Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

Alla Innokentevna drew away. Behind her glasses, her eyelids lowered. “Love for my community,” she said. “Quote me on that in your article. They don’t have that in the city, do they? No.” The organizer turned back toward the lasso game on the stage, and Marina, too, faced forward.

Petya returned with three shallow bowls of salmon soup on a tray. Alla Innokentevna did not budge, so he ate standing, and Marina and Eva spooned up their own portions without any more attempts at conversation. A native boy came onstage to try his luck. He raised the lasso and rocked on his heels, waiting. The deer skull spun. As Marina ate, and even after she set her bowl and spoon on the ground, she felt the presence of the organizer weighing on her, like someone’s foot stepping on her chest. Alla Innokentevna wanted to use Marina’s loss of Alyona and Sophia; she had failed the first time, but she would try again.

Marina put her head down. Her hiking boots were spattered with mud. The crowd erupted in applause and she knew the boy had finally lassoed it.

When Alla Innokentevna left to introduce the next event—an hour-long dance marathon for children—Petya took his seat back. Eva asked Marina, “How are you doing? Are you going to dance in the adult one?”

“For an hour?” Marina said. “No.” On the stage, schoolkids moved in thick-limbed imitation of the earlier dance ensemble. One little girl was even decked out in a tiny leather tunic with a matching strap around her forehead. The girl swayed, arms in the air.

“For three hours,” Eva said. “The adult one’s longer. Petya and I are going to do it—aren’t we, my love?” Petya agreed. “We danced through the whole thing last year. It’s fun. Think about it.”

“I am,” Marina said, though in truth she was thinking about her grandmother’s soup recipes, her father’s lessons in her childhood about chopping wood. Anything to keep out of her mind the thought of what she had not been able to do for her daughters. Marina scanned the scene for another distraction. She saw children—girls waving to their parents, smiling on the stage, arranging their arms like ballerinas.

Marina stood from the bench. “I’ll be back,” she told her friends and made her way toward the trees.

The forest muffled the music’s high notes so only the bass came through. Marina found the tent. The afternoon was drawing on. She checked her phone—no service—and slipped it into her jacket pocket anyway. Then she crawled onto her sleeping bag.

Rain came light on the tent top. The sound was soft crackles. The distant music did not interfere. She, Alyona, and Sophia used to lie in her bed together, when the girls did not want to sleep alone. Her daughters would talk across the pillows until late. Their high, precise voices on either side; Sophia’s head heavy against Marina’s bare arm; the twinkling spearmint smell of Alyona’s brushed teeth.

Surface tension, Marina reminded herself. The reflection and refraction of light through water. If this weather continued, she would run out of rain trivia. The raindrops made noises like a thousand parting lips.

Eventually she checked the time to make sure the kids’ marathon was well over. Adjusting her hood, Marina crawled out and zipped the tent flap shut behind her.

The path took her back to the clearing. Adult couples were onstage now, with drums throbbing behind them; Marina spotted Eva tossing her head and Petya stomping to the beat. Choral singing and prerecorded gull cries played through the sound system. As Marina edged around the back of the stage, Alla Innokentevna’s voice came over the speakers. “Aren’t they wonderful? Let’s hear you cheer.” A yell went up on the other side of the banner. “How long can they last?” Alla Innokentevna asked the crowd. No one responded to that.

Marina emerged beside the food booth. One of the cooks looked at her, waiting for a dinner order. “What do you have?” Marina asked.

“Soup.”

“Just soup? Fish soup?”

“Fish soup and reindeer blood soup,” the cook said. Marina was already taking bills out of her pocket. “The blood soup,” she said, passing the cook a hundred-ruble note.

Marina held the hot plastic bowl in both hands as she shouldered her way to a spot, twenty meters from the stage, that was relatively free of other people. The evening stank of smoke. Strong alcohol and charred meat. The broth in her bowl was clear brown, and at its bottom were countless suspended droplets, darker, solid, a heap of stones on the floor of a lake. She watched the dancers while she ate. Eva, spotting her from the stage, waved with both arms high, and Marina raised her spoon to signal back.

Getting to the dregs, she put the bowl to her mouth and drank. Slivers of green onion slid down her throat. She lowered the bowl. The comment-seeking reporter stepped in front of her. “Marina Alexandrovna.”

Immediately her body began to shut itself down. “Yes.”

“Your friend told us about your situation.” Behind him, the photographer, who looked barely out of his teens, hung on to his camera. The reporter said, “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

“What friend?” Marina knew, she knew, that Alla Innokentevna had arranged this ambush. Not only had the organizer herself been after Marina all day but she had enlisted the other villagers to lay claims to Marina’s tragedy.

But the reporter corrected her. “Your friend, the woman—” He pointed toward the stage.

“I see,” Marina said. Eva.

“She explained what happened. I’m the editor of Novaya Zhizn, Esso’s newspaper. We have four hundred and fifty readers, and we can run a piece in our next edition, put the call out around the village. Do you have a picture with you of your girls?”

Marina heard the pulse in her ears. Felt the blood in her stomach. Constant, constant, these small tortures. Everyone behaving as though their offer of assistance would change her world. “On my phone,” she said. “But it’s back at the tent.” She put the bowl on the ground, the spoon in it. Placed her hands in her pockets. “Oh. No,” she said when her fingers bumped against a screen. “I have it. It’s here.” If she moved slowly, she could last on the oxygen left in her lungs.

The reporter said, “You just tell us in your own words, and I’ll record you. Their picture?” She slid her phone out of her pocket. “Perfect. Great.” He gestured to the photographer, who raised the camera to cover his face.

The reporter’s recorder drifted toward her mouth. Music thumped around them. “When you’re ready,” the reporter said.

She lifted the phone to her collar. Glass and metal touched her there, hard over her clavicle, and she lowered the phone again. She looked into the black, strange eye of the camera. Opening her mouth, expecting to choke, she spoke.

“Please help me find my daughters, Alyona Golosovskaya and Sophia Golosovskaya, who went missing from the center of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky last August. August fourth. Alyona is twelve years old now. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt with stripes across the chest and blue jeans. Sophia is eight and was dressed in a purple shirt and khaki pants. They were taken by a heavyset man in a big, new-looking car that was black or dark blue. If you have any information, call Major General Yevgeny Pavlovich Kulik at 227-48-06, or contact your local police department.” Marina had memorized these descriptions and numbers early on. Her face in the circle of the camera lens was a person trapped in a well.

“Would you please show us?”

She unlocked her phone, scrolled to the photo roll, and held up her older girl’s school portrait. “Alyona.” The shutter clicked. She flicked the screen. “Sophia.” They were well lit and smiling. “We are offering a reward. If you know anything, call the police.”