to the Geosciences department for a Terrenaissance-funded scholarship.\n“The past is the new frontier,” Yujin ironized Terrenaissance’s slogan. “Excited to pioneer the resource-juicing of our dead mother planet through the space-time continuum?”\n“Excited to fetishize protonatives and their little folktales nobody cares about?” Xander shot back.\nNeither truly knew what they were talking about. Despite the terrasimulators, neither was prepared for the sensation of snow against their skin, the smell of pines, or the mountain’s purple-orange hues at sunset.\nNo simulator could’ve prepared them for their host, either. Elvira was a ray of Terran sunshine, babbling faster than their dead language in-brain translators could process.\n“When Papa, God rest his soul, told me we’d been hosting time-travelers my whole life, it all made sense!” Elvira said. “I always wondered what all those foreigners were doing in the middle of nowhere\u0026hellip;”\nThey were on their third serving of “birthday pie” — Elvira was twenty-five today — when she asked them about their Sabbaticals.\n“I’m tracing a folktale’s origin,” said Yujin. “A mountain faerie was courted by two princes. She couldn’t marry either, for if she left her kingdom, its magic would wither. One prince agreed to be her husband for one day each year, when the gates between their realms opened. The other was jealous, and stole the faerie’s mountain. I believe the legend originated around here-now.”\n“Fascinating!” Elvira said. “Never heard of it though, and I know the Nart saga by heart.”\nHow could Xander and his boring glacier analyses compete with that? Before long though, it was him Elvira accompanied on every trek, talking and talking, about life, death, magmatic rocks, balalaika music, outer space, donkey-rearing, Boris Yeltsin\u0026hellip;\nSabbaticals lasted seven years, but they were slipping away like weekdays.\n“You never wish you time-hopped like Yujin?” Elvira asked Xander one night in 1999, lying on his chest.\nOnce arrived in their time-topos, students were allowed to short-distance-travel up to seven years back and forth, provided they never landed in the same day twice. Yujin had been hopping from 1988 to 2002, chasing his mysterious folktale with some old woman somehow connected to it all. He always visited around Elvira’s birthdays.\n“Nah,” Xander said. “Glacier’s the same here-now as in 1988.”\n“You know, I think I met you in 1988. You were older and had purple eyes.”\n“Possible. Iris-mods are trendy back home.”\n“You said I should leave Karmadon before my thirty-second birthday.”\n“Well, the day before that is my last, so please don’t go anywhere,” Xander said, kissing her endlessly.\n“How could you?” Xander burst into Yujin’s tenured professor office, violet eyes simmering with anger. He shoved a holo-tablet in his face. “Kolka-Karmadon glacier collapse, September 20, 2002? Entire Nizhny Karmadon village buried in ice and debris\u0026hellip; You had archives access, you knew! She dies right after we leave, and you didn’t warn her?”\n“I was waiting for you to get clearance at Terrenaissance so you’d learn the truth,” Yujin said. “Why do you think they pay students to poke around glaciers? They’re smuggling Earth’s water into the future! They caused the collapse, Xander.”\n“What?”\n“There’s a local Resistance. Their leader, Feira, contacted me on Earth. That’s why I was always gone.”\n“B-but Elvira\u0026hellip;”\n“Here.” Yujin handed him his travel wristband. “I have a few minutes of Sabbatical left on September 20, 1988. Go say your goodbyes, then come back and join the fight.”\nOn September 20, 2002, Elvira went out for wood with Murtaz III. The mule bucked as the mountain let out a familiar grumble.\nAn old woman appeared, dusting snow off her overalls. “Come, child,” she said, handing Elvira a wristband. “They’re stealing our mountain. Time for you to join your princes and resist.”\n“Who are you?” asked Elvira.\n“I’m you. You’re the legend. We’re Feira.”\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/the-stolen-mountain/","summary":"Elvira remembered everything.","title":"The Stolen Mountain"},{"content":" Published in: Pulp Asylum Date: December 1, 2024 Read (External) ⤴ “It’s not dead.” Kneeling on the linoleum floor, Jamie scoops the remains of my Walkman while I sob into his Monster Jam bed sheets. He smashed the thing to pieces, along with the Psychedelic Jungle album that was inside. We’d barely started the A-side when he began punching it into the wall. Jamie hates punk rock.