Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

She had told her sister that stupid thing about the wave. The piece of earth that disappeared.

“This never could have taken place in Soviet times,” Valentina Nikolaevna said. Diana sipped her soup. “You girls can’t imagine how safe it used to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made.” Valentina Nikolaevna put the remote down. “Now we’re overrun with tourists, migrants. Natives. These criminals.”

After the USSR collapsed, there were no longer any restrictions on travel, no stop to movement; the Soviet military bases that had constrained the entire peninsula were shuttered, so Kamchatka’s residents could finally explore their own land.

Everyone indigenous: Even, Koryak, Itelmen, or Chukchi.

Chander, too, had dated a Russian.

“A white guy and a dark car. They’re everywhere,” he said. “You know what I mean.” She did. Chander wasn’t insulting Ruslan. He wasn’t even talking about his own ex-girlfriend. He was onto something else, deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.

Lilia was three years missing, Even, the child of a nobody.

after all this time, it made no sense that she got to wake up and chatter and drink fresh coffee while Gleb could not.

At the funeral, there were photographs of him. A shut box that tormented her with what it did or did not hold.

In any case, Kamchatka was no longer a place to raise a family. Just look at the hole in her cousin’s life where a daughter belonged. The communities Revmira grew up in had splintered, making them easy places to be forgotten, easy places to disappear.

Zoyka, you don’t know this, but our building used to be full of humble people like us. Real Russians. The whole nation was. No one was a stranger. We were united by our common ideals, we believed in greatness. That was a different era, wasn’t it? A better time.”

Though now a propagandist by necessity, she was a journalist by training, and she had always had a head for information.