Phone Booth No.3: Ukraine to Los Angeles

by Olena Zakharchenko

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The Road

First things first

I was twenty-two and I had absolutely no idea what to do with my life. Fresh from university, I didn’t feel like getting a job in my field. The field itself—foreign philology—had a ridiculous sound to it. I wanted to become an artist, but my father had told me that I shouldn’t even think about it. Lost, that’s what I was. My English was better than my Russian; I could speak German and Spanish; I played the piano, went skiing, and danced tango. I graduated with honors from Lviv University.

From The Below by Kira Malko

Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Gordynchuk and Hanna Leliv

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On a cruise ship, everything under the fourth deck is called The Below, and everything over it—The Above. The fourth deck is like a ground floor in a hotel. It is the first deck above the waterline and the only one where you can cross the ship from its bow to its stern. It runs through the vessel like an axis, dividing it into two separate worlds.

Below the fourth deck arethe laundry rooms, utility blocks, and the cabins of ordinary crew members—those who do not belong to the noble class of officers. The Below is safely hidden from an outsider’s eyes—it is underwater, without illuminators; the doors leading there are inconspicuous and locked to the passengers. Behind those doors, below the fourth deck are mysteries, intricate affairs, true feelings free from any codes of conduct, mistakes and doubtful achievements, love and hatred, secrets and confessions, dirty laundry and honorable motives. And the engine. Everything that moves the ship is in The Below.

From TWO MINUTES Of TRUTH

by Iren Rozdobudko

Translated by Michael M. Naydan

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..He stood by the corner food store where he always had coffee, and was watching as the patch of dry land beneath his feet grew smaller little by little. The balcony of the second floor loomed above him, but today he couldn’t hide it from the streams of water. The sudden August downpour turned the morning into night. The street that just had been alive and in motion — died. Just he, as always, was stubbornly standing beneath the balcony, drinking his coffee from a plastic cup and having a smoke, though the damp wind and droplets flying into there kept trying to douse his cigarette. He loved the rain and that feeling of solitude beneath it when you become different from everyone else. But everyone scatters like mice, covering themselves with umbrellas, plastic bags, and runs with dismay toward the first best shelter, but you keep walking along the street, wet and happy. And you talk to the water. And every droplet tells its own story. Because each droplet truly has its own story and soul, which it inherited from someone on something it had been earlier…

From The Morning Housekeeper

by Iren Rozdobudko

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I’m terribly afraid to lose my job. I wake up with this thought every morning at five a.m. I go to the kitchen, turn on the coffee maker, light my first cigarette (my Marlboro habit has stayed with me ever since those long-cut-out-of-my-life days when I had to cough up as much as ten karbovanets per pack to gypsy profiteers), and try to finally wake up. A cigarette along with a cup of strong coffee start up the worn-out mechanism of my body, and I feel my heart beating (it’s actually the onset of irregular heart beat) and a tingling sensation in my stomach. It means that my body has come alive again. I take a shower and shave (not without cutting myself two or three times) and then put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I do all this as quietly as possible so as not to wake, God forbid, my landlady, Mrs. Stefaniya O’Tull, who lives on the first floor. Mrs. O’Tull is very proud that she happily fit in among those “in the middle”—among apartment owners—even though it seems that she never had any other tenants besides me.