ISSUE SEVEN: April, 2021

THIS STRUCTURE, THIS RUIN

by ELENA MALKOV

The street is completely black already but the sky is glassy and light—a shallow bowl with a thin layer of day at the bottom. Sarah is at the park sitting on a low brick wall looking out over a darkened pond and a smattering of faceless trees and the back of an apartment building. She is smoking a cigarette and not thinking about anything. Actually she is certainly thinking—words pile up in her mind but remain nothing more than their own skin. She is young and if her thoughts do crystallize, it is only around a self-indulgent obsession with death. She is trying to make herself heavy with it, solid. But as her lungs fill with smoke she is only getting lighter.

Sarah is not as interesting as she thinks she is. She wants to whet her senses enough to notice more than anyone else, but then she always gets lazy or distracted. Morally speaking, she wants to go back in time. Not those kinds of morals—I don’t mean religion or regression or anything like that. She’s just suspicious of the modern world. Maybe just an affectation, but it seems sincere enough.

Actually I like Sarah quite a bit. She isn’t too pathetic, and she laughs a lot more than you’d think. I’m just trying to explain her honestly. With humility for both our sakes. We met a long time ago and so I know too much of her. I can’t even picture her face, she is all-encompassing.

She feels something mystical about the pond and the trees and the quiet square behind her, but she won’t dare articulate it. So we’re stuck here sitting with her, just sitting and thinking scattered broken things.

Sarah looks down and she can’t see the pond anymore nor her legs, but the trees—ahh—the trees...!

ELENA MALKOV is a fiction writer living in Richmond, Virginia. Her stories have been published in Fiction Kitchen Berlin, From Whispers to Roars, STORGY Magazine and Typishly. She is co-founder and fiction editor of Sublunary Review.