\nIt was a brand new Walkman too, with auto-reverse and all. My mom’s boyfriends always buy me the nicest things when they want to get rid of me. Every-Other-Wednesday-Jeff from AA got me a skateboard. An actual skateboard! Mom would’ve never let me have one in a million years if it wasn’t for the two awful weeks I agreed to spend in YMCA summer camp. Gary-Works-in-Finance-Can-You-Believe-It didn’t strike me as the fun type, but he bought me a Game \u0026amp; Watch (he probably thought it was a fancy calculator). The best part was that my mom didn’t even send me away that time. The console’s disposable battery stuck around for longer than Gary.\nAnd now there’s Michael. Did-I-Tell-Ya-How-I-Once-Met-Debbie-Harry-Backstage-Michael, to be precise. He gave me the cassette tape along with the Walkman. “The Cramps are pretty niche, but they’ve been all over the NYC club scene,” he said with an air of authority. “Show ‘em to your friends and I guarantee ya, before long you’ll be the coolest kid in all of Hartford.”\nHere I am two weeks later, trapped in the midsummer heat of a lonely trailer far off the interstate. Showing The Cramps to my “friend”. The coolest kid in all of Hartford, my ass. Jamie and I would normally barely acknowledge each other in the halls of junior high, but a sort of understanding grew between us over the last semester. On Wednesday afternoons, I’d call his landline and dictate the answers to our math homework. In return, every day after lunch, he’d let me pretend to smoke a single cigarette with him under the bleachers. Being seen hanging out with a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks is like insect repellent for bullies.\nThat’s how my mom knew what number to reach Jamie’s old man at. Without asking me, she arranged for me to stay with them for the rest of the summer, while she and Michael travel across the country with a bunch of Deadheads.\nThe image of my mother bent over a crack pipe in the back of a hippie van, combined with that of the sad pile of plastic shards and bunched up tape in Jamie’s hands, make me start bawling again.\n“Shhhh, don’t cry,” Jamie whisper-shouts. His voice sounds urgent, pleading. He glances at the open hinged window, then draws closer to the foot of the bed. “Look, Sam, I swear I can fix it, okay? You’ll see, it’ll be better than before. But you have to trust me and be quiet.”\nI wipe my eyes in my sleeve and look up at Jamie. His pupils widen at the sound of a wet cough coming from the front porch. It dawns on me that his fretting has little to do with some newfound remorse, and everything to do with fear.\nWhen I first got here, Jamie had a split lip. He told me that his old man had thrown a “temper tantrum” the night before, when Jamie had reminded him they’d agreed to host me. He was in the crappy in-between state where he was neither sober enough to work nor bad enough to disappear into a weeks-long bender, Jamie said.\nI can’t help but revel at the slight shift in the power dynamic. Jamie could break my things and make me cry, but I could cry loud enough for his piece of shit father to hear about it. I’m not going to, but I could.\n“Come on, put your shoes on.” Jamie taps his foot in the narrow doorway of his sleeping compartment. Covered from floor to ceiling in posters of monster trucks, lightsabers, and Red Sox players, it almost looks like a real bedroom. Jamie has placed the Walkman’s carcass inside a shoebox and wrapped the headphones around it in a bow, like a last minute Christmas present. I have no idea how this is supposed to help fix it, but I’m too tired to argue.\nWe tiptoe across the main area as Jamie’s father snores in the folding chair outside the front door. We exit out back, and I follow Jamie through the chain link gate to the junkyard. His dad guards it at night, or at least he’s supposed to. Whenever he goes dark, Jamie takes over, by which he means that he forges his old man’s signature on the presence sheets so the checks keep coming in. It’s a bullshit job anyway, Jamie says: nobody ever dumps anything worth stealing here, and there are other junkyards near the highway that are way more fun to break into and vandalize.\nWe walk down the main driveway past variously sized piles of rust and rubble, until we almost reach the outer fence. Jamie stops and crouches in one place on the side of the path, where the dirt looks softer.\n“Here,” he says, drawing an X in the ground with his finger. “Here’s where we’ll bury it.”\n“Bury\u0026hellip; my Walkman? Is this your idea of an apology?”\nThe constellation of freckles on Jamie’s right cheek changes orbit as he flashes a smug grin. “You’ll see. Now hold the box while I go get the shovel.”