Endling

by Maria Reva

None of it mattered anymore. Even Yeva was tired of Yeva.

I’m trying to be grateful. But why must a country be bombed before we care about it?

Yeva pulled a dented thermos from the cup holder in her door and said, “Here’s some bad coffee. Now it’s a committee meeting.”

The future had been a luxury. The future didn’t exist anymore.

Nastia’s mother had once said her strangeness was what made her special. Wasn’t this a lie all children heard at some point, because all children are born strange before they learn to smooth down the edges?

Watching a war from abroad, rather than living it, can be its own brand of horror. Moonlike, we in the diaspora watch the captured zones of our homeland ebb and flow like tides. We are aware of every wave of bombings, first in piecemeal fashion from texts, phone calls, and social media, then aggregated into numbers (deaths, injuries, scope of destruction) on the news. Then we put on our shoes and go to work, surrounded by people who have other worries.

She’d been waiting for this moment for as long as she could remember, to know if it was possible to be present with another’s body and for that to be enough.

It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn. That’s why I can’t go back. I lived in a stupor and now, it’s like, all the colors are saturated.