Emily Rubin - Stalina

Whhoosh, hahhh!

Out from under the water, my breath restored, memory intact and fingers wrinkled like the mammoth’s brow. The Liberty Motel is my museum! My rooms are a singular collection, the history of fantasies of pleasure, all preserved and frozen in time. The guests bring life to the exhibits, and I am honored to be the minder.

To my dear family and friends, who will inhabit me forever, I bring you along with me, for it is you that keep the swing in my ever-shifting hips and inspire me to provide a place for happiness, recovery, and when needed, a dose of revenge.

Thiip!

I’ll finish up here and count the dollars we brought in and look to see who signed the register tonight. Mark Twain, Alfred Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Harry and Joanie to be sure.

Thiip!

Good night.

Thanks to the students in my “Oral History” class at Touro College in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn for sharing their life stories, which inspired the writing of this novel.

Thanks to the Summer Literary Seminar for the opportunity to visit and write in Russia.

To my friends, too many to name here, who helped me get to Russia because they knew it was important.

To Terry Goodman of AmazonEncore whose phone call about publishing this book was like winning the lottery.

Special thanks to Linda Rosenberg for her insightful editing and for meeting me on train platforms to hand off her weekly notes.

To Les Baum for sharing everything with me and for those encouraging nudges to keep writing.

To Anne Kristy Childers, in memory of her warm laughter and exceptional intelligence.

Emily Rubin’s fiction has been published in the Red Rock Review , Confrontations , and HAPPY , and she is a past nominee for the Pushcart Prize. In 2005, she began producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose , a reading series that takes place in laundromats around the United States. She divides her time between New York City and Columbia County, New York, with her husband, Leslie, and their dog, Sebastian.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2010 Emily Rubin

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by AmazonEncore

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

ISBN: 978-1-935597-17-9