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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
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      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
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      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
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      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
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      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Katya Kulik

Boarding the Train

Imagine a small town in Russia. Like many other small towns of Russia it is small, boring, and barely surviving. There is a railroad that connects the small town to a bigger town: a joyful ride of forest, forest, forest outside the windows for almost 400 miles. There are two trains that run between the small town and the bigger town: the “poor” train which is cheaper and slower, and the “rich” one — more expensive and less slow.
 
Boarding the train is a significant event in the small town, and the day routines are structured by the train’s arrivals and departures.
 
“Time to get up,” the mother would tell her children. “The poor train has arrived.”
 
Or the father would say:
 
“Time to have dinner: the rich train has already departed.”
 
 
Today the newly-wed couple is boarding the train. They arrive at the station in a wreck of a white car decorated with red and blue bands and flowers. A doll wearing a bridal veil sits on the bumper of the car, and two rings united in the manner of the Olympic rings are attached to the roof. The newly-weds are young, happy, and drunk. The bride, eighteen, is fresh and glowing, still wearing her bridal veil which looks slightly out of place with her warm coat and jeans. The groom, twenty, is boyishly handsome, talking, joking, laughing non-stop. They are so shamelessly happy that everyone looks at them and smiles. The bottle of champagne is opened, plastic containers with the leftovers from the reception dinner are placed right on the roof of the car, glasses are passed to relatives and friends who are seeing them off. They toast to the safety of their journey: his tipsy mother and father, her tearful mother, the best man, hungover, unshaven, hair disheveled, the bridesmaid who seems undecided whether she is envious or sorry for her friend. The train departs in fifteen minutes, and the bottle of champagne is empty at once, so the bottle of vodka is opened. One more toast to the journey: it is a long one. First, a night on the rich train to the bigger town, then an eight-hour flight to Moscow, then a three-hour charter flight to Kemer, Turkey. It is a wedding present from both his parents and her mom: a trip to Turkey. Everyone tried to talk them out of this outrageously expensive trip: going to Thailand or China from the Far East of Russia would have been easier and less expensive, but the bride wants to go to Turkey, and Turkey only, because in Moscow, that undisputable center of the Russian universe, everyone goes to the seaside in Turkey. Oh, it will be so much fun to spend their honeymoon in Kemer. The bridegroom said that he would go anywhere his baby-girl decides to go, and so they are traveling to Turkey — cumulatively over 24 hours of travel on different kinds of transportation to reach the bride’s idea of modern paradise.
 
Drinking on the train is not allowed, but if it is a little beer, and you are newly-weds, no one is going to fine you. They are in the compartment with four more passengers, and everyone toasts to their happy marriage. And the honeymoon which is going to be wonderful: they will be slightly hungover after the train and will sleep on the plane, then they will get some food and beer between planes in Moscow, and since on the charter flight it will be okay to drink, they will spend three glorious hours tasting the duty-free discoveries — champagne, Baileys, and tequila.
 
***
 
Boarding the train is the beginning of different kinds of epic journeys. The small town’s
hospital is so poor and so badly equipped that all pregnant women two weeks before they are due board the train and start their long journey towards the delivery — in the hospital of the bigger town. The official reason is to avoid complications. The ulterior motive is not to be responsible. There is no one responsible if the premature birth happens on the train too.
 
A heavily pregnant woman is boarding the train today. She is young, probably nineteen or twenty, but she is so pregnant and is already so exhausted that it makes her look older and more mature than her yet childless girlfriends who are seeing her off. She does not look happy: she has been told what to expect. It is not the painful inevitability of childbirth that scares her, but the endless two weeks of expectation — boring, dreary, gloomy. The lucky women of the bigger town will arrive a day or two before, and sometimes, lucky them, in labor, whereas she will share her room with the unhappy restless fellow victims of the public healthcare system. Her mind is uneasy: she is worried about her baby-boy, but even more so about her husband who didn’t come to the station to see her off. He called and said that he had to stay at work that day. There was another accident with the machinery at the power plant. Second accident in a month. She is not so naïve, however: one of her girlfriends told her that there is a new employee at power plant: both beautiful and capable of drinking any of the male employees under the table. Clearly, her wildness and lack of restraint are irresistible for men. At least, her girls told her so. Most likely, the accident is a party at work with the new girl.
 
She sits on the train and her thoughts are heavy. What if her baby-boy was conceived when her husband was as always Friday night tipsy, Saturday night drunk, Sunday hangover treated with beer? He is not an alcoholic, no, but the communal male drinking is a tradition immune to destruction, no matter however hard women of the small town try to change that. Her mother was defeated in the battle with it, and many other mothers and wives were defeated. She can’t possibly win.
 
It is hard to be an eight and a half month pregnant woman traveling alone on the train, and the only thought that cheers her up a little is the thought of her tiny baby-boy with his little hands and feet, his Daddy’s dark hair and her blue eyes.
 
