Endling

by Maria Reva

U.A.: My first book? The irony is that it was also about Ukraine—about Soviet Ukraine, that long-gone Ukraine I’m more familiar with, since that’s the place I left—and for the book’s release I had written op-eds to be printed in newspapers, essays about growing up in Ukraine, the language politics, but they got canned when the pandemic hit. Now those same newspapers are calling me, asking me to write about Ukraine again, promising to actually publish this time, probably canning other writers’ pieces because now “my” cause is more important. I’m getting calls for magazine interviews, photo shoots, radio appearances I’d only dreamed of when my book first came out. I’m trying to be grateful. But why must a country be bombed before we care about it? Yurt Makers: The world is a whore.

And, perhaps also just like you, they once thought disaster only befell other people.

As long as I saw her predicament as material, a good story, I could live through it, and by some irrefutable logic, so could she.

Am I no better than a snail, sniffing out the softest, most rotten part of a log to feast on? At least a snail digests the rot and excretes nutrients, useful.