\nI’ve never met anyone else with such a massive concentration of freckles only on one side of their face. Jamie says it’s because the sun would always fall on his right when he was little and used to ride shotgun in his dad’s pickup truck. They’d drive up the I-84, sometimes across state, where his dad did carpentry work for some Masshole general contractor. That was before Jamie’s mom left and his dad hit the drink. At first I thought Jamie was making it up, but then I noticed his right eyebrow and the right side of his hair are also blonder than the rest, so maybe it was the sun. Luckily his eyes are both the same shade of swampy green, or else he’d look like a trucker-tanned cyborg.\nJamie comes back with the shovel and begins digging while humming “On the Road Again”. I feel like I should say something, but he looks so determined that I just stand aside and leave him to it, lest he should start punching things again.\n“Should be deep enough,” he says, wiping sweat off his brow. Deep enough for what, I don’t know, but what I do know is that it’s getting dark and this is starting to creep me out. I lower the shoebox into the pet-sized grave, then help Jamie fill it in by sweeping some of the dirt with my feet.\nAs we walk back to the trailer in silence, I begin to wonder if he isn’t planning on replacing the broken Walkman with something else overnight, and then having me discover it in the morning. Something crappier, no doubt, but perhaps something just weird and cool enough to make me forgive him. “Sorry I broke your state-of-the-art Japanese portable cassette player. Here’s the radio my old man used in ‘Nam to hunt down commies through the jungle.” Sounds like the kind of thing Jamie would do.\nWe tiptoe back inside the trailer. Jamie spends a good ten minutes closing the zipper of the front porch’s mosquito net as quietly as humanly possible. He spends another fifteen soundlessly gathering all the empty beer bottles laying around his dad’s feet with the grace and focus of a tightrope acrobat, or perhaps a professional Twister player. “He gets mad if he knocks them over when he wakes up,” Jamie explains later, as we slurp instant noodles on his bedroom floor. He has an electric kettle and some provisions hidden under the bed so he doesn’t have to pass by the kitchen too often. He even has techniques and rules for how to brush your teeth silently or when not to flush the toilet.\nJamie turns the lights off, and I stare at his glowy star ceiling. Lying upside down with my feet curled next to Jamie’s pillow, I only now notice that the stars are arranged in the shape of words.\nLuminous beings are we, not this crude matter.\nI wonder if it’s a quote from the Bible or Star Wars.\n“Hey, Jamie?” I whisper.\n“It’s Yoda,” he says. “He said it in The Empire Strikes Back.”\n“Ah\u0026hellip; cool. Um, why’d you break my Walkman?”\nJamie raps his fingers on the headboard, exhaling loudly. “Told you I can’t stand your stupid punk music.”\n“But\u0026hellip; why?”\nThe mattress shifts under the weight of another deep sigh. “Cause it’s for whiny city losers. If it’s all such doom and gloom in the downtown tenements, then why don’t these punks drag their powdered asses five miles up the highway and see how real American folks live?”\nHe’s repeating almost word for word something I heard his father say the other day.\n“I could probably get another Walkman, you know?” I say, unsure why.\n“Good for you.”\n“No, I mean\u0026hellip; I could’ve left you this one and said I lost it or something. Get Michael to buy me a new one if he’s still around when I’m back. You could’ve listened to country or whatever you like, you didn’t have to break it.”\n“Whatever, Sam.” Jamie turns on his side, facing the wall. “Go to sleep.”\nI wake up from the deafening roar of music blasting outside. Bright neon lights dance along the walls. They’re coming from the back-facing window.\nThat’s where the music’s coming from too.\nYou~better~duck~\nThe junkyard!\n~When~I~show~up~\nMy heart drops to my stomach as I recognize the song.\n~The~goo~goo~muck.\nJamie is awake next to me. He practically pushes me off the bed. “Woah,” he says, dragging me towards the window, “I didn’t think it’d be back so soon.”\nHe pulls up the blinds. We both stare at the impossible creature on the other side of the junkyard fence.\nA mud-covered jukebox wobbles back and forth, its dome opening and closing in rhythm with the music. The fluorescent beams along its front panel flash in a frenzy of lime green and glittery pink. The whole thing looks like some twisted disco version of a Dalek from Doctor Who.\n“How do you do this? I stare Jamie up and down, trying to gauge if he could be hiding a remote in the sleeves of his pajamas. Do jukeboxes even have remotes?\n“It’s not me.” Jamie’s voice carries the mix of terror and awe of a boy who’s gotten exactly what he wanted. “It’s the graveyard. I mean\u0026hellip; the junkyard.”\nBefore I can press him for answers, another roar rises above Poison Ivy’s guitar solo.\nThis time, it’s coming from inside the trailer.\n“Damned trespassers! I’m coming out with a gun, you little shits, so you better get the hell out!”\nIt’s Jamie’s dad.\nEven in the dark, I can see the color draining from Jamie’s face. “Stay here,” he says, opening the bedroom door.\nThrough the window, I see his dad appear in front of the fence, holding a shotgun. Across the hall, Jamie disappears through the back door.\nI take a deep breath and follow him.\nI’m about to exit onto the back porch when a succession of loud pops splits the sky. Gunshots.\nI cover my ears and duck behind the plastic door that’s left ajar.\n“Dad, no! Stop!” Jamie screams.\nI dare a glance through the tiny crack between the door and the wall where it hangs on its hinges. I catch a glimpse of the jukebox across the fence. Sparks fly and glass shatters as Jamie’s dad rains bullets on it. It makes a dying sound, like that of a scratched record, then crumbles sideways.\n“Why?” Back on the porch gone dark, Jamie’s silhouette shoves his father’s. “I fixed it, why’d you have to break it again?”\n“You did this?” Now his father’s silhouette is shoving him. They’re heading back inside. “That how you treat a veteran, boy? My own son!”\n“Sam, go back to my room,” Jamie mouths through gritted teeth as the two of them walk past me, Jamie’s dad forcefully dragging him by the collar.\nMy heart burns with guilt and shame, but the fear in my stomach prevails. I slam the bedroom door shut behind me, accidentally ripping the Han Solo poster that’s taped to it. I throw myself onto the bed, burying my head under the bunched up covers. I wait and pretend it’s not just the comforter, but the weight of the entire monster truck arsenal depicted on it that’s stacked on top of me, crushing my skull until I can no longer hear the cacophony of objects falling off shelves, of leather falling on bare skin, of Jamie’s yelps falling on deaf ears.\nI don’t know if it’s been a minute or an hour when the door creaks open and I feel Jamie’s weight sink into the mattress. He jumps over me, reclaiming his spot on the side of the wall with the skill and precision of someone who knows what sleeping position works best after a beating. He cries skillfully too, the slight shaking of the mattress his only giveaway.\n“Hey, Sam?” he whispers after a while.\n“Yeah?”\n“You saw it, right? Your Walkman, it\u0026hellip; came back. It wasn’t dead anymore.”\nOnce again I stare into Yoda’s words on the ceiling. Crossing the galaxies between us, I sit up and orient myself to lie beside Jamie. In the faint light of the bedside window, I locate the spot on his cheek where his freckles abound, and cover it with my thumb. “I saw it,” I say, smiling. “Dead, it was not.”\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/luminous-beings/","summary":"“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” I wonder if it’s a quote from the Bible or Star Wars.","title":"Luminous Beings"},{"content":" Published in: Fraidy Cat Quarterly Date: November 30, 2024 Read (Paywall) ⤴ “You know the old pond is haunted, right?” you say tongue in cheek as I lead you up the forest trail. It’s not typical for you to leave a party early, especially not when the whole town is gathered at the square for a night of guiltless, church- and state-sanctioned revelry. It’s Rusalia week, and not even a god-fearing wife can keep her man from raising a glass or twelve to the summer crops’ health. Yours certainly couldn’t.\n“Surely you don’t believe such silly wives’ tales?” I say, grinning.\nYour gaze glimmers with desire or perhaps from all the booze. “I’m following you there, aren’t I?”\nI shiver in my thin dress, sensing the growing dryness in my throat. I shouldn’t have drunk that poison you villagers call alcohol, but I had to get your attention.\nIt’s not like you made it hard for me, either. Not even a quarter-hour had I been sitting in the town’s only so-called pub, hidden in the folds of the carousing crowd, when you approached.\n“What’s a fine young lady doing drinking rakiya all alone on this bright holiday?” you said. Leave it to a middle-aged married man to pass judgment on your age, lack of company, and choice of beverage in a single breath, all while courting a girl young enough to be his daughter. I smirk at the last thought.\nA few playful looks, some innocent inquiries into my business in town—confirming I’m not sweetheart or kin to anyone you know—and here you are. You’ve followed a stranger into the woods on an unspoken promise of the kind of sinful entertainment that not even the most hypocritical religious holiday can provide.\nThe other men on that square will watch and whistle as barely clothed girls dance through the Rusalka Burial, symbolically banishing the dreaded water spirit to the bottom of the well she had dutifully crawled out of to bless their precious crops. The other men will stumble back to their houses, sink into inebriated slumber to the fading sounds of their wives’ reproaches, and call it a great night.\nNot you. You are the mayor.\nYou’re sitting on the bridge, shirt half-unbuttoned, toes caressing the water’s surface. You haven’t taken your eyes off me, yet I’ve managed to slip off my dress and into the pond’s dark embrace without letting you see a thing. Funny how the shadows of the willow trees can play tricks on you.\n“Aren’t you coming in?” I ask, dousing you playfully.\nYou giggle and send a few ripples back. “Nah. I told you this place is haunted. Besides, I’m enjoying the view.”\nLiar. The only view you’re enjoying is the one in your imagination, and you’re getting impatient.\n“Why do people say that about the pond, anyway?” I ask. “Is it because of that girl who drowned herself here?”\nThe spark in your eyes vanishes. “I\u0026hellip; don’t think so. Folks are always telling tales of evil spirits and such.” Nice try. “Who burdened your pretty head with this wretched tragedy?”\n“Tragic indeed,” I say. “You didn’t know her well, then? They say she was the most beautiful girl in town, with emerald-green eyes and tar-black curls. A bit like mine, actually.” I straighten up, my breasts only covered by two wisps of wet hair.\nHad it been any other night at any other pond, you would have rightly interpreted my coy self-flattery as an invitation to move past the spooky bedtime stories and on to more mature pleasures. Instead, you’re staring at me, white as a sheet.\n“N-no, I didn’t know her. I mean, everyone knows everyone here, but we weren’t…”\n“Close?” I offer. “Then you wouldn’t happen to know what drove her mad? What, or who, could possibly make a healthy young woman come here one day and\u0026hellip;” I dive in, releasing a few exaggerated air bubbles.\nMy feigned drowning doesn’t seem to do much in the way of lightening your mood.\n“It’s a well-known story,“ I continue, “funny you haven’t heard of it. Poor farmer’s daughter meets the mayor’s handsome son. They fall in love, make plans: city, university; then marriage, daddy’s mayoral office. What’s maidenly virtue worth with such bright prospects?”\n“Maybe we should go,” you mutter, glancing back at the trail. “It’s getting late.”\n“Wait, you don’t want to hear the rest of the story? Of course, you already know it.”\nSomething, or someone, pulls at your feet, slowly dragging you down as your legs begin to slide off the edge of the bridge.\nYou shriek. “What is this? Let me go!”\n“Tell me, what happened to those shiny plans when farm girl got pregnant? Did her beloved support her? Did he agree to delay his prestigious studies by just a year, to help raise the baby before taking on the world?”\n“I—I don’t know\u0026hellip;” Your pathetic kicks only speed up your descent into the water.\n“What about months later, when in her lowest of lows she asked at least for money for the city clinic, to fix the problem for good? By then, word had gotten around. Did mayor-to-be and his esteemed daddy at least leave poor little farm girl be, or did they pay off her own father and the stable boy to claim the latter had knocked her up?”\n“I—I wasn’t the mayor back then… Please, what do you want? Is it money? I have money!”\nI’ll give it to you, the audacity to attempt lying or buying your way out of this once again takes me off-guard. “And who was the mayor, Mr. Chernyshki-Son? Who was it, Sava?” My voice starts to shake. “Why didn’t you want us?”\nYour hands cling furiously to the slippery beams that hold the bridge together. Our faces are an arm’s reach apart when it dawns on you.\n“Maria? How\u0026hellip;?”\nYou feel the invisible clasp loosen around your ankles, and for a second, you allow yourself to believe you still have a chance.\nThen she emerges, her emerald eyes unmistakable even in the darkness of the night and in your feverish mind.\n“That would be her.” I glance at my mother, then back at you. “Hi, Daddy.”\nYou’re all sobs and wails now, desperately flapping your arms and legs, knowing it’s pointless.\n“Tell me, Sava, have you at least once during all those years wondered what it feels like to drown?” Mother says. “What final images flash through your mind as you sink with stones tied to your legs? As the water overtakes you, its unbearable heaviness crushing your skull, and that of your unborn child?”\n“Maria, please forgive me! I’m a changed man… I have a family!”\n“Yes, I know,” she continues, “wife and daughter. They too begged for their lives.”\n“No! You lying b—”\nBefore you finish, two bodies float to the surface, white-blue as the moon.\n“Nooo! You monsters!”\n“That’s what they said too, at first. But now, they understand,” I whisper as the corpses awaken.\n“Hello, Sava,” my stepmother says.\n“Hi, Daddy,” my half-sister chimes in.\nEach of us grabs a limb. Your screams turn to gurgles as the four of us drag you to the moonless bottom with the weight of a thousand stones.\nSomewhere in the distance, men cheer and bagpipes roar in synchronic frenzy as a naked girl dances atop a covered well. The rusalka has been banished.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/wives-tales/","summary":"You know the old pond is haunted, right?","title":"Wives' Tales"},{"content":" Published in: Crepuscular Magazine Date: October 13, 2024 Read (External) ⤴ “It’s not dead.” Jamie kneels on the floor, scooping the remains of my Walkman while I sniffle into his Monster Jam bedsheets. He smashed it to pieces. Jamie hates punk rock.\nHe drags me out back, to the junkyard that his old man guards at night (when he’s half-sober). We dig a shallow grave and bury the Walkman.\nWe’re asleep head-to-toe when The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” starts blasting. I glance out the trailer’s window. A mud-covered jukebox wobbles around, its dome opening and closing in rhythm.\nJamie’s toe pokes my cheek. “See? They always come back.”\nThe skunk he shot out of boredom with his father’s Winchester .32 reincarnated into a spray paint can. The dog he ran over—speeding with no license, then sobbing all through my hopeless CPR attempts—now guards the junkyard, tinbox jaws clanking atop an ottoman body.\n“What would you return as?” I ask Jamie one night. We’re too old to top-tail, but we do it anyway, for old times’ sake.\n“Grave Digger.”\n“The monster truck?”\n“Yeah, man.” Jamie’s knuckles draw serpentine race tracks down my shin. “You can be the driver.”\nThat day came too soon.\n“You never learned to drive for shit.” Crouched in a pile of rust and dirt, I sob as Tin-Tin sniffs at the empty urn.\n“That’s why I got you,” says the tow truck beside me.\nWhile Skunksy graffitis “MONSTER JAMie” across his bumper, I climb onto the flatbed. We fall asleep, head-to-tow.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/the-goo-goo-truck/","summary":"It\u0026rsquo;s not dead.","title":"The Goo Goo Truck"},{"content":" Published in: Elegant Literature Date: October 1, 2024 Read (External) ⤴ Think of your deepest fear. Your darkest, most disturbing nightmare.\nNow imagine being trapped in it, under a hermetically sealed dome at the bottom of the ocean.\nIf you’re anything like me, then congratulations, you’re attending the billionaire destination wedding of the century.\n“Welcome to Atlantis 1.0, Mr Pierrax,” a concierge dressed in a fish scale patterned uniform says, holding out a gold plated seashell. “This is your cabin key. Miss Whitmore is already checked in.”\nI nod politely and start for the elevators, following the ‘Olivia \u0026amp; Jake’ arrow signs that some wedding planner spent way too much time designing in the shape of mermaid tails. I try not to gawk at the manta rays swimming in the ceiling.\n‘What the flying fish, Conseil?’ I hiss into my in-brain commspiece. ‘We said separate rooms. How the fish am I supposed to work with that hag breathing down my neck all weekend?’\n‘That is correct, Aron. I booked two separate rooms,’ Conseil’s synthetic voice chirps. ‘You are in cabin 117. Miss Whitmore is in cabin 117.’\nI sigh and press the elevator button. Conseil has served me well in many jobs, but the hydrostatic pressure must be messing with his programming. I willingly ignore the fact that my escape from this fished up aquarium hinges on my seasick AI getaway driver and a janky submersible that may as well be from OceanGate’s yard sale.\nAt least Conseil’s fishing straight-to-brain profanity filter seems intact.\nLucretia Whitmore stands in the doorway, wearing an aquamarine bathrobe with “Team” and “Bride” embroidered on each side of her voluptuous boob job. “You’re not the boy from the catalog,” she says.\nMa’am, you’re not pulling off Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus all that well either, I bite my lip to avoid blurting out.\nBefore I can tell my rehearsed backstory of her original date for hire’s unfortunate seafood poisoning on the ferry sub, she shrugs and says, “Whatever, you’re more handsome anyway. I have to be at Bubbles With the Bridesmaids in twenty, but please, get comfortable\u0026hellip;” She winks, motioning to the clamshell bed.\n“I—uh\u0026hellip; gotta get ready for the welcome cocktail,” I mumble, making a run for the bathroom and locking it from the inside.\n“Na-uh, that’s only for B listers,” Lucretia shouts over the sound of the shower I’m performatively running. “We’re A list, baby. You’re going to the bachelor party.”\nDammit, Conseil.\n“Remember, the dress code is Mermaids and Mermen. Then for tomorrow’s reception it’s Black Tie, of course.”\n‘For fish’s sake, Conseil, you said White Tie! Where will I get a spyware-tapped black bowtie now? Or a fishing merman costume, for that matter?’\n‘You have a point, Aron. Procuring spy tech equipment would be difficult at this stage. A merman costume, however, can be improvis—’ I mute him so I don’t smash the porthole mirror.\nWhat is it with straight people going all campy at weddings, I wonder, chafing in the DIY merman toga I fashioned out of the shower curtain. All that’s missing in this Cocktails’n’Scales cabaret is a drag queen named Lana Del Mar lip-syncing “Kiss the Girl”.\nAdmittedly, groom Jake Marmara looks kinda hot in his Poseidon costume, minus the “Who’s Your Marman” sash.\nI remind myself that he and his daddy-in-law are my primary targets. Stockton Whitmore, Lucretia’s brother and head of the Whitmore development empire, is partnering with Marmara Biotechnologies on a mysterious innovation that will supposedly revolutionize luxury real estate. They are expected to announce it at the reception.\nMy job is to steal the blueprints and deliver them to our client before the official media announcements. For that, I need to get closer to Marmara and his associates.\nThere are few things in life that terrify me more than a group of straight white Silicon Valley dudes running loose like zoo animals in the wild. Regardless, a job is a job, and in order to do mine successfully, I must join the circus. My first objective is to secure an after party invite. For that, I have no choice but to debase myself with the sorts of activities that pass for a jolly good time with the boys among these specimens: smoking cigars and getting heated up over card game bets. The 1960s called and want their Mad Men script back.\n“Hey man, Alan, is it?” After I’ve folded, Jake leans closer to show me his hand. “What do you say, should I raise?”\nI scratch the nape of my neck and pretend to think. ‘Conseil?’ I call out to my partner through our mind link.\nTo be honest, I’m not even entirely sure what game we are playing, but Conseil has hacked into the CCTV. He can read everyone’s cards.\n‘Yes, he should raise,’ Conseil says. ‘Nobody else has the Biden suit.’\nBiding suit? Does he mean bidding?\nWait.\n“I’d go all in,” I tell Jake with an air of authority. “I bet nobody else has the trump suit.” Fishing Conseil’s fished up programming.\n“Damn, dude, you’re like my good luck charm or something!” Jake says after he wins the hand and collects everyone’s seashell chips. “You should come with us to The Naughtilus after.”\nBingo.\nJake leans in again and whispers, “They have sirens and sailors there, by the way. My best man swims both ways, if ya know whatta mean.\nI look over at Marmara’s twink CFO, then at Jake’s hand on my bare knee. Maybe the tabloids aren’t lying for once, and Marmara’s marriage to Olivia Whitmore is a political sham.\nSoon, I have another twink-adjacent problem on my hands.\nNay, in my lap.\n“Aron Pierrax? Seriously? At this point, why not just call yourself Captain Nemo?” the male stripper giggles, toying with my name badge as he places his sailor cap on my head.\nEdward fishing Vandersee. I’d recognize that six pack from 20,000 leagues away.\n“Ned,” I say, gritting my teeth behind a fake smile. “I didn’t realize things at Nexus were so bad you needed a second job.” We used to be partners, until Vandersee left for another corp intel firm, snatching away half our clients with him.\n“I’m not working with Nexus on this,” he says. “The fact that you thought I was is proof enough that you have no idea what’s really going on here.”\n“Shot-shot-shot-shots, motherfishaaas!” Jake roars as two sirens bring a tray full of silvery liquids. “Time to see if y’all are sinkers or swimmers!”\nIs it me or is Ned looking pale all of a sudden?\n“Gimme this.” He snatches the shot glass out of my hand. Then, more composed, he flashes a mischievous grin, tilts my head, and pours its contents into my mouth.\nFrom then on, I’m sinking.\nblubblubblub\nJake is gurgling in my ear again.\nslorpslorp~\nWhy are his hands so slimy?\n“Come on, we need to go!”\nNed is dragging me somewhere.\nTHUNK!\nIs that the CFO swimming in the ceiling?\nWhat the actual fish\u0026hellip;?!\nI wake up naked and alone. I have a splitting headache, and my ears ring with ocean sounds as if I have pressed sea snail shells to them.\nThe clam-shaped bed frame is a different pearlescent shade than the one I thankfully avoided sharing with Lucretia, but I recognize the sailor cap and marinière lying on the floor next to the shower curtain. Fish. I’m in Ned’s cabin.\nI glance at the crab clock on the nightstand. Fish fish fish! It’s almost noon. The reception is starting!\nI put on a hotel bathrobe and storm out.\nI bump into Lucretia in the hallway. She’s giving Ursula from The Little Mermaid in her tentacled octopus gown. “Why aren’t you dressed?” she hisses.\nHer neck gills look freakishly real.\nI mumble an apology and lock myself in our cabin. I grab a scanner brush from my bag and run it furiously over my neck and shoulders. ‘Conseil, tell me you got Marmara’s DNA?’\n‘Negative. We got it.’\n‘You mean affirmative, you useless son of a ChatGPT!’\nI sprint towards Marmara’s penthouse, sweating through my white tux and the black spy bowtie I pinched from Ned’s room.\nHalfway through, I feel my dress shoes getting soaked. I look down and gasp. There’s a solid inch of water on the ground.\nIt’s rising.\nAt the penthouse door, Conseil cracks the lock’s encryption, making my own keycard work as a master key. Inside, I find Jake’s laptop and stick the DNA sample into the ID sensor.\nI’m in. I execute a script that queries for blueprints.\nAtlantis-2-0.pdf\nBingo.\nI feel the blood draining from my face as I scroll through the blueprints. It’s\u0026hellip; the floor plans for Atlantis 1.0, but without the dome? And an anatomy sketch of a\u0026hellip; fish man?\n“The ocean floor is the new frontier,” a voice behind me recites in a TV marketer tone.\nMy heart skips a beat as I turn around.\nIt’s Ned.\n“They’re lifting the dome as we speak,” he says. “Apparently, genetic mutation is way cheaper than hyper pressure resistant glass. I’m sorry I had to roofie you last night to stop you from drinking the metamorphosis formula, by the way.”\nI stare at him in confusion. “Lifting the dome…? B—but\u0026hellip; w—why?”\nNed shrugs. “Free buildable land. No regulations. Self-aggrandizement. The only problem is, they gotta keep the predator fish away. They’re dispersing them using sonic waves. Over time, it’s bound to cause mass extinctions.”\nThat must be the reason for Conseil’s blips!\n“So… what is your plan?” I ask sheepishly.\n“I’m working with Greenpeace. They located and deactivated the sensors an hour ago. It won’t be long till those billionaire shits-for-brains start getting eaten by sharks.”\n“What about the staff?”\n“Evacuated.”\n“What about you?”\nThe water rises up to our knees.\n“I came back for you, stupid,” Ned says. “Now what is your escape plan?”\nI don’t wait for a second invitation. “Conseil, navigate us to the drysuits closet.”\n“Fish!” I yell out loud. “Conseil, these are fishing wetsuits!!”\nNed bursts into laughter. “Okay, plan B, I guess. Marmara gave me the keys to the honeymoon sub.”\nHe dangles the ‘Just Marmarried!’ keychain in front of my face, and I can’t help but smile. I knew that bachelor party was gay as fish.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/short-stories/sinker-sailor-swimmer-fish/","summary":"Congratulations, you’re attending the billionaire destination wedding of the century.","title":"Sinker, Sailor, Swimmer, Fish"},{"content":"This page redirects to the homepage.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/about/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis page redirects to the homepage.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"About - Sanya Dimova"},{"content":"This page redirects to the homepage.\n","permalink":"https://sanyadimova.com/home/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis page redirects to the homepage.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Home - Sanya Dimova"}]