Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya

Author:Tatyana Tolstaya
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

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Looking out the window once again, I saw that the waters had already roiled up to my car doors, and that if I didn’t sign right now I wouldn’t have anything to drive away in. And so I bit the bullet. The house became mine, and I—its.

All the participants, who either received or parted with their money, experienced their complicated and contradictory emotions and went their separate ways: David disappeared into the wall of rain, conveyed by his pickup truck; Barbara glided off into the waterfall of her unhidden tears, and my family, we made our way toward our new home, unsure whether it was still standing.

It was completely empty, naked, and old. The floors were drab and worn, the windows swathed from the outside in dark spruce branches. I don’t like pine trees—to me they feel like the trees of the dead. Blue pine trees are the worst; they are the color of a Soviet general’s uniform, and so they plant them where those high-status corpses lie. Our neighbor had one such pine. And so I was forced to look at it, see.

Brown spiderwebs were already dangling under the ceiling, in the corners. The agile American spider produces a high-quality web overnight, and since Barbara had long stopped taking care of the house, the accumulated layers of web could easily support the weight of small household items, if somebody decided to place them there for some reason, as if in a hammock. My boys gloomily inspected their dimly lit cubbyholes, unpacked their computers, and proceeded to stare at their screens.

The magical room was also sad and cold. And its glass doors opened onto nothingness.

I alone loved this house.

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