***
 
It is not easy to board the train, especially when one is traveling alone with an energetic ten-year-old. The woman carries two suitcases and at the same time tries to restrain her boy — a flash, a storm, a hurricane of a child. The car conductor is particularly malicious today: she doesn’t let the woman’s mother who is seeing her off to get inside the car, so the hapless travelers have to struggle with their suitcases in the narrow aisle between the compartments on their own. Not that her mother, not old by age but already an old woman, could be of big help — her health is shattered by worries. The woman pushes the suitcases under the berth, then tells the boy to sit still and hoping for the best, hurries outside to say final words of good-bye to her mother. She touches her mother’s
wet cheek and says:
 
“As soon as I am more or less settled, I’ll get you out of here.”
 
Her mother wipes her eyes and answers:
 
“Yes, dear.”
 
“And if Alex asks, don’t tell him where I went.”
 
“You still hope he’ll notice?”
 
The woman sighs.
 
“All right, mother, I have to go. Max is on his own in the compartment, and there are oil rig workers returning from their shift. I’ll call you when we arrive. Don’t cry, mother, everything is
going to be fine.”
 
“Yes, dear, of course.” whispers her mother, and the handkerchief goes around the left eye, and then around the right eye, non-stop.
 
Oh, the woman wants everything to be fine badly, but she doesn’t believe it will be.
Everything is going to be hard. Finding work will be hard for she has got only a distant learning degree — how she regrets now that she didn’t go to college. Rent will be high. The boy is ten —hyperactive and a lot of trouble at school: how she will manage him alone, she can’t imagine. Yet she is not the first and not the last woman looking for better life elsewhere, because in the small town there is nowhere to hide from your alcoholic ex-husband, boisterous abusive male in his early thirties, to whom the doctors tell that his body will be completely undone in five, or if he’s lucky,
ten years.
 
***
 
Boarding the train is the hardest for elderly. The three steps one has to climb in order to get into the car are the steepest possible, and if one’s arthritis is raging, and the blood pressure keeps rising and rising, these three steps are one’s own personal Everest. One can climb but at one’s own risk. It doesn’t matter that this is the rich train and the tickets are more expensive. The car conductor might or might not help: it is a question of being in the mood, and not about providing proper customer service.
 
For the old woman who climbs these three steps the trip is both desired and unwanted. She is leaving the place where she spent all her life, where her parents and grandparents are buried, and yet she anticipates living with her daughter, her only child, pampering her grandchildren, the elder boy and the younger girl — tiny beautiful baby-girl. Both children look more like their mother, only that the boy has dark hair of his father, and the girl is blonde, a blue-eyed princess from the fairy-tale. Her grandchildren have a father, finally, a good man. Her daughter’s married life seems to be going well. A new beginning at her old age for the old woman looks promising, as long as she conquers those three steps.
 
***
 
Sometimes the train departure is a little bit delayed. This time the passengers are warned that an ambulance will transport a very sick man to the train, and the train will leave ten minutes later the scheduled time. Difficult medical cases are almost always sent to the bigger town’s hospital because the small town lacks specialists, equipment, and medicine. The ambulance doors open, male-nurses take out stretchers and start pushing them up the three steps into the car. The man on the stretchers looks pale, exhausted, and old. His lips are thin and bluish, his once ruddy and round face reminds a balloon with the air partly blown off, as layers of skins droop from the prominent cheekbones. The crowd recognizes the sick man and the whispering starts:
 
“Goodness, he looks so ill…”
 
“Who could’ve thought — a stroke! Not yet forty!”
 
“They say the stroke was triggered by some fast-developing cancer.”
 
“Everyone knows by what it was triggered.”
 
“Yes, he liked it a lot…”
 
“Poor man, such a long ride on the train and he is so sick. Is our town that poor that they
can’t take him to the city in an emergency helicopter?”
 
“Have you seen the mayor’s new car?”
 
“Is there anyone to visit him in hospital there?”
 
“Not really. His parents died several years ago, and both of his wives left him.”
 
“Tough”
 
After a series of jerks and pulls which make the sick man grimace, the stretchers are finally
inside the train, and the whispering subsides.
 
It is not true that there is no one to visit him in hospital. His first wife will come to see him. She used to love him so much. On her first visit to the ward she will be startled and shaken when she will find a ruin, a remnant of the old epoch, ugly and tired. Nothing is left of the handsome boy she married. In several weeks nothing will be left at all. She will be the one who closes his eyes and arranges his funeral.
 
 
 
--
Katya Kulik is a graduate student in the Program for Writers at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in ‘So to Speak’ Literary Journal, ‘theEEEL’, ‘Embodied Effigies’, CutBank Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a 2014 winner of